This bill is a stain on the honor of our nation, a moral and ethical outrage that strains the credibility of our country. I am embarrassed to call myself an American on this day.
I’ve been teaching Frederick Douglass recently. In his famous anti-slavery speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, Douglass writes that “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” Though his subject, in the passage below, is slavery, it is to that institution of the past, and its effects on American society, that the base, outrageous, shameful, and inhumane practice of torture in the present should be compared.
Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
It was an examination of a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review called Failures of Imagination. The article provides more evidence that U.S. newspaper editors buried important news stories about torture that, had they been given adequate attention in 2003, might possibly have prevented the later abuses at Abu Ghraib:
[New York Times reporter Carlotta] Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.”
Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”
Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.)
“Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.”
Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)
Gall, who is British, chalks up the delay to reluctance to “believe bad things of Americans,” and in particular to a kind of post-9/11 sentiment. “There was a sense of patriotism, and you felt it in every question from every editor and copy editor,” she says. “I remember a foreign-desk editor telling me, ‘Remember where we are — we can smell the debris from 9/11.’”
[. . .]
The skepticism back in 2003 about Gall’s findings wasn’t limited to the Times. The evidence of homicides got only a short mention on CNN and a brief write-up inside The Washington Post. The biggest follow-up came not in any American paper but in the Sunday Telegraph of London.
“There was no great urge to follow up,” Gall says. “Nobody went to the doorstep of the pathologist or anything like that, until of course Abu Ghraib. And I don’t know why.”
The next time you hear a conservative talking about “the liberal media,” ask him or her whether newspaper editors were right to bury reports of torture in 2003. Not that it will make any difference . . . the conservative fantasy of “the liberal media” is antithetical to everything we know about the reality of coverage of the War in Iraq.
This is the paradox of waging an unpopular, morally ambiguous war.
What happened to 19-year-old Lance Cpl. Matt Solowynsky at the beginning of this year shows another aspect of the strain. The process of dehumanizing the enemy — the sine qua non of every war in human history, and crushingly obvious when a war grinds on without a clear strategic objective — sooner or later backs up on itself.
Part of the toxic waste of war embeds itself in the emotions and the soul of the combatants. That Guantanamo energy, that gusto to terrorize helpless detainees, to humiliate unarmed civilians, isn’t so easily contained, and begins corrupting the whole system. When a designated enemy isn’t available, anyone — a new recruit, say — will do.
“He didn’t do anything but be a gung-ho Marine,” said Tod Ensign of Citizen Soldier (citizen-soldier.org), the organization that eventually came to Solowynsky’s aid. Indeed, he was the highest ranked recruit in his class when he graduated from Marine Corps Basic Training last September. How odd that, a few months later, he was AWOL, fleeing Camp Pendleton, Calif., as though he were a POW.
It’s an unbelievable story, and Koehler is exactly right that it is the inevitable blowback of the Bush administration’s championing of torture. Read that Wikipedia definition and try to tell me that that is not what is going on here.
The Guardian reports that some of the information leading to the arrests of alleged terrorist plotters in London may have been procured under torture (via Doug Krile):
Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week’s arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had “broken” under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. “I don’t deduce, I know - torture,” she said. “There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all.”
It’s important that we realize that this latest news presents a challenge to one of the biggest arguments against torture — that information produced under duress is often unreliable. As expected, conservatives pounced on the news. Here’s what Karol Sheinin, writing for MichelleMalkin.com, had to say:
The Guardian wrestles with the question if “actions abroad pollute British justice, even if in the short-term they may protect British security”.
Personally, I have no such quandary. It is one thing to debate the ethics of torture in a general sense, whether captured terrorists can be subject to uncomfortable conditions in order to extract information about their network and associates. It’s quite another to understand the use of torture in order to save the lives of innocent people. An attack was imminent, and the information had to be obtained, no matter the method.
That’s a nice sleight-of-hand — Sheinin derides discussion of torture “in a general sense,” and then discusses torture in a general sense. She’s unwilling to name the barbaric acts of which she approves: “uncomfortable conditions” are what one experiences when the air conditioning goes out in 90 degree weather; waterboarding, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and anal rape are what one experiences when one is “rendered” by the United States Government.
The first condition of any sort of dialogue on this matter involves an honest description of it, rather than a cynical and politically motivated minimization of what torture truly entails. It’s particularly important because the entire process of what The New Yorker calls “the outsourcing of torture” depends upon an effort to keep American citizens ignorant of what is being done in their — in our — names.
So, let’s welcome this chance to educate Americans about what “uncomfortable conditions” really means — and let’s start with the videos from The Abu Ghraib Files. Let’s ask our fellow citizens to watch the videos of Iraqi prisoners being forced to masturbate in front of the camera, the footage of Iraqis being shocked by electric nodes, the images of them being stacked naked in pyramids. And then let’s talk about what “uncomfortable conditions” really means.
The inescapable fact is that America’s standing in the world, and especially in the Middle East, has never been lower. The price we have paid for our misdirected torture policies has been incalculable. The Arab street may not always grasp the finer points of separation of powers or proportional representation; but everyone, everywhere, comprehends hypocrisy, and judges us for ours. If the torture advocates truly believe that the value of violently coerced information has been worth the plummeting drop in America’s world stature, or that such information is worth the clear and present endangerment of captured Americans, it’s time to justify the claimed value of torture to the nation in whose name it’s being done. Not assumptions, not generalizations, not, “I can’t explain because it’s classified.”
The president and vice president wish to chart a course of heretofore unacceptable savagery toward anyone even suspected of terrorism. If we are to become a nation where a president may torture anyone he wishes, it deserves a broad, sober, fact-based national debate.
A year later, conservative writers and administration officials are still preventing that debate from taking place. Until that changes, torture will remain our national shame.
Update: Please see my comments on this post at the end of the next one.
It strikes me that this closing statement by Alan Shore (James Spader) on ABC’s Boston Legal is what I should have posted three days ago to celebrate our national holiday. Like the Jefferson excerpt I did post, it’s old and it’s long, but damn, is it good.
The AP reports that a U.S. District Judge has ordered the release of photos taken at Abu Ghraib that the military tried desperately to withhold on the grounds that releasing them could aid al-Queda recruitment.
The judge opined that terrorists have proven that they “do not need pretexts for their barbarism.” He also said that “My task is not to defer to our worst fears, but to interpret and apply the law, in this case, the Freedom of Information Act, which advances values important to our society, transparency and accountability in government.”
The article refers only to photographs; I don’t know whether the videos will be released as well.
Daily Kos has a partial transcription of a July speech by New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, who described some of the immensely disturbing photos and videos that he has seen (a video of Hersh’s speech can be found here; it starts at 1:07):
Some of the worst that happened that you don’t know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad […]
The women were passing messages saying “Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened”. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.
It’s impossible [not] to say to yourself how [did] we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?
Get ready for a shitstorm of major proportions.
Just as I thought that it was important for Americans to look at photographs of the New Orleans dead, I think it is imperative that our nation take a sober look at this material, no matter how disturbing it is. After all, the abuse was done in our name.
And as a nation, we must be willing to come to terms with the fact that the deranged abuse at Abu Ghraib was not simply the product of a few “bad apples,” but rather was the direct result of the decision, made by those at the highest pinnacles of U.S. power, to abandon the Geneva conventions for detainees in this war — a decision that ultimately puts our troops in the gravest possible danger.
At her trial, the lawyers for Lyndie England were not allowed to present evidence that her actions were the result of systemic problems in the military chain of command:
Late Monday, [Judge] Pohl rejected a request by Crisp to allow testimony during the sentencing phase by an Army captain who has reported similar prisoner abuse by other U.S. soldiers at a camp near Fallujah around the same time as the Abu Ghraib incidents.
Crisp said testimony by Capt. Ian Fishback would provide evidence of a command breakdown in Iraq that might have led England and other soldiers to think detainee mistreatment was condoned by military leaders.
But the judge ruled that he saw no proof that the two abuse situations were related, or that abuse elsewhere would in any way lessen the blame England might deserve for Abu Ghraib.
Her lawyers were forced instead to argue that England had “an overly compliant personality.”
The open question is how compliant the U.S. public will be as the Administration attempts to pin this outrage on grunts at the bottom of the chain-of-command.
As Reed Brody, special counsel for The Human Rights Watch, has argued, there is only one way for our nation to absolve itself:
“If the United States is to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib, it needs to investigate those at the top who ordered or condoned abuse and come clean on what the president has authorized,” said Brody. “Washington must repudiate, once and for all, the mistreatment of detainees in the name of the war on terror.”
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