1 Boring Old Man

Sunday afternoon, Professor David Cole from Georgetown Law School hosted a book salon on FDL on his collection of the key torture documents with commentary [The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable]. It was a thoughtful discussion of a thoughtless topic. As it continued, I found myself wondering why it’s only a hot topic for a few of us rather than a source of far-reaching outrage. I suppose that there’s always a danger of questioning why everybody else isn’t thinking what I am thinking, since the question can be turned around – what’s wrong with me that I’m so stuck on this torture thing?

^{VICE PRES. CHENEY: … they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy. We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.}

^{States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.}

The forward to Cole’s book was written by Phillipe Sands, author of Torture Team, and it’s titled The Embrace of Cruelty. Is that too dramatic? I don’t think so. As these memos trickled out, it became clear that Abu Ghraib wasn’t the work of "bad apples" in our ranks. Any of you who have been in the military know that such things don’t happen in the military unless they come from the top. I’m sure that atrocities occur in the heat of battle and always will, but not in a non-combat command like Abu Ghraib. So, in spite of the White House denials, this whole thing was part of a secret grand plan involving the DoD, the CIA, the DoJ, and the White House – negotiated by the lawyers hired to prevent this very kind of thing.

Yesterday was a beautiful day here in the Georgia mountains. It was sunny, slightly cool, and the leaves are just giving off those signs that they’re about to turn. I found myself sitting inside at a computer reading and writing comments in the book salon on FDL about this book. It seemed like an odd thing to be doing. I opened some of the Memos in question, and could feel my head trying to turn away, even though I’ve read them all before. I feel some of that same guilt I mentioned above about the intensity of my feelings towards the people involved in this sordid business – specifically Dick Cheney, David Addington, and Douglas Feith. I wonder sometimes if I’m as crazed as they were – rationalizing vengeful feelings or political leanings as they did when they constructed and used these absurd documents. So I take heart that others are as outraged by all of this as I am.

^{Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.}