Lincoln

I never would have believed that I’d live to see the day when the United States government legislated torture. Now that I have, it makes me want to scream. Or rather, it makes me want to screed – but no one wants to read a screed, so I’ll do my best to scrape together some restraint. Easier written than done. This is a flagrant transgression of the most basic principles of American democracy, and I take it very personally.

Before Mark Foley and his dirty IM’s with teenaged boys so captivated the nation, you’ll recall that the previous week the Senate approved Bush’s euphemistically-named Military Commissions Act by a 65-34 margin. The House then voted 250-170 to approve the senate version. So there it is, America: the latest return on the taxes you paid out for your representatives’ salaries, the “We Can Torture if We Want To, We Can Leave Your Friends Behind” Act of 2006.

What the hell has become of us? How is this possible? Have they lost their minds, are they MAD, are they absolutely batshit INSANE??? I thought that even members of Congress weren’t SO devoid of conscience as to wave this through. Senator John McCain, a victim of torture as a POW during the Vietnam War, the guy who pushed through the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to ensure that the U.S. would not itself perpetuate such atrocities, now has caved to the Bush Administration’s insistence on permitting the CIA to act as judge, jury and torturer for “unlawful enemy combatants.” Why? Because he wants to be President in 2008, so he can’t allow himself to become the guy who punted the midterm elections to the Democrats in ’06. So what does he have to say for himself? Some mealymouthed crap about how he’s “confident” that the worst torture methods will probably not be used, or something like that. Pfft! If he still had the keys to his old “Straight Talk Express” bus, maybe he could just say, “Call me a hypocrite, call me a flip-flopper, call me a partisan douchebag – just don’t call me soft on terrorism!”

The central fallacy is that this measure is going to make us safer. We’ve all heard the approved Republican pro-torture talking points parroted into microphones up and down Capitol Hill: “these interrogation techniques have prevented further terrorist attacks,” “the war on terror is a totally different kind of war, so we have to do totally different things to win it,” “those opposing this legislation are against giving the President the tools he needs to win the war on terror,” and of course the Dick Cheney Fear-a-palooza Special, “these are terrorists, they’re coming to kill you and your family, they don’t care about your rights, so why do you care about theirs?”

Each of these are nothing but different shades of horseshit. First of all, from a purely practical standpoint there are many, many statements for the record by experienced military interrogators who state flatly that torture doesn’t work. The statements and information it produces are deeply unreliable, and it endangers American soldiers in the event of their capture. It’s very easy for the Bush administration to claim that they’d beaten information out of captives that had enabled them to foil planned terrorist attacks, since any specific details that would prove or disprove the claims are kept classified.

This is not a “totally different kind of war.” Terrorism is not new, and in fact it’s not even war – it’s crime. We’ve responded to these large-scale crimes by waging military war. The resulting condition of asymmetric war is attended by reams of historical precedent. I’ll give them credit for accuracy on one thing, though: the Bush administration is indeed using a completely, um, different set of tactics to conduct this war, to put it politely.

We in America HAVE all of the tools we need to win the war on terror. We have the capability to hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists that attacked us. Amidst the swell of international good will toward the United States in the wake of September 11, shoring up our foreign alliances could have served to isolate the terrorists and grease the springs of the imminent mousetrap operation (as it were). Instead, Bush and his ship of fools belittled the U.N., denigrated long-standing allies, and demonstrated all manner of reckless incompetence. I remember awhile back when the White House sound bites du jour included lines about “winning Iraqi hearts and minds.” Three years on, we’ve announced our intention to settle for kicking clueless Arab goatherders in the testicles. It might not win too many hearts or minds, but it plays well at election time and makes Bush, Dick and Rummy feel like tough guys. The Bush administration has often expressed a cavalier disregard for other nations’ opinions of the United States, including his hyperbolic straw man line from the 2004 election campaign about how he would “refuse to ask for a permission slip from foreign countries to protect America.” In fact, he should care what other countries think of us. He should care a lot. The world is smaller now than ever, more and more institutions are “global,” and no country is an island unto itself.

To defeat the people that perpetrated atrocities against us, I think it’s important for our nation to conduct ourselves non-atrociously. This may seem obvious to the point of being patronizing, but it bears pointing out in light of the “terrorists don’t respect our rights, so we don’t respect theirs” argument. Lowering ourselves to Al Qaida-level human rights practices is not only morally indefensible, but self-defeating in the extreme.

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined… with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a Trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln
January 27, 1838

For America to prevail, we need to be better than our enemies are: more just, more free, more beneficient. We need to demonstrate again why we are the world’s leading democracy. We need to lead by example, relying upon the best moral qualities of our society and our nation.