The Disgrace

Andrew Sullivan has two posts, Disgrace and Disgrace Ctd., that I wanted to highlight for the manner in which he addresses neocon arguments concerning torture and the treatment of detainees. I was first drawn to Sully's blog because of his stand on torture and his championing of Captain Ian Fishback. He has lost none of his passion in writing about this topic.

From Disgrace:

Pete talks about a moral disgrace. You know what is a moral disgrace? Conflating innocent people with those who "want to slit the throats and watch innocent Americans bleed and die." Here's also what is a disgrace: that an American administration knowingly seized individuals who were innocent of any crime, tortured and abused hundreds of them, and lied about it. That Dick Cheney and George W. Bush decided in advance to bypass the Congress in setting clear, legal, constitutional rules for the handling of detainees in the war on terror and so ended up in the Gitmo mess. That, in a time of war and great peril, Bush and Cheney decided to go on an executive branch power-grab because they knew full well that what they intended to do - torture their way to "intelligence" - was illegal. That the Bush policy has neither brought anyone to justice nor provided a decent alternative to habeas rights and poisoned the reputation of American justice for a generation around the world. That the United States coopted former Soviet prison camps in Eastern Europe in order to perpetrate Gestapo methods of interrogation. That's a disgrace.

In Disgrace Ctd., he goes on:

Pete concedes that the administration originally seized far, far more detainees than it could prove guilty (or ever tried to prove guilty) and has released thousands falsely imprisoned. Of the thousands seized, Pete concedes many were abused and tortured, with over a hundred deaths occurring during interrogation, two score of whom the administration has itself conceded were murder-by-interrogation. All this occurred after the president decided his actions as commander-in-chief could not be constrained by the law, after he had waived the baseline Geneva Convention protections for prisoners in wartime - in violation of the policy of every previous president of the United States from Washington on - and after critical memos were signed allowing American interrogators to do anything to prisoners short of death or loss of a major organ. [...]

And all this was done not in the chaos of a battlefield or even by rogue units or POW camps. It was not done in a war with anything like as many soldiers and battles as World War II. It was done in a closely managed war by a professional military and intelligence service in every theater of combat as a concerted policy to get more intelligence about Jihadist terror and the Iraq insurgency. It was authorized directly in the chain of command by the president, who knowingly broke the law and hired lawyers to tell him he hadn't. No clever argumentation that "only" 270 prisoners remain at Gitmo can gainsay that. And it is not, by the way, evidence against the fact that this administration seized countless innocents and tortured them to say that they eventually released most of them. It is no consolation to the torture victims at Abu Ghraib that they were eventually set free and their innocence confirmed. Those are the standards of benign dictatorships, not democracies.

Now, you could argue that the administration, after initial understandable over-reach, has tried to set things right. But you would be wrong. [...]

Major Gen Antonio Taguba, trusted enough by this administration to run an earlier report on the abuse scandal, puts it plainly enough:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The Bush - Cheney administration has much to answer for. The question remains in what court or venue will they be held accountable?