Desperation

If you missed seeing Countdown last night, there’s a video of the first two segments here. If you’ve already seen the presser, featuring David Gregory’s beautiful moment, you can fast forward the tape to about 5:57 for remarks by Howard Fineman. I transcribed just a snip:

Fineman: It’s not just John McCain, a known maverick; it’s not just Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, a known maverick; it’s not even Colin Powell, who is very popular in the country but sort of outside the system right now. The key guy here is Senator John Warner, the Republican of Virginia, as well as Colin Powell. The thing about Warner is he is the establishment man; he is the very symbol of the Pentagon establishment, the defense establishment, in a way the intelligence establishment over there in northern Virginia, and if HE is taking the side of the rebels on this, the Republican rebels, it’s a very serious division in the party, and one the Democrats ought to sit back and watch.

But the best part begins at 9:43, when Olbermann gets into the legal and ethical implications of President Bush’s proposed “let’s torture!” law. Olbermann interviewed Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law professor at George Washington University. Boldface is added:

Olbermann: … is he [Bush] covering his own backside with this?

Turley: Quite frankly, I think that there is evidence to say he is. You know, the thing that is ticking here in terms of a clock, is the fact that these fourteen guys that were recently transferred, just arrived not that long ago in Gitmo, in Cuba. They are going to be or have been interviewed by the Red Cross. Most people believe that they will reveal that they were subject to waterboarding, where you are held under water until you think that you are going to drown. That is undeniably torture under the international standards. If that occurs in the coming days, the United States and specifically the President will be accused of committing a very serious violation of international law. Torture is one of the top three or four things that the international law is designed to prevent. And so the reason there is this move to try to get legislation as fast as possible is because I think I think this administration senses that there is a lot of trouble coming down this mountain.

Then Olbermann asked how the proposed law would protect Bush legally.

Turley: Well, he would retroactively define what he did not to be a violation. That’s pretty good if you are going to commit a violation of law, to go and get the legislature to retroactively say what you did was not a violation. But remember, the President stands accused of thirty felonies in the NSA controversy; many of us believe he committed felony crimes there. If now he’s going to be accused of intentionally and knowingly ordering serious violations of international law, it’s not going to go well for the United States. We’re already viewed as a rogue nation around the world. But here’s something the President most likely knew about and condoned.

Olbermann read a bit from this Washington Post editorial that explains what the Bush Administration wants:

[WaPo:] It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

We might note that WaPo says “it” wants rather than “the President” wants.

The editorial is titled “A Defining Moment for America.” Olbermann asked Turley if this is indeed a defining moment, adding, “If the President gets his way, have we just become what the terrorists want us to become?”

Turley: Well, I’m afraid it would be, but this is really a redefining moment. You know, I always tell people — the president used that term as well — that our defining moment came in 1787, when we defined ourselves in a constitutional document that committed us to the rule of law. And what would happen here, if we embraced torture at the President’s invitation, would be to redefine ourselves, and we would become something that we have long fought against.

[Update: See also Billmon.]

If there is one point I would like to see written in the sky in 100-foot-high letters, it’s this: President Bush and his enablers went down this road not because they are strong, but because they are weak.

On last night’s Hardball — I believe it was last night — Jack Murtha told Chris Matthews that the fight over the proposed “permission to torture” legislation is going on between Administration civilians — the overwhelming majority of whom never served in uniform and have no personal experience with war — and the military. It’s Weenies versus Warriors, in other words, and Bush is the chief Weenie.

Most of the Bushies and the neocons generally are hothouse flowers who were either born into privilege or have been firmly entrenched in the power establishment for many years. They don’t know what real strength is; if you have power and privilege up the wazoo, bullying others around to get your way takes no strength at all. People who are physically and emotionally abusive of others are weak people who can’t control their own fears and impulses.

Bush and his followers think cruelty is “smart” and that people who hesitate to be cruel are weaklings. But time and time again, people with experience at war and intelligence; people who see the bigger picture; say that torture of prisoners and abuse of civilian populations is hurting our cause — assuming our cause is security and peace — more than helping it. I say that the torturers are the weak ones, because their actions are determined more by fear than by reason.

Bush and his followers think they are being “strong” by their cruelties and deceptions, which they hide in the dark, but in fact that is weakness. Strength involves keeping your integrity and being true to your principles no matter what the circumstances.

Indeed, if you toss your principles out the window as soon as they are less than expedient, they were never your principles to begin with.

Too many (although not all) “conservative” bloggers are siding with the torturers here. There’s something I want to say to them and to Captain Ed, in particular. He writes,

We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been fairly brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.

I have in the past written about an uncle who was a POW of the Japanese from December 8, 1941 to August 1945. It’s true that the treatment of the POWs was cruel and barbaric. My cousin, David Faries, wrote his master’s thesis in military history about my uncle and other U.S. Marines who had been U.S. embassy guards in Peking when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Here’s a quote:

… at the time of the Guadalcanal Invasion in 1942, much of the Japanese populace believed that Americans tortured prisoners. Rumors circulated that the barbarians churned tanks over those Japanese captured in the Solomon Islands. These of course were untrue, but they were widely believed. Japan, unlike the United States, was not bound to treat its prisoners under international law because she failed to ratify the Geneva Convention articles on prisoners of war. Japan claimed, however, she would observe its stipulations.

The Vatican, of all places, broadcast to the world Japan’s kindness to its captives. Prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese occupied territory, the Holy City reported, received ample supplies of soap, cigarettes, and money to purchase other items from their captors. Those who knew the truth but were unable to speak because of their plight meanwhile learned to avoid the wrath of an Ishihara or to “stand fast or move fast” when suddenly face to face with a “menacing bayonet or rifle butt.” Behind the cold wire walked death, hatred, and hunger. [David Oran Faries, “Home Is My Only Destination: William Harold Thomas, North China Marine, 1940-1945” (Master’s Thesis, Department of History, Western Illinois University, August 1985), pp. 69-70.]

In other words, the Japanese falsely believed Japanese prisoners were being treated barbarically by Americans, and they felt this gave them license to treat their American prisoners barbarically.

And now the American Right is following the same ghastly “logic”: They broke the rules first! Why do we have to be the ones who play by the rules? Only weaklings and children think that way.

We have to be the ones who play by the rules because that’s who we are. Or, at least, that’s who we used to be.

Update: Read Robert Kuttner in today’s Boston Globe:

My father was a machine gunner with the Army’s 28th Infantry Division, which was among the first units to march down the Champs-Elysées after the Allied liberation of Paris . In December 1944, having landed at Normandy and fought across France and Belgium, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent hundreds of miles through northern Germany in an unheated boxcar in the dead of winter to a prison camp at Muhlberg in the east.

My father survived the war not because of the generosity of the Nazis to Jewish soldiers. The Germans must have been tempted to send captured Jewish American soldiers to Auschwitz along with Polish, German, and Dutch Jews and kindred human garbage. But they did not. My father survived because, amazingly, even the Nazis respected the reciprocal agreements on humane treatment of prisoners.

Not every enemy thinks this way, of course, but that doesn’t mean we have to become just like our worst enemies.

14 thoughts on “Desperation

  1. Amazingly the Germans treated prisoners better in WWII than in WWI ( shot them) and the American and British prisoners were treated far better than the Russians. The American and British prisoners received Red Cross packets and threw them over the fences to the Russians because the Russians were routinely starved.

  2. Great commentary, Maha. I have begun taping Keith Olbermann every night. I will keep them for my grandniece in case she becomes a fully formed adult caring what happens to her country.

    It is interesting that the rightwingers who support the torture idea are also the people who have been shoving Christianity down the throats of everyone who they determine to be an unbeliever. However, what they seem to have forgotten is that being Christian is being Christ-like. As I remember it, Christ was tortured and he forgave his torturers. These pseudo-christians are not even remotely Christ-like. Bush and his enablers give God and Christ bad names. Shame on them. They are no better than the people who crucified Christ.

  3. Why is torture such a big deal to these guys? It really puzzles me. Some potential reasons: (a) as you say, it reinforces their own manly manhood image of themselves; (b) it actually gets them useful information–not TRUE information, but useful, such as evidence of WMDs in Iraq and of connections between Al Quaeda and Saddam; (c) their ruthlessness serves to intimidate opponents.

  4. As I remember it, Christ was tortured and he forgave his torturers.

    I remember it that way, too. One suspects Jesus was opposed to torture.

  5. When Matt Lauer asked about torture Bush said ” SO WHAT?” I don’t remember the question, but the answer sticks in my mind. He said ” So What?” unbelievable.

  6. “They broke the rules first! Why do we have to be the ones who play by the rules?”

    For at least 5 years now, everytime Bush opens his mouth, I hear that old kindergarten playground excuse: “He started it – he hit me back!”.

    Kissinger was evil, manipulative, duplicitous and slimey, but you would never mistake anything he said for pre-pubescent pouting.

  7. What King George keeps forgetting is that morality is not a comparison between different views or ideologies about what is moral, but rather an ultimate goal for living one’s life. Just because Bush is more moral than Hussein, does not in itself mean that Bush is Moral! Bush is NOT a moral leader. Moral leaders do not condone torture, that’s part of what makes a moral person, at least in my opininion. Of course, others might include torture in their opinions about what morality is.

  8. Raenelle, you ask why torture is such a big deal to these guys……I second Maha that those who want to torture are weenies….but I would guess that they also have a particular kind of soul-twisted weakness that psychologically predisposes them to feel an almost sexual pleasure from cruel and degrading acts. I would put them into the same category as child molesters who also get their sick kicks from harming those who can’t fight back.

  9. What Bush and his bushbots do not understand is that it takes more than beating your chest to be strong.
    To be strong comes in many guises. It’s takes someone strong to take the high ground, or to admit to error, or to put personal feelings aside for the sake of diplomacy.
    You tend to find the insecure doing the chest beating. Insecure in thier manhood or self. They try to make themselves feel relavant or like a man by throwing around what they percieve as strong guy stuff, or to attack someone who is different, or to drive thier trucks and drink thier beer and start bar fights or talk tough to thier friends.
    These types are the ones who push for Bush and for torture. They see Bush as one of them. Not the beer and trucks but, the same insecure little man shaking inside.

  10. The argument that we honor Geneva because we want our POWs to be treated in accordance with Geneva is easily misinterpreted by those insecure weenies just as Maha shows. They miss the point that, even if our enemy doesn’t treat their prisoners properly, we have no moral argument against them unless we ourselves do better, and treat our prisoners as we believe civilized human beings should treat prisoners. Unless we do the right thing, we can’t object when others don’t.

    Which is a separate reason from that we do the right thing because it IS the right thing, regardless of what anyone else does, because we believe in our moral code, and don’t need to be forced to obey it by some ‘contractual agreement’ with our enemy. It is the honorable thing to do, and we believe in honor, and so we choose to behave that way.

    Sadly, and to our lasting shame, Bush et al. seem to find concepts like honor or decency too ‘vague’ and ‘ambiguous’.

  11. Gee, I wanted to say something insightful, something that would help clarify and enhance the understanding of the complexities in dealing with the moral issue of torture. Unfortunately, after pondering the issue after several hours, the best I could come up with is the fact that Bush is a major asshole and all his supporter are equal partakers in that distinction.
    Torture is wrong, it is immoral ,and no good will come from it. Don’t get drawn in by the lure of justifications through meaningless debate.. the bible says it best…*Beware of the harlot, all saucy and pert, for she sits at gate waiting to devour you.

    * I love that scripture, it has so many applications..It sounds so much more profound than the dried up expression..don’t let the monkey get on your back.

  12. Thanks, Swami, for the scripture quote. For some time, I have been trying to articulate a view of what I think is really happening in the ‘good vs evil’ front.
    Let’s say that the God and the Devil of Christian theology are actual beings…….and are in competition for followers…….
    I’d say that the Devil is happily counting his innumerable new converts at present….. he has effectively confused issues so much that the self-proclaimed ‘Godly folks’ of once-moral America are now embracing the devil’s tools: torture, deceit, secrecy, and so forth.

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