[Vision2020] Washington Still Dancing the Torture Minuet

[Tom Hansen]

Bronze Star, with 'V' (for valor) device, winner Joe Galloway unloads on
Obama, Pelosi, Bush, Cheney and everyone unwilling to address torture with
the same vigor done to the NVA in the Ia Drang Valley in November of 1965.

Courtesy of the Ledger-Enquirer (Columbus, Georgia - that GI town right
outside of Fort Benning) at:

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/sunday_voices/story/706776.html

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Washington still dancing the torture minuet
By Joe Galloway

There they go again, those folks in Washington, D.C. Everyone wants the
power; nobody wants the responsibility.

We’re back to the question of which Bush administration officials ordered
Justice Department lawyers to concoct some legal way to use illegal
torture methods on the prisoners we were taking in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Iraq and elsewhere.

It appears that no one in power or recently out of power wants to know the
answer to that question.

The Republicans in Congress, who resemble nothing so much as a dwindling
flock of whooping cranes, have been nothing but surly since last November.
Now they’re threatening to get nasty if the Democrats across the aisle
insist on unearthing the truth — the who, what, when, where and why —
about the torture question.

(Spare me your e-mails about how waterboarding isn’t torture; even John
McCain, who knows more about torture than you do, agrees it is.)

President Barack Obama doesn’t want or need this issue sucking all the
oxygen out of the Congress and his ambitious agenda, and he just wishes it
would go away. His position, if you can call it that, changes daily, if
not hourly. He and his people look and sound like a hokey-pokey line on
the issue.

The problem is they’re all thinking and acting like politicians, and
there’s nothing in this issue for any of them except an opportunity to do
the right thing. Whoever won an election by doing the right thing? Talking
about doing the right thing is another matter.

Torture, however, isn’t a political problem, but a legal and moral problem.

The new president and his administration released a few of the Top Secret
memos that show how and why the lawyers in the Bush Justice Department’s
Office of Legal Counsel went to work turning criminal acts into just
another day at the office for CIA and military interrogation officials.

Then, however, the president hurried out to McLean, Va., to assure CIA
employees that none of them will ever face prosecution for just following
orders and using methods they thought were legal — even though one of his
first acts as chief executive was to halt torture and order the closing of
Guantanamo prison.

Next, the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sen. Carl Levin of
Michigan, released a long-delayed timeline of how the torture issue wended
its way from the highest offices in the land to the OLC and across the
Potomac to the Pentagon and CIA headquarters and down to cells in
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and rent-a-dungeons hidden away around the
world.

In the process, we learned that one high-ranking al-Qaida prisoner was
subjected to waterboarding, a barbaric tool in the torturer’s kit that
involves suffocation and near-drowning, not one time for 20 seconds, as
reported earlier, but 183 times. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed got the same
treatment 183 times, or an average of six times a day.

The new director of national intelligence, Navy Adm. Dennis Blair, said
some useful information was squeezed out of the torture chambers, but he
isn’t certain this information couldn’t have been gained without resorting
to techniques borrowed from the Spanish Inquisition.

Former Bush administration luminaries, beginning with Darth Cheney and
proceeding down the chain, hasten to declare that torturing those people
made America safe, or safer than it was on Sept. 11, when they were all
ignoring a CIA warning that Osama bin Laden was “determined to strike in
U.S.”

Even if you believe the end justifies the means and ignore the numerous
factual flaws in this ex post facto defense, it doesn’t address the
question of how many of the 4,954 American troops who’ve been killed to
date in Afghanistan and Iraq were killed by Islamic jihadists who were
recruited in part by the revelations we were torturing helpless Muslims.
How much safer did those orders to torture make our young men and women?

The plain fact is that waterboarding is illegal under U.S. law. It’s
illegal under international laws and treaties we helped negotiate, we
approved and we adhered to until President Bush and his men and women
decided we wouldn’t.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont has revived his proposal for a bipartisan
Truth Commission to investigate the well-known and less well-known authors
of this legal and moral outrage. If the Republicans continue to refuse to
participate, as they have so far, he says, then he’s prepared to launch a
congressional investigation.

What’s truly disheartening is to watch all the ducking, bobbing and
weaving in the nation’s capital — like so many powder-haired dandies
prancing a minuet.

Yes, it’s an ugly chapter in the life of a nation that prides itself on
its freedoms and its rule of law. But it’s more than that: It’s a splendid
opportunity for a bunch of politicians from both parties to find their
spines, or borrow some, and get to work cleaning out the dark corners in
the White House and emptying the closets of skeletons.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Unknown