| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
04 Jun 2006 12:54:06 PM |
| Object: |
This is not America. |
The Sunday Times June 04, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,29449-2209636,00.html
The horrors really are your America, Mr Bush
Andrew Sullivan
"This is not America."
Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the
horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in
2004.
He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a
cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them.
If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu
Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent?
They wore the uniforms of the United States military.
They were under the command of the American military.
In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe
that what they were doing was routine and approved.
And we now know from the official record that Donald Rumsfeld, the
defence secretary, had personally authorised the use of unmuzzled dogs
to terrify detainees long before Abu Ghraib occurred, exactly as we
saw in those photos.
Does the secretary of defence not represent America?
Almost two years after the torture story broke Congress finally roused
itself and passed an amendment to a defence appropriations bill by
John McCain that forbade the use of any "cruel, inhuman and degrading
treatment" of detainees by any American official anywhere in the
world.
It was passed by veto-proof margins and Bush signed it.
But he appended a "signing statement" insisting that, as
commander-in-chief, he retained the right to order torture if he saw
fit.
And so on May 18 the nominee for CIA director, Michael Hayden, was
asked directly by Senator Dianne Feinstein whether he regarded
"waterboarding" as a legitimate interrogation technique.
Hayden replied:
"Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss
it in some detail."
Huh?
Why a closed session?
Isn’t the law crystal clear?
Isn’t strapping a person to a board, tilting him so that his head is
below his feet, and pouring water through a cloth into his mouth to
simulate drowning a form of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment?
And isn’t that illegal?
In America?
Or is that not America either?
I ask these questions because so few in power in Washington want to go
there.
When I have brought up the question of these atrocities in front of
senators and senior administration officials in private, I have
noticed something.
Their eyes flicker down or away.
Some refuse to discuss the matter, as if it is too much to contemplate
that the US has become a country that detains people without trial or
due process, and reserves the right to torture them.
Or they tell me that however grotesque the charges Bush would never
approve of them.
It’s always someone else’s responsibility.
"This is not who American servicemen are," Richard Armitage, the then
deputy secretary of state, insisted after Abu Ghraib.
Or in the words of the secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, in an
interview with Al Arabiya:
"Americans do not do this to other people."
I know what these people are saying or trying to say.
The vast majority of American soldiers are decent, brave, honourable
professionals.
The America I love and the Americans I know are among the most
admirable and open-hearted people on the planet.
But this much must also be said:
the words of Bush and Rice and Armitage are still untruths.
That much we know.
And last week, we had to absorb another dark truth:
that in a town called Haditha, US Marines appear to have murdered
women and children in cold blood and covered it up.
There is also a new claim of a similar kind of massacre at a place
called Ishaqi.
Last week the American military issued fresh ethical guidelines for
soldiers in Iraq.
One marine commander told Time magazine:
"If 24 innocent civilians were killed by marines, this will put a hole
in the heart of every single marine."
I believe him.
But I do not believe that this president has ever acknowledged his own
responsibility for the atrocities committed by Americans on his watch
and under his command.
He simply cannot process the fact that his own hand provided the
signature that allowed torture to spread like a cancer through the
military and CIA.
He cannot acknowledge that his own war policy -- of just enough troops
to lose -- has created a war of attrition in Iraq in which soldiers
are often overwhelmed and demoralised and stretched to the limit, and
so more than usually vulnerable to the psychic snaps that sometimes
lead to atrocities.
His obdurate refusal to change course, to provide sufficient troops,
to fire his defence secretary, to embrace, rather than evade, the
McCain amendment has robbed him of any excuse, any evasion of
responsibility.
And yet he still evades it.
Last week he spoke of Abu Ghraib as something that had somehow
happened to him and to his country, almost as if he were not the
commander-in-chief or president of the country that had committed such
abuse.
When the evidence is presented to him, he displaces it.
He puts it to one side.
In his mind America is a force for good.
And so it cannot commit evil.
And if he says that often enough it will somehow become true.
In this way his powers of denial kick in like a forcefield against
reality.
It is, I think, an integral part of his own world view, which is that
of a former addict whose life was transformed by a rigid form of
fundamentalist Christianity.
"[My faith] frees me to enjoy life and not worry what comes next," he
told the reporter Fred Barnes.
When you know you have been saved, when you know your motives are
pure, when, as Bush so often puts it, your "heart" is a good one, then
it follows that you cannot commit evil.
Or if you do, it doesn’t attach to you.
Somehow, it isn’t yours, even when it is.
In this sense fundamentalist Christianity can enable evil by promoting
the lie that some humans have been saved from it.
It misses the deeper Christian truth that even good people can do bad
things.
It forgets that what is noble about America is not that Americans are
somehow morally better than anyone else.
But that it is a country with a democratic system that helps expose
the constancy of human evil, and minimise its power through the rule
of law, democratic accountability and constitutional checks.
That system was devised by men who assumed the worst of people, not
the best, who expected Americans not to be better than any other
people, but the same.
It was the wisdom of the system that would save America, not the moral
superiority of its people.
What is so tragic about this presidency is that it has simultaneously
proclaimed American goodness while dismantling the constitutional
protections and laws that guard against American evil.
The good intention has overwhelmed the fact of human fallibility.
But reality -- human reality -- eventually intrudes.
Denial breaks down.
The physical evidence of torture, of murder, of atrocity, slowly
overwhelms the will to disbelieve in it.
I am sorry, Mr President.
This is America.
And you have helped make it so.
_______________________________________________
Harry
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