MORALITY TEST: WILL THE REAL INFIDELS PLEASE STAND UP?

"If America is not good, America is not great."
--- Alexis de Toqueville
We were treated to a moral double whammy this past week: the Pope was seeking dialogue with the Muslim world by insulting (and misrepresenting) their Prophet, while our president was lecturing middle easterners at the U. N. on the blessings of freedom, democracy, decency, and human rights. No one at the N. Y. meeting (except for the Prez.) could help but be embarassed for him, knowing he stood before them morally naked. Everyone knew also that his people have been torturing Muslims routinely and were, as he spoke, fighting in the U. S. congress for permission to keep on torturing.

George Packer, writing in the Sep. 18 New Yorker "Talk of the Town," spoke of this craziness as "an ongoing strategic disaster around the world." As to Bush's repeated claim "The United States does not torture . . . I have not authorized it and will not authorize it," Packer says: "This was a lie, and most of the world knows it. The lie, and the reality that the phrase 'an alternative set of procedures' is meant to conceal --simulated drowning, sleep and sensory deprivation, induced hypothermia, beatings, and other forms of torture that are responsible for some of the dozens of detainee deaths considered to be homicides --- have done more to embolden America's enemies and estrange its friends than anything bin Laden might say or do."
(emphasis mine.)

The Muslim world knows too well (it's on their TV frequently) that we are holding 14,000+ of their young men in prisons in Iraq, three or four thousand in Afghanistan, plus secret numbers in secret prisons, and 400+ still in Guantanamo. Most of these, by far, including those at Gitmo are being held without charges, with little or no evidence, without lawyers or legal process, and without hope. (They are victims of Cheney's "1 percent doctine." To find out what that is, see Ron Suskind's terrific (I mean that literally) new book by that name.)

Last time I looked, only ten people at Gitmo had ever been charged with anything. That probably means that, for the rest, evidence is skimpy or nonexistent. Half of the original 500+ were Afghans caught on the battlefield defending their country. Since when is that a crime? No country, and no religion says it's wrong to fight in defense of your own homeland. Most, in fact, hold it a crime not to.

Many in Gitmo were turned in by corrupt warlords who collected bounties on them, and manufactured stories to go with the prisoners. (Those warlords, by the way, are still running Afghanistan, outside of Kabul, and are still on the CIA payroll. They also run the incredibly profitable opium and heroin trade, and pay off the Taliban where appropriate). Meanwhile, back at Gitmo, as to the treatment there, in a letter to the Oct. 2006 Harper's, Stephen Xenakis, M. D. writes:

" We cannot separate the decision of the detainees at Guantonamo to starve themselves from the grim facts of their imprisonment: 55 percent of the detainees have not been determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States; they have not been accorded due process; and they have not seen their families or friends for over four years. . .The conditions of incarceration illustrate that our military health-care system has not taken all possible measures to prevent detainees from spiraling downward into a hopeless and helpless state, one in which self-starvation seems the only alternative."

Dr. Xenakis is understandably critical of doctors at Gitmo who are violating their Hippocratic Oaths by participating in these atrocities. The President claims the people held at Gitmo are "hard core terrorists." If that 's true, put them on trial and produce the evidence. Instead, the Prez. wants the power to torture them until they confess to something, and then use their tortured confession to convict them and incarcerate them permently. Never mind what this travesty does to our legal system (Packer says innocent men have languished for years). How is it viewed in the rest of the world? This is the kind of stuff Saddam did! It's also what Colin Powell means by asking about our moral bearings.

As for the supposed need for torture, we shoud note that some of the most convincing testimony against it comes from senior military combat veterans who say its use dishonors them, the uniform, the flag, the country. Its main advocates have not seen active military service (Cheney took five deferments) and can't be dishonored. You can't lose what you don't have.

Lt. Gen. John Kimmons is the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence. He was briefing reporters recently at the Pentagon on the new field manual that specifies which interrogation techniques will be forbidden. As reported by George Packer (in the New Yorker article already cited above), here is what the Gen. said about the usefulness of torture:

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. And, moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't afford to go there. Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been -- in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them, have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral, and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there."

Packer again: "Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the Pres. demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them." Is that really what America stands for? Why do we stand for it?

Fareed Zakaria is the reason I keep taking Newsweek. He's one of the best in the business. I hope he's not overly optimistic in writing in this week's issue of the mag:

"The secret prisons have come out of the dark. Guantanamo will have to be closed or transformed. . . The administration's policy has undergone a sea change. The executive branch has abandoned the idea that 'enemy combatants' ---that is anyone so defined by the White House or Defense Dept.---may be locked up indefinitely without ever being charged, that secret prisons can be maintained, that congressional input or oversight is unnecessary and that international laws and treaties are irrelevant. The Geneva Conventions, in particular, were dismissed during the administration's first term by the then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales for the 'quaint' protections of prisoners and 'obsolete' limitations on interrogations. Donald Rumsfeld publically announced that the Conventions no longer applied."

Fareed is happy that the bad old days are gone for good! I sure hope he's right. I can't help but remember what the old eastern Oregon rancher said as he stepped onto his back porch with his deer rifle, and shot his faithful cow-dog, saying: "you can't break a dog from suckin' eggs." Let's hope that ancient folk wisdom has no application whatsoever in what we are discussing here! Cheers!

"Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He that has clean hands and a pure heart. . . .He has shown you O man what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

I'd love to hear from you! jgoodwin004@centurytel.net