This week, the Senate debated whether or not to sanction President Bush’s policy of torturing detainees. Let’s not trifle with words — torture is what we’re talking about here, not some antiseptic “alternative methods of interrogation” cooked up in the laptops of Dubya’s spin-meisters. We’re talking about grabbing people in the middle of the night and dragging them off to some “dark site” (perhaps the basement of a suburban home, who knows?) with no legal recourse. We’re talking about lashing people to boards and holding them under water. We’re talking about beating them senseless and fucking with their minds until they don’t know their own mother’s name. And we’re also talking about shipping them off to third countries where they’ll get even worse — the full spectrum of coercive technologies, modern and medieval. Some of the Republican leadership in the Senate framed this as a battle for American “values,” though they appear to have caved as of this writing. They had also raised a more practical question of leaving our military people at risk of ill-treatment and our leaders and commanders at risk of prosecution for violations of international law.

Personally, I think Bush had the advantage on this one. I think he appeals on a very visceral level to the impulses of revenge and retribution that are fairly common currency in the American body politic. Plenty of Americans — and I have known more than a few — are of the opinion that people in custody are most likely guilty, that foreigners are doubly guilty, and that the guilty deserve whatever they get. In fact, the worse their treatment the better, and if Bush can convince them that ill-treatment somehow makes them more safe, that’s better still. These base instincts are the same ones that inspire snickers at stories of prison rape, a staple of late-night television comedy monologues. Prisoner abuse constitutes the ultimate dehumanization, placing someone in a position of utter powerlessness, then systematically depriving them of dignity, basic physical security, and in some cases, life itself. Ugly as it is, prisoner abuse reflects a strand of our culture that’s as American as apple pie. Think about Abner Louima, the Haitian fellow who was beaten and sodomized with a nightstick by Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD. America’s mayor, wielding America’s nightstick. It’s in the blood, my friends.

On the other side of that same coin are the atrocities we’ve seen committed by some of our troops overseas. Once again, dehumanizing the “other” to the point where life is cheap, disposable, expendable. Back to Giuliani’s New York, remember Amadou Diallo, the unarmed black guy shot 19 times by the NYPD for attempting to pull out his wallet and identify himself; or Patrick Dorismond, another person of color shot by undercover cops when they tried to harass him into buying drugs off of them (he was resisting entrapment, apparently). This is part of the culture we bring with us to Baghdad, playing it out in the streets just as we do at home. Like the brutality of Saddam’s era, this has become part of their social burden. And now, with the Senate compromise legislation, our government will have expanded ability to circumvent common article three of the Geneva Conventions, ignore our own War Crimes Act, and gut what’s left of habeas corpus (which shysters like McCain didn’t even affect to defend). They are also protecting themselves from prosecution at some presumably more civilized point in the future. Saddam must be green with envy.

The tradition continues.

luv u,

jp

On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (which seems to have lasted months rather than a single day) my trusty hometown newspaper published a jumbo-tron sized headline on the front page: NEVER FORGET.

They were, of course, referring to the terror attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. That one moment in time — one morning in September that must remain seared into our collective memory for all time. A moment of supreme infamy, as horrific as they come. There are other moments, however, that our government would much prefer we forget. In fact, they are relying on us not to remember those particular moments.

Like the decade we spent sluicing money into what was the biggest CIA project in history up to that time — the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, when we created a virtual Ford Foundation for jihadists of the type our politicians now excoriate at every opportunity. Thanks to our largess, aspiring militants anywhere in the Muslim world could go to their local Pakistani embassy and pick up free tickets to Afghanistan on the CIA’s tab. I recall hearing about U.S. State Department officials pulling their hair out because the Reagan-era U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia kept issuing visas to highly unsavory types on the insistence of our intelligence community. It was at that moment that the seeds of Bin Laden’s (then himself a CIA asset) organization were planted.

Of course, at the same moment (the 1980s) the U.S. was actively helping a certain Saddam Hussein prosecute the war he started against neighboring Iran. We supplied strategic intelligence, supplies, helicopters, and other aid as Saddam repeatedly used chemical weapons against the Iranians, starting as early as 1982 (fully six years before the Halabja massacre). When he gassed to death 5,000 residents of that Kurdish community, our State Department put the word out that Iran was somehow responsible. When Saddam started attacking ships in the Persian Gulf, we ran escorts to protect the safety of shipping allied with Iraq — not Iran’s ships. When Saddam’s air force shot up the U.S.S. Stark and killed 30+ sailors, our leaders cursed Iran. No one in the Reagan administration, from the “Gipper” on down, gave a damn for Saddam’s victims throughout that entire war. Meanwhile, these avowed enemies of terrorism were secretly selling arms to Iran (which they considered the center of terrorism), funneling the proceeds to the Contra terror army in Central America, so they could shoot up more undefended civilian targets, like farms and clinics and anywhere their U.S. sponsors told them the Nicaraguan army wouldn’t be.

That was before 9/11. Then, of course, there was all that stuff since the day of infamy — stuff like, oh I don’t know, lying us into a major war that has now cost nearly as many American lives as the 9/11 attacks. They run away from it now, but the Bush administration and its allies in congress (of both parties) played the terror card over and over in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, making claims and insinuations about Al Qaeda links and WMDs that were wholly unsubstantiated. No investigation is needed to work that one out — it’s a matter of public record, and a performance so transparent that any five-year-old could see through it. Now, because of their actions, Iraq is in worse shape than ever, and it’s well on the way to becoming a “failed state” on the magnitude of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Their boneheaded efforts at building a hillbilly empire (their own Mayberry on the Tiber) is probably beyond any hope of even a moderately benign outcome, and we will pay for their stupidity for many decades to come.

Yeah, well… you can forget all that.

luv u,

jp