Last week's torture revelations

There was more news last week about the continuing implementation of the Cheney-Bush torture policy in Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen New York Times 10/04/07. It's a telling symptom of how things could have gotten to this point that the New York Times still can't bring itself to call it by its name, torture. Every time the word is used in the article it describes either laws against torture or the administration's alibis for torture, never the sadistic acts being committed by the Cheney-Bush government. The closest it comes is "brutal interrogations".

This is a depressing subject. And as important as I know it is, I find it hard to even write about. Because not only is the subject itself disgusting. It's also a grim reminder of how badly off the tracks of democratic practice Dick Cheney and George Bush and today's authoritarian Republican Party have taken us. Virtually every single Republican member of Congress has supported the torture policy by their votes.

Jimmy Carter wrote in Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005), "The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear." A tool of state terror, in other words.

It has to end. Those responsible for it at all levels should be prosecuted, given the fair trials and legal treatment they denied their victims, and sent to serve long prison terms after being duly convicted. It would be hard to overstate just how damaging this policy is for democracy and the rule of law in the United States.

There have been an number of good commentaries in the wake of the Times article, such as The latest revelations of lawbreaking, torture and extremism by Glenn Greenwald Salon 10/04/07 and Were You Really Surprised? by David Luban, Balkinization blog 10/05/07.

As for how far the rot has spread in the Republican Party and how much torture has become a core value of the Republican base, Matt Taibbi gives a good picture of it in McCain's Last Stand Rolling Stone 10/04/07. The latest torture revelations had to do with legal opinions designed to get around the anti-torture legislation that McCain had sponsored. I don't think the great Maverick McCain should get much credit for opposing torture. Because he surely knew very well that if the administration had been ignoring laws against torture already, they would continue to ignore the new one.

But McCain at least does verbally distance himself from the torture policy, as Taibbi describes in a Republican Presidential debate in South Carolina:

One by one, McCain's GOP opponents had lunged toward the cameras pledging, by means of innuendo both thinly veiled and not veiled at all, boundless enthusiasm for the abuse and torture of America's terror-war detainees. Rudy Giuliani, baldly seeking to overcome his rep as a two-faced Yankee liberal who kills the unborn and dresses in women's clothes, grinned into the cameras and said he would tell his people to "use every method they could think of" to get information. The other suspect Northerner, the Mormon queer-coddler Mitt Romney, took in Giuliani's response like a frat pledge who had just been issued a beer-pong challenge, preposterously promising to one-up the field and "double Guantanamo."

Both answers elicited approving roars from the blood-lusting South Carolina crowd, and it seemed only a matter of time before Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter pulled a car battery out from behind the podium and pledged himself ready to torture someone, anyone, right now, if it would win him red-state votes. But just then, McCain, who spent five and a half years in a POW camp in Vietnam, decided to rain on the parade. "If we torture people," he said sadly, "what happens to our military people when they're captured?" After the debate, he went even further, offering a history lesson on one of America's choicest "enhanced" interrogation techniques, water-boarding. "Do you know where that was invented?" McCain asked. "In the Spanish Inquisition. Do we want to do things that were done in the Spanish Inquisition?"

In the diffident silence you could almost feel McCain's poll numbers dropping toward the low single digits. I, for one, was impressed. It seems amazing to say, but in the Bush era, distancing oneself from the Spanish Inquisition actually qualifies as political courage. (my emphasis)

The latter is only true so far in the authoritarian Republican Party. But that is worse than it ever should have gotten. There's no better illustration of the kind of Christianity practiced by the Christian Right and the Party that is now completely beholden to it.

The Republican Party isn't ignoring the issue. Torture is now one of the Party's core values, just as lynch-murder (and the torture that went with it) was a core value of the Southern Democratic Party for nine decades or more following the Civil War. In that sense, torture is a "traditional value". A tradition that should have died out long ago. Instead, the Cheney-era Republican Party made it a passionately-defended practice of the American government.

Tags: authoritarianism, bush administration, christian right, torture