|
|
|
|
|
The Worst Generation
This entry was posted on 5/20/2009 6:30 PM and is filed under Added Articles.
Tom Brokaw wrote a book called "The Greatest Generation" about our parents and grandparents who fought World War II. How quickly we have fallen.
When Washington was nearly captured or assassinated in the plot which involved Benedict Arnold, though Arnold got away they captured his handler, a British officer with incriminating documents. Washington, after much deliberation and soul searching, with no pleasure or gloating self satisfaction, had him executed as a spy. How much thought do you think he gave to torturing the man first?
After all his life was personally threatened, his livelihood and way of life was imperiled. As Franklin famously noted, "either we hang together or we will hang separately". No one had any doubt as to how critical the situation was, yet Washington didn't consider torture as an option. Why? Because he had integrity, he was civilized, he knew better. That's why Washington is the founder of a country that didn't exist before he did. He had character.
When Lincoln was Commander in Chief during the Civil War his life was threatened many times. Robert E. Lee fought most of the first half of the war in the north, just a few days march from Washington. Lincoln certainly had ample incentive, if he were that kind of man, to torture rebel prisoners (or high value detainees) to discover Lee's troop movements and plans. After all, Lincoln's life was in jeopardy, the country was in danger and our very way of life was under assault.
Yet there is no evidence anywhere that such a thing was ever even remotely considered - even by the troops of either side in the field - in that most visceral and passionate of wars.
Why? Because Lincoln wasn't that kind of man and is now widely considered today to be our greatest president.
After Pearl Harbor was attacked and Japan was running riot in the Far East, Hitler declared war on the United States too. This meant that the two most powerful military establishments, east and west, were arrayed against us. In both theaters of war, Japanese atrocities in China and German genocide against the Jews provided abundant evidence in the darkest days of the war that these nations were not playing by our rules. They wanted to kill us, enslave us, our entire way of life was in peril and under grievous assault by forces of evil and darkness.
Yet there was still no torture contemplated. Roosevelt wasn't boastful or apoplectic but reassuringly calm and quietly determined. Our military prisons were humane and the rules of warfare were scrupulously adhered to whenever possible. Roosevelt is also considered to be one of our greatest presidents.
If this is what the greatest American presidents did at the greatest crises in our history, why were Bush-Cheney so quick to do exactly the opposite? 9-11 wasn't a situation like that which faced Washington, who against great odds was trying to overthrow control of the world's greatest military power of his day. No, just the opposite. Bush was president of the largest and most powerful and prosperous nation on earth with military firepower greater than the rest of the world combined.
To be sure, the attack against us was grievous, not strategically perhaps but in shock value it was every bit another Pearl Harbor. But the ability of the attackers to follow it up with anything as great or greater than the original attack, certainly on any kind of level which approached World War II, was nonexistent. Any ability to follow it up with more attacks at all was severely limited and even, with due diligence on our part, doubtful.
Why then with a proportionally much smaller threat against our infinitely greater resources and resiliency did our leaders behave with so much less self control, integrity and courage? Of what exactly were they so petrified? To be sure those who build something have a different sort of mindset and make up than those merely called upon to maintain something that has already been built. Maintence men are of a different caliber than architects and visionaries and great leaders. Still the vast retreat from the principles we have always held dear and scrupulously adhered to in this country in the Bush administration was stark and even astonishing.
The one thing they have used as an excuse, as reverse justification for the torture they engaged in, has been an imminent threat scenario of massive destruction. In an improbable "what if" situation they ask, "wouldn't you want to know if we were about to be attacked by a nuclear weapon? Shouldn't we torture then?"
But this is an entirely false premise designed to deceive, a non sequitor to this particular situation because nuclear weapons were the one thing we knew our enemies didn't possess at the time and they tortured anyway.
In moments of rare lucidity the Bush people seem to have been aware of the implausibility of another attack against us equal to the first. When they weren't busy trying to frighten the American people (something else unprecedented for an American leader to engage in in time of war) for extraneous political reasons they spoke candidly that the threat against us was really more abstract and theoretical than real. Cheney called it "existential". Yet Cheney was so afraid of this existentialism (and apparently any other branch of philosophy or deep thinking) that he apparently spent way more time than was synonymous with bravery hiding in bunker in an undisclosed location.
Be that as it may, and all their ulterior political motivations aside, we are still left with the question. Why were they so weak, timid and afraid? Even in the only comparable situation in our recent history, the red scare of the fifties and the farcical, anti-democratic McCarthy hearings which resulted, no one claimed that all the normal rules of human decency were expendable because a few of us were afraid.
But supporters of this unjustifiable cause feel that if they can lure you into conditional agreement of an extreme, hypothetical case, that torture might potentially be justified, they then jump to the distant conclusion that in every case, due the discretion of the torturers, torture should be allowed. If torture is acceptable in any scenario then it must be permissible in every scenario.
Bizarre as this rationale is, it is what is being claimed today by the apologists and supporters of a torture policy which cannot be proved to have provided us with any actionable intelligence, particularly not of the "smoking gun" variety which has been used as its only legitimate justification. Conversely, torture has indisputably proven very harmful both to our efforts in the court of world opinion and to ensure the safety of our troops of the ground. All because of these policies which only resulted in very nebulous background information which might as well have been obtained by other means.
The rest of the information received from torture was purely erroneous which led to false leads and unjustified fears which only hindered our ability to respond to real threats and were undoubtedly counterproductive to our ability to understand the capability of the enemy. In this case it is impossible to see that the benefits of torture outweighed the risks even in the best case scenarios put forward as justification.
One of the "triumphs" in torture they do claim was apparently waterboarded eighty four times in the course of one month "after" he had allegedly given us the valuable information he possessed. This disproves the value of their argument cross the board. If they had gotten the information they claimed they got from him why was it necessary to continue to torture him? Either they didn't get the information they claimed or they were torturing just to be torturing. And then why did the CIA feel it necessary to destroy hours of video of these same sessions apologists now are claiming were so valuable and necessary and humane? Innocent people don't destroy tapes they preserve them.
In fact one problem with suspending normal rules of ethical behavior is that no other ethical paradigm is ever erected to replace them. Therefore the slippery slope of possibility soon runs straight to the gutter at the bottom of the hill. This is exactly the case with the two instances of torture with which we are most familiar, Abu Gehraib and Guantanamo. Excesses were rampant in both places. Torture and cruelty became ends in themselves and quickly turned into sheer depravity.
So why was our government so weak kneed? When you look at the privileged existence of Gorge Bush, never seasoned, steeled or hardened by difficulty, and the intellectual shallowness of the people in his administration you begin to approach the heart of the problem. This generation of Americans in leadership positions are soft and softness and flaccidity lead to moral decay. There was never a difficult challenge facing them which their daddies or sugar daddies or high powered connections couldn't buy them out of. They cut life's corners everywhere.
The crisis on Wall Street stems from the same root cause. The money men didn't build the nation's financial power, they only inherited it and capitalized on it, living off their father's or your father's or your wealth. They don't earn money or make things, they merely play with other peoples' hard earned capital.
This sense of separation from those who build things to those who only use them leads to a superficial understanding and analysis of how things actually work and how things get done. It leads to a reliance more on ideology than ethics and hard work. In government it leads to Rovian gamesmanship rather than competent government. The Bush administration along with all its mindless and corrupt supporters was small mindedness in action.
In an instance like this, often people who are far removed from a fight are more nervous and fearful about its outcome than those actually engaged in the fighting. The policy makers in the Bush administration had nothing in common with the people who built this country, they are its inheritors, they mistrust our strength and the resiliency of the American people.
As they have never built anything of value themselves they cannot recognize the telltale signs of the strength of a structure that others have built. Since they lack the integrity, strength of purpose and sheer fortitude that it took to create this country they are weak in the management of it and nervous as to whether it may withstand periods of great pressure. That's why they are so afraid.
Such people who possess small minds cannot fathom large principles. They cannot see ahead with confidence because they cannot discern the trajectories of the past. Wracked with paranoia they overreact disproportionately to small provocation while myopically missing large warnings signs which go unheeded. They do not trust the greater instincts of others or of history because of their lack of imagination and courage and personal will power. They have so little in common with the people who have made this country great that they do not even know where to begin to try to emulate them and so in the end do not even try.
Bush and Cheney inherited a system of government whose traditions they neither completely trusted nor ever fully understood. It was way too big for their limited imaginations to absorb. Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt knew the country was great and could feel in their souls that we would prevail against all odds and could afford to adhere to principles without which they knew we could not ultimately succeed.
This generation as represented by George Bush and Dick Cheney are hard of heart, flaccid of mind and weak of spirit. They are soft and gutless. They don't have the integrity to adhere to principle and do the hard things necessary to be great. They are short cut artists. They are a danger to us. They are unworthy of our past. They are enemies of our future and they are foreign what has made us great.
They engaged in torture not because it worked or because it was necessary. they engaged in torture not because they are tough or strong as they would have us believe, but because they are weak and afraid of things they don't understand. And they understand very little. Heroes don't torture, tyrants do.
So what do we do about the Bush torture policies? Imagine if you loan a car to someone who abuses it and then returns it to you impaired just as you are going to have to use it to make a long trip. Would you refuse to get it fixed because you weren't responsible for creating the problems? Obama has inherited Bush's clunkers, his lemons and his wrecks. While it's easy to sympathize with their desire to put Bush behind them, in their rear view mirror so to speak, there are repairs which have to be made first or they will never be able to get very far down the road before the car falls apart.
So of course there has to be what they are calling a truth commission or something very much like the 9-11 commission. Not out of vindictiveness but out of honest discipline. We must go on record officially and institutionally and irrefutably against such behavior or undoubtedly its proponents will do it to us again next time they have a chance. Do you believe for a second that a guy like Cheney wouldn't? Rhetoric alone does not wash the stain away. We owe it to our past and to posterity to put ourselves right with our own past to ensure that these things never happen again in our future.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
