Who Really Holds Our Troops in Contempt?One of the favorite tropes of those who labored for years and years at St. Blog's and elsewhere in the Rubber Hose Right to excuse and justify the Administration policies of torture and abuse of prisoners was that Abu Ghraib and similar incidents were the work of "a few bad apples" in our armed forces. Again and again we were told that people who focused on this "isolated incident" (and on similar isolated incidents involving hundreds of people from Bagram to Camp Cropper to Guantanamo to CIA black sites were doing so because a) they hated our troops or b) they were afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Well, now the Senate bipartisan committee has just
issued a report without any dissents which documents that the abuse was not a grass roots phenomenon inexplicably cause by a bunch of evil soldiers who betrayed our wise and just President, but was in fact authorized by president Bush at least as early as his January 2002 memo authorizing abuse and torture of prisoners in US custody, including many of the specific SERE abuses later photographed at Abu Ghraib. Our troops, in short, did as they were ordered to do by the Administration.
And yet, when our troops, acting on the orders of the President of the United States, did what they were ordered to do, the President's response was this:
Bush, on May 24, 2004, described what happened at Abu Ghraib as "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values."
On June 1, 2004, he told a reporter: "Obviously, it was a shameful moment when we saw on our TV screens that soldiers took it upon themselves to humiliate Iraqi prisoners -- because it doesn't reflect the nature of the American people, or the nature of the men and women in our uniform."
This is what is known in English as "filthy betrayal". The President essentially left his troops out to twist in the wind and joined in shouting accusations that they, not he and his Administration, were the criminals. That is what always happens when a politician orders war crimes and then his hapless low-level troops get caught carrying out his orders.
And yet, the Rubber Hose Right media in this country, which claimed to "support the troops" and screamed "unpatriotic" at critics of Administration policy has been entirely silent on this matter.
Oh. Wait. Not entirely silent. They have (I heard it just yesterday on Michael Medved) laughed off torture and called it "frat hazing". They've told Club Gitmo jokes. They've joshed "More cowbell!" But they have never squarely admitted that when the vilified Lynddie England was doing this:
She was (you can read it for yourself) carrying out Administration policy, not being a "bad apple".
So when you see things like this man covered in his own excrement at the order of President Bush:
....recall several things. First and foremost, recall the long rearguard action of
chin-
pullers,
apologists and
sneerers on the Catholic Right about whether or not things like what you see above are contrary to Church teaching about human dignity and whether critics of the same were actually insane America haters or merely useful idiots eager to destroy the West due to some loony
Fundamentalist reading of magisterial documents.
Recall that the whole Right Wing Catholic attempt to make the case for fog is all water under the bridge now. Practically the only people left who are still puzzled about whether this
or this
is torture are a few remaining Highly Clever Blogospheric Catholic Specialists in Morality who continue to scrape the bottom of Hell to find ways to put the word torture in scare quotes. That, however, gets harder to do when the victims of (let us say it again) Administration policies authorized by George W. Bush himself turn up dead like this guy
Don't show these awful pictures, Mark! You are indulging in Torture Porn! We want to stick with comfy phrases like "
enhanced interrogation" that muffled the reality of what President Bush ordered in nice gauzy euphemism. And besides, everybody knows that Abu Ghraib was an abuse. But our noble and law-abiding President saw to it that the evildoers were punished! When will you let it go? You must really hate the military!
But see, that's the thing: this wasn't military policy. This was Administration policy, which mined stuff like
Chinese Communist torture techniques and the methods of "
our Jordanian friends" to find new and ingenious ways to torture people (80% of whom were innocent at Abu Ghraib, though of course 100% of our victims doubtless had it coming at all our other facilities).
Get it: The guy who ordered all this stuff was George W. Bush, not Charles Graner or Lynndie England. It was carried out by flunkies who took the fall because, in the eyes of the Administration, that's what flunkies are for. But the flunkies didn't come up with this stuff. They simply implemented it and were the sort of people who enjoyed their work and were too stupid to see what would become of them should word get out. According to the bipartisan Senate report, the guy who ordered it and then left his troops to take the fall was George W. Bush.
And that's not all. When the military revolted against this disastrous policy (precisely because the brass could see what would happen to our troops if they continued to be the patsies of the Administration brutal incompetence) and refused to submit to Cheney's pressure to alter the Field Manual in order to make it easier to order such crimes in future, Bush fought to make sure the CIA could continue torture and prisoner abuse. And Bush has fought to make sure that the CIA ops who murdered the guy in the picture above
don't get punished. Hooding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, all manner of other assaults on the Geneva Conventions? All approved by George W. Bush--with the caveat that any troops caught carrying out orders will be denounced by the President as criminals.
Now, the lesson criminals learn when they get away with crime is this: do it again. That could explain why the
Beeb is reporting this morning that:
The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody. Muntadar al-Zaidi has suffered a broken hand, broken ribs and internal bleeding, as well as an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC.
But, of course, everybody knows that this is impossible. Surely, Bush would not authorize still *more* prisoner abuse merely because he has gotten away scot free so far (and indeed, with the warm approval of most on the Right)? Indeed, the real story is not that the President of the United States ordered the systematic torture and abuse of prisoners (huge percentages of them at Abu Ghraib innocent, I repeat) and should therefore be tried as a war criminal. No. The real story will doubtless be that the Beeb is reporting this, which is nothing but further evidence of Euro-weenie hostility to Bush. And, of course, it goes without saying that somebody who thinks stories like this are not prima facie incredible, given what we know and have documented about the Administration's war crimes, deserve nothing less than full-throated condemnation from
all the
Righteous of
St. Blogs. Strangely, none of them has said word one about the Senate report.
No doubt that's because, if it's true, it's just some more bad apples, because when the chips are down, the problem is not the Administration, but our troops. Pay no attention to that Senate bipartisan report assigning the responsibility, not to our troops, but George W. Bush (and issued without a single dissent). And besides, it's not torture. It's "torture". And besides, what is torture anyway? And besides, they deserve it. And even if the victim was innocent, you have to expect collateral damage sometimes. And the Church used to allow torture, you know. And Fr. Brian Harrison's
hair-splitting attempts to find wiggle room for torture constitute magisterial proof that I can safely ignore Veritatis Splendor because only Magisterial Fundamentalists take it for what it actually says. And besides supporting the troops means supporting George Bush when he orders them to do commit war crimes and then leaves them to twist in the wind. And besides, the military fought back against Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policies so that only the CIA can do this stuff (which is by no means wrong, or is wrong but effective, or is "tough" or was "meant well" even though, in hindsight it might have been a little, you know, evil.)
I have two brothers who served in the Air Force and a number of friends who are either in the military or vets. I honor their service and their sacrifice with all my heart. It is precisely because I do so that I am outraged and must speak when men like George Bush and Dick "
Other Priorities" Cheney organize systematic war crimes, command men and women low in the chain of command to carry them out, and then betray them and call them criminals for doing what the Administration wanted. It is no small part of the bizarreness of the Rubber Hose Right that it is critics of this Machiavellian dealing and not the Administration who are told they "hate the troops." Of all the people involved in this sorry spectacle, the least culpable are probably people like Lynddie England.
And of all the unsung heros of this war, not the least are the guys in the Pentagon who resisted Bush/Cheney's attempt to rewrite the Army Field Manual so that they could make it easier to do what they ordered done at places like Abu Ghraib.
