Philocrites

Conservatives against torture.

by Philocrites

I'd like to call your attention to two self-critical articles by pro-war conservatives in the last month about the use of torture by U.S. military and intelligence forces. The Boston Globe's conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby says it took him a while to acknowledge just how awful the abuse of prisoners was, but the way U.S. troops have used "religious humiliation as tools of war" seems to have pushed him to real anger. After describing the sexual humiliation of prisoners, he asks:

How about religious torture?

In Abu Ghraib, the cruelties inflicted on prisoners by Specialist Charles Graner and his little band of sadists weren't limited to the sexual. Inmates told investigators they were forced to swallow pork and liquor — both are forbidden to Muslims — and to denounce Islam.

"They stripped me naked," said a detainee named Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik. "They asked me, 'Do you pray to Allah?' I said yes. They said, '[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.' They ordered me to curse Islam and because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive. And I did what they ordered me. This is against my belief."

He concludes his column:

As regular readers know, I write as a war hawk. I strongly support the mission in Iraq. I voted for President Bush. I believe the struggle against Islamist totalitarianism is the most urgent conflict of our time.

But none of that justifies the administration's apparent willingness to countenance — under at least some circumstances — the indecent abuse of prisoners in military custody. Something is very wrong when the Justice Department advises the president's legal adviser that a wartime president is not bound by the international Convention Against Torture or the US laws incorporating it. Or when that legal adviser tells the Senate, as Alberto Gonzales did last week, that "there is no legal prohibition under the Convention Against Torture on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment with respect to aliens overseas."

If this were happening on a Democratic president's watch, the criticism from Republicans and conservatives would be deafening. Why the near-silence now? Who has better reason to be outraged by this scandal than those of us who support the war? More than anyone, it is the war hawks who should be infuriated by it. It shouldn't have taken me this long to say so.

("Saying Nothing Is Torture in Itself," Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe 1.30.05)

And Andrew Sullivan, who has decided to give blogging a good long rest, writes in his review of The Abu Ghraib Investigations and Mark Danner's book Torture and Truth:

What's notable about the incidents of torture and abuse is first, their common features, and second, their geographical reach. No one has any reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to one prison near Baghdad. They were everywhere: from Guantánamo Bay to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Basra, Ramadi and Tikrit and, for all we know, in any number of hidden jails affecting "ghost detainees" kept from the purview of the Red Cross. They were committed by the Marines, the Army, the Military Police, Navy Seals, reservists, Special Forces and on and on. The use of hooding was ubiquitous; the same goes for forced nudity, sexual humiliation and brutal beatings; there are examples of rape and electric shocks. Many of the abuses seem specifically tailored to humiliate Arabs and Muslims, where horror at being exposed in public is a deep cultural artifact. . . .

Whether we decide to call this kind of treatment "abuse" or some other euphemism, there is no doubt what it was in the minds of the American soldiers who perpetrated it. They believed in torture. And many believed it was sanctioned from above.

Sullivan also condemns the people who are politically responsible for the abuses:

Worse, the president has never acknowledged the scope or the real gravity of what has taken place. His first instinct was to minimize the issue; later, his main references to it were a couple of sentences claiming that the abuses were the work of a handful of miscreants, rather than a consequence of his own decisions. But the impact of these events on domestic morale, on the morale of the vast majority of honorable soldiers in a very tough place and on the reputation of the United States in the Middle East is incalculable. The war on terror is both military and political. The president's great contribution has been to recognize that a solution is impossible without political reform in the Middle East. And yet the prevalence of brutality and inhumanity among American interrogators has robbed the United States of the high ground it desperately needs to maintain in order to win. What better weapon for Al Qaeda than the news that an inmate at Guantánamo was wrapped in the Israeli flag or that prisoners at Abu Ghraib were raped? There is no escaping the fact that, whether he intended to or not, this president handed Al Qaeda that weapon. Sometimes a brazen declaration of toughness is actually a form of weakness. In a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere, it's simply self-defeating.

He points the finger at himself, too:

But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against "evil" might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.

("Atrocities in Plain Sight," Andrew Sullivan, New York Times Book Review 1.13.05, reg req'd)

Copyright © 2005 by Philocrites | Posted 13 February 2005 at 10:13 PM

Previous: The conservative sky is falling.
Next: Francis Ellingwood Abbot, romantic.