Should we be thanking God for the wisdom and judgment of our wartime president George W. Bush?
Or not?
Once upon a time in a country now long gone, a squishy General George Washington made the humane treatment of captured British soldiers a primary strategic objective of the Revolutionary War.
A while later in 1863, a namby-pamby Abraham Lincoln established the first code of conduct proscribing any kind of torture or cruelty; it was this code that formed the basis for the 1929 Geneva Convention.
More contemporary wimps like Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas McArthur were similarly stodgy about not tolerating torture or cruelty, foolishly insisting that such a ban constitutes bedrock American value.
And when you get right down to it, torture is a lot like sausage and law-making.
If you ever have to watch how either actually get made, you'll never want to have anything to do with the finished product again.
Just listen to what one former military interrogator, retired U.S. Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis, had to say:
"Well, hypothermia was a widespread technique. [Some people] were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn’t die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. A lot of other not as common techniques…was (sic) just beating people or burning them. Not within prisons usually. But when the units would go out into people's homes and do these raids, they would just stay in the house and torture them."
All-American stuff, that.
Former chief of staff to Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has stated that top officials, including the president, had to have in effect given permission for the torture to occur.
"You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there," Wilkerson said, "unless you've condoned it."
But that’s not to say that Bush's pro-torture policy hasn't had more than its share of tough-luck stories.
Shucks, no.
The Department of Defense recently informed the Red Cross that somewhere between 70 to 90 percent of the detainees were entirely innocent.
Whoopsee.
As many as 15,000 prisoners may be held at various facilities from Guantanamo to Diego Garcia, and many more places in between.
Habeas corpus? Nosiree.
And if you take the word of Col. Austin Schmidt, who was in charge of operations at Camp Bucca detainee facility in Iraq, a good percentage of these people may be guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever, let alone terrorism.
Schmidt estimates that one in four detainees are probably innocent.
"[They] perhaps were just snagged in a dragnet-type operation or were victims of personal vendettas," Schmidt said. "This is like Chicago in the '30s. You don't like somebody, you drop a dime on them."
The average stay for prisoners at Camp Bucca, whether guilty and the innocent, is one year.
Whether detainees had that kind of time, or not.
But Camp Bucca is but one of the many "official" prisons scattered around the globe, and it may be a country club compared to at least one alternative variety.
So-called "ghost prisoners" are sent to "ghost prisons," frequently in U.S. allied nations known to torture detainees on a routine basis. The fate of the denizens of these foreign dungeons is anyone's guess.
Boo.
Since 9/11 George Bush has made lots of leafy speeches about exporting democracy – usually and I’m sure coincidentally – to places with lots of proven oil reserves or that oil pipelines must cross – where doubtless it is needed most.
He vows to win the war on terror with zero in the way of specificity as to how this eventuality will come to pass, let alone when.
And so far he has completely whiffed Osama bin Laden.
Whiff.
All of this can be chalked up to gross incompetence. Condoning torture cannot, and while George Bush and his multitudinous pseudo-conservative apologists may not much like it, a pretty recent history lesson is well in order at this stage of the proceedings.
In his book Hitler's Prisons, Nikolaus Wachsman wrote: "Various police activities during the seizure of power clearly damaged legal authority. Indefinite detention without due judicial process is incompatible with the rule of law. But on the whole, there were no loud complaints or protests from legal officials."
Well, the time for legal officials, and everybody else, to commence loudly complaining has arrived.
And the very simple question that must be answered is: "Are we still a nation of laws, Or not?"
Right now it doesn't much look like it.
Professing high moral values while condoning torture will make the United States a house divided that is doomed to fall, not to mention a world pariah. And a president who breaks the law – even our occasionally costumed wartime George – must be held accountable.
As for me, I'm in no mood to thank God for much of anything George Bush has done lately, unless he has suddenly decided to resign.
October 11, 2006
Sean Lanham [send him mail] is a native Texan from Fort Worth. In 19789 he earned a B.S.B.A. with a concentration in economics from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
