Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.
That is one paragraph, towards the end, of Frank Rich's Sunday NY Times column, which is entitled The Banality of Bush White House Evil, itself a reference to the famous phrase penned by Hannah Arendt. Read the Rich if you want. I will quote no further. I will merely focus on the implication s of this one paragraph.
It is not that the paragraph tells us anything we should not already know. By now we have repeated reports of the attempts, desperate at times, to be able to offer a link between the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the regime of Saddam Hussein to enable the Bush administration to claim justification for what they had already decided to do - invade, topple Saddam, and establish a "model" state to influence the rest of the oil-rich Middle East.
I remember my students at the time saying it was all about oil. Were they being cynical, or were they merely more perceptive than the many adults who insisted it was about other subjects, perhaps even about national honor? It may not seem to matter now, but they were at least partly right. It was also about power, not only internationally, but also to be exercised without oversight or checks and balances domestically.
The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality - so writes Rich. I think he is too kind. I think the lying about iraq is at the heart of the Bush White House's many illegalities, their abuse of power, their ignoring of international agreements, protections of the Bill of Rights, and Constitutional checks and balances.
I do not know which is chicken and which is egg, but the lying, the torture and the abuses of the power granted them by the American voters and Congress are inextricably linked.
And they were woven so tightly together that were any thread allowed to be pulled, the entire fabric could well unravel.
It must have seemed like a golden opportunity to achieve the political goals of Karl Rove and the kleptocratic goals of the Bush supporters like Ken Lay. For the corporations along for the ride, no-bid contracts on the grounds of national emergency was an opportunity to transfer billions without accomplishing any productive government or diplomatic service. And by declaring the situation to be a war where the president's powers could not, in their minds, be limited, they had carte blanche.
That is, they would, provided they could justify going into Iraq. We know from Richard Clarke that the President was seeking that evidence on September 12, even though he was told there was no connection. We know from the Downing Street Memo that the administration had determined a policy and was prepared to "fix" the intelligence around the goals of that policy.
"Fix" the intelligence. Certainly some in the upper ranks of the administration knew that people under torture would say whatever you wanted in order to make the torture stop. What better way to get the "intelligence" to justify an unprovoked invasions - which if truly unprovoked by itself represented a war crime, a crime against humanity, for which under international law the policy makers pursuing such policy could be subjected to the most serious international penalties.
On September 12 Clarke heard a president trying to find evidence to justify attacking Iraq. And were that all we knew, perhaps I could grant the possibility of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us s Rich puts it. But we also know from Paul O'Neill that the first National Security Council meeting in early 2001, well before the attacks of September, was already focused on toppling Saddam.
I think we must consider the very real possibility that the purpose of torture was to manufacture "intelligence." I cannot prove it. I think it is possible to infer.
It is also possible to view some of the torture as having a different purpose - to terrorize, not just those in custody, but those who would inevitably learn at least pieces of what we were doing.
Iraqis knew, even when we didn't. I have vague memories that Seymour Hersh heard things about Abu Ghraib from the Christian Peacemakers in Baghdad, who lived among Iraqis without security. That is why when the four, including my acquaintance Tom Fox - later killed - were kidnapped, at least some of us worried that they might have been seized by security forces who did not like what they were exposing.
Perhaps we were paranoid, but as the old saying goes, sometimes even paranoids have enemies. And the track record of less that complete truth about things to do with Iraq from the Bush administration might well give people pause, make them susceptible to imagining truly horrific things.
Torture by itself is horrific. Justification and rationalization merely addes to the horror that already exists. Torture is done because it can be done. It dehumanizes, and those who think the ones carrying it out are not affected have not paid attention to the pieces by Greg Mitchell, or the statements by those who opposed the policy from the beginning.
How many lies are we going to excuse, to ignore? How many atrocities and abuses that flowed from those lies are we prepared to gloss over?
If we do not FULLY expose what was done, then those who did things believing they were doing the right thing for this country because the administration lied to them will not be able fully grasp their own roles, and thus their responsibility to demand a full accounting.
Some people will argue that we have too many other crises now to devote attention to this. But think how many other of our crises come from lies and abuses and aggrandisement of power.
And if you are at all religious, remember simply these words: For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?
It is our collective soul, the soul of this nation, that must be cleansed and restored. It cannot be cleansed if we look the other way.
The lying about Iraq is the original sin - perhaps even that does not fully express the depths of what has happened, but it is at least a place from which we can start.
For we will not see fully the damage to merely focus on the torture. That torture occurred within a far broader consequence.
We must pull the threads we now see, and then see what else becomes uncovered.
We may be shocked when we discover what we do not yet know. And not just about torture.
That possibility may be frightening. But if we ignore it, if we pass on this chance to examine all and thus be able to rectify and heal, we will in some way have acquiesced.
If we acquiesce we become complicit.
Knowing as we do now of so many lies and abuses, can we pretend that we have no responsibility to look further?
Lying, torture, coverups, ignoring international agreements . . .
If We, the People are sovereign, then it is incumbent upon us to demand that our government be accountable to us, for We the People are accountable to each other, and to the entire world, for what has been done, ostensibly in our name and on our behalf.