A Tortured Republican Argument

 

The United States of America routinely tortured suspected terrorists during the administration of Republican George W. Bush, in flagrant violation of American law and tradition.

 

And it’s all Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

 

The Republican National Committee’s website at gop.com, has a page titled “Nancy’s Debunked Denials,” where the text begins in boldface: “New Intelligence Documents Prove That Pelosi Has Not Been Honest About What She Knew And When She Knew It.”

 

The Republican reasoning is that since Pelosi knew about what the RNC stubbornly calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” and failed to stop them, she is complicit in their use.

 

And since she’s complicit in the use of torture, she shouldn’t make it a “political issue,” which is how Republicans prefer to describe conduct that would be a crime if it took place in a police station or jail.

 

The GOP says Pelosi learned about the torture (oops! Enhanced Interrogation) in a Fall 2002 briefing. Pelosi says that briefing’s only mention of water boarding, the torture technique of choice, was that it wasn’t being used.

 

Thoughtful Republicans – there must be a few somewhere – might recall that the “what knew/when knew” query reached its sloganeering peak in the Watergate burglary hearings about another GOP guardian of our liberties, Richard M. Nixon. But let’s not focus on the past, especially the past in which Republican operatives broke the law.

 

We should stay focused on the present in which Republican operatives broke the law because the Democrats failed to stop them.

 

Never mind that Democrats were in the minority in 2002. Today’s Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, is quoted in Wednesday’s New York Times as saying “It’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were; they were well aware that they’d been used; and it seems to me that they want to have it both ways. You can’t have it both ways.”

 

Sure you can John. You can do the crime, and when you’re caught, you can blame the cops for not preventing you.

 

Not to be outdone by the John Boehner Theory of Criminal Law, Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri thundered from his web site: “Instead of prosecuting or persecuting, our country should be supporting our intelligence professionals who work to keep us safe.”

 

Senator Bond’s four-paragraph statement made no mention of who would keep us safe from our intelligence professionals.

Let’s just say that when looking for an answer to that question, the present Republican Party doesn’t immediately spring to mind.

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Satan’s Pride and Joy

 

Satan must be so damned proud.

 

The debate over Central Intelligence Agency torture of suspected terrorists now centers not on whether it was right or wrong, but on whether or not it was effective.

 

Since time began, turning our attention from issues of good or evil to procedural details has been high on Hell’s agenda. And at no time has success been as spectacular as in the last 100 years.

 

The debate in Nazi Germany was not over whether the execution camps were wrong, but whether the Final Solution functioned efficiently. Stalin’s artificial famines, forced collectivization and endless Gulags were criticized less for being wrong than for being economically inefficient.

 

And now the heirs of those who so proudly wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” are treated to an August 1, 2002 memo from the ironically named U.S. Department of Justice that says:

 

·        It’s okay to grab a suspect’s head, slap them in the face and throw them against specially-built walls.

·        There’s no problem with putting a suspect into a box for 18 hours at a stretch.

·        Sleep deprivation for 72 hours is fine, as is forcing suspects to assume and hold body positions that bring intense muscle fatigue pain.

·        Putting feared insects into the box with the subject presents no issues.

·        Water-boarding, aka near-drowning, is perfectly legal, even if you do it to one suspect 183 times in a single month, and give another suspect a break with only 83 episodes.

 

We prosecuted folks in Germany and Japan who did things like that to detainees in World War II, but we have it on no less authority than former Vice President Dick Cheney that these things were necessary to keep us safe. Or as he told ABC News in a December 2008 interview”

“. . .So, it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.

“And I think those who allege that we've been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don't know what they're talking about.”

So a “remarkably successful” wrong is right, and therefore only a failed wrong is wrong, which opens the question of whether a failed right is wrong or a wrong right is failed, and. . .and the howls of laughter in Hell rise in unending crescendo.

 

Some have made so bold as to suggest that doing these things constituted crimes, both by those who ordered and did them and by those who blessed the whole stinking mess in pages of BureauLawerSpeak.

 

That must also amuse the Hell out of Satan, who has watched our concern as a nation slip from a mutual pledge of “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” to a more convenient pledge of “your life to protect my fortune -- and honor be damned.”

 

Damned it will be, and Satan gets his amusement with little effort. Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and the rest of the goose-brained goose-stepping Right are doing all the heavy lifting here, and the Prince of Darkness has no doubt prepared appropriate rewards.

 

Rewards in which we’ll all share unless we stop nattering about how effective a criminal act was in nabbing the loot and start prosecuting those who in the guise of protecting us from harm exposed us to a far greater evil.

 

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