Did you hear? The Republicans have been busy, busy, busy this fall. As the all-important November elections approach, the party in power has been working overtime. Not to solve the world's problems. Create more, to be sure, but never solve. No, they've been busy preparing for the upcoming vote by doing what they normally do. By scaring Americans. By disenfranchising those who refuse to be scared. By throwing red meat to their rabid base. And, to me, the latest - and no doubt worst - examples of this has been the inconvenient truth that it's now apparently fine for representatives of this government to
torture people. Not only that, but also that our willingness to accept torture is seen by the Republican Party as one of its top selling points as November nears. But by simply acknowledging this fact and stopping there, we miss a larger point. And that is this:
Without many everyday Americans looking the other way, none of this would have been possible. Without a base as complicit as those in office, we wouldn't be spending so much time discussing America's steady slide into tyranny. I'm speaking, of course, about the torturers next door.
One of the most pathetic - and telling - aspects of this story has been the Republican Party's willingness to turn such important matters into petty election season selling points. The best example of this came Friday with an Associated Press
article titled "GOP hopes to parlay deal on detainees". The lead paragraph of Anne Plummer Flaherty's story says it all. "Republicans," she wrote, "hope that an accord reached between the Bush administration and GOP senators on the treatment of terror-war detainees means the party can go on a campaign-season offensive on the issue of protecting the country." It's bad enough that we're even
discussing our use of torture, let alone forging phony compromises. It's even worse that the party in power sees this as a
good thing and is willing to use it against the Democrats as November approaches. Anything, of course, to take the American electorate's eyes off of Iraq. Anything to distract voters from the reality that this administration
sent its young men and women to Iraq based on lies,
has failed to support them and
has done nothing while the casualty totals reach shocking proportions. "Wait," you say, "some Republicans
did do something for the troops."
Well, you're right. They voted to support amnesty for those who would
torture, mutilate and murder them in Iraq. So at least they've got consistency going for them.
It's rather distressing, of course, that elected officials from the president down seem fine with something as morally reprehensible as torture. Just as it's distressing that those "rebel" rubber-stamp Republicans helping reach this agreement seem fine with letting the president - who thinks the phrase "outrages upon personal dignity" is vague -
have the final word on which interrogation techniques are fine and which aren't. But most distressing, to me, is the fact that so many rank-and-file Republican voters are looking the other way while the party in power sells this country's soul to the devil. Where are those right-leaning "values voters" who seem quite content to
lecture everyone else about the ills of Janet Jackson's nipple, yet are somehow absent for the debate on whether or not we want to be a society that tortures people? Where are those partisan hacks who love to
post comments on progressive blogs about
our immoral ways, yet can't be counted on to speak out against the most immoral of immoral actions? Where are those supposed support-the-troops Republicans who have no problem
slapping stickers on their cars, yet whose support apparently ends the moment one of our brave men and women fall into enemy hands?
Where are they? What are they doing? Well, they're doing the same thing they've been doing since this president took office and began making every terrorist objective a reality:
Nothing. They did nothing while this president
squandered the national unity we felt in the days following September 11. They did nothing while this president willingly
shredded every freedom we're supposedly
imposing on Iraq right now. They did nothing while this president declared war on the Muslim world and began creating the next generation of terrorists. And they're doing nothing now while this president not only destroys any shred of credibility and respectability this nation once had on the world stage, but also renders false any claims of morality we felt justified in staking. Who needs to fly airplanes into buildings when the party in power seems willing to do the terrorists' dirty work for them? It's beyond shameful that we're even having a "debate" about torture, let alone a "compromise". It's
torture. It doesn't work. And it's wrong. And if some in our country can't recognize that, then I can no longer recognize my country.
No matter how you view right and wrong, either from a religious or nonreligious perspective, there is absolutely no middle ground on this matter. Either you believe, as this administration does, in the use of torture, or you don't. And if you support this president, nothing you say or do to the contrary can prove to the rest of us that you
don't support the right of this nation to stoop to the level of its adversaries and act like a bunch of low-rent, sociopathic thugs. To me, there's no debate on the rightness or wrongness of forcing naked detainees into a pile. Nor is there a debate on the rightness or wrongness of forcing someone to stand, hooded, on a box with wires on his hands. Just like there's no debate on the rightness and wrongness of several of the
officially approved methods our interrogators have used. "According to an ABC News report from last fall," Paul Krugman recently
wrote in the New York Times, "procedures used by C.I.A. interrogators have included forcing prisoners to 'stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours'; the 'cold cell,' in which prisoners are forced 'to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees,' while being doused with cold water; and, of course, water boarding, in which 'the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet,' then 'cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him,' inducing 'a terrifying fear of drowning.'"
Though Republican apologists would have you believe that institutionalized barbarism only affects our interactions with our prisoners of war, the reality proves otherwise. By accepting our use of torture, we lose the moral justification for criticizing our adversaries when they treat our men and women with the same disregard we treat theirs. But, then again, forgiving amoral behavior is nothing new to supporters of this administration. Torture isn't the answer. It's the last resort for people who have failed at their jobs of truly protecting us. Had this administration actually done the work needed to track and eliminate terrorists - instead of
firing Arabic language specialists simply for being gay - we would have never reached this point. Instead, we find ourselves sacrificing everything that made us American in exchange for questionable intelligence, endangered troops and an irreparable moral standing around the world. And we only have ourselves to blame. The Republicans are in office thanks, in part, to voters who felt it more important to keep gay Americans from marrying and adopting than actually keep us safe. Voters who fell prey to the fear campaign that convinced them that their hometown was a top al Qaeda target. Voters who supported an amazingly unqualified candidate simply because he was the kind of guy they would love to grab a beer with. And now, thanks to these voters, the Republicans have treated our democracy so shabbily that, if the party in power remains unchecked, future generations won't be able to identify the remains of our once-great society. Sure, the administration shoulders much of the blame for what has happened and what promises to happen unless things change. But so, too, do the torturers next door.
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