I have a new sig line today. It won't be up for long, because I have another one to post, but I'm hoping others will steal it from me so I can still see it. So, for the record, here it is:
They tortured people to get false confessions to fraudulently justify our invading Iraq.
Those of you who have brilliant sig lines -- and there are many of you -- please ignore this message. But many of you have no sign lines and I hope that you will consider adopting this one. (You go to the rightmost tab on your home page and edit the sig line on the bottom; it's easy.)
The reason I hope you'll do this is that finally we have one simple message that ties together the crimes of the Bush Administration in so clear a way that even low-information voters will get it.
We need to press that advantage.
The basic idea is this: we've learned today that the reason that our country was torturing people in 2002 is that our leaders wanted to get information that would justify our invasion of Iraq on the basis of ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. In other words, we didn't want true information from those we tortured: we wanted particular information, whether true or not.
They tortured people to get false confessions to fraudulently justify our invading Iraq.
In a twisted way, this is a compliment to our country. Our morally twisted leadership felt that they needed public opinion on their side, in our democratic system, in order to get people behind the war effort. While lies about the possibility of nuclear attack from Iraq were part of that scheme, the more straightforward approach was to convince people that, like the war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, this was simply a war of revenge, morally justifiable as such.
Had Saddam materially contributed to the attack on the U.S., they would have had a point, although the prudential argument against war would have still been compelling. But they didn't care about whether the point was valid or not. They just wanted to be able to use it in their PR effort to sell the war to the public.
They tortured people to get false confessions to fraudulently justify our invading Iraq.
Public opinion is against the Iraq War, now, for the basic reason that our government made a hash of it. Their plans did not work. They are starting to realize that all those predictions that the war would ruin our economy in fact came true: the war did help ruin our economy.
The public is less clearly opposed to torture. To many, spurred on by "ticking time bomb" scenarios (that admittedly long predate 24), torture may make sense in some cases. The Bush Administration rolled back much of the successes gained by Amnesty International and similar groups over the years and we will have to, over time, win that territory back. Where I think we still have a national consensus, though, is on the minimal proposition that there is not excuse for torture that does not have an absolutely compelling justification.
This torture had no such compelling rationale. It was not even a close call. This was the sort of torture that we torture opponents have predicted would happen once we loosened the moral strictures against torture of any kind. I have to admit that I thought that this would happen the second time around. It turned out, though, that even the first time around, torture was simply for purposes of providing better public relations -- and perhaps to feel some deep psychological need on the part of those ordering it (who by and large never served in combat) that they were, somehow, proving their toughness.
They tortured people to get false confessions to fraudulently justify our invading Iraq.
Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others. Generally, that's true. This is one of the exceptions to the rule, however. Here, the perceived need for public support for an unjust but politically convenient war led the government to torture people so that it could more effectively deceive the public. The public should be shocked and awed by such temerity.
We need the public on our side as we push for full investigations of all of this. By tying together torture and the poisonous effort to begin the war at all, we can foster and tap public revulsion. Nothing is forever; the public often forgets the lessons of politics before they are fully learned. But this -- this will be a strong and vivid lesson. If we get people to accept the truth -- how they were used, lied to, then lied to again -- it will be harder for miscreants to get into power and harder for them to repeat these atrocities if and when they do. That is probably the best we can hope for in a democracy. It is a lot.
We need to explain something simple to the public. Repetition -- both on these pages and beyond them -- will convey that message. So, if you're willing, please steal my sig line and help echo its sentiment.
They tortured people to get false confessions to fraudulently justify our invading Iraq.
And everyone should know it.