I give up. I'm done; I can't compete with this.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is engaging in a "despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort" to withhold what she knew about the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques, former Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday. [...]
"She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior," Gingrich also said in the blistering interview. [...]
"The American people ought to know what Congress knew and when they knew it, and they'll will recognize that not only did President Bush but Republican and Democratic leadership on the Hill supported the use of these enhanced interrogation techniques," [Rep. Pete Hoekstra] told Fox News on Thursday.
The gist of the story is the same as the gist of the Republican narrative, which is the same gist as it always has been and always will be: torture cannot be wrong, cannot be legally or morally reprehensible, and certainly cannot be a war crime, because a Democrat may have known about it too. Whatever logic is contained in that argument, I cannot discern it. And this is because, apparently, I am not a monster, but at this point I very nearly wish I was. It is apparently a hell of a lot easier, for starters, and it seems nearly a requirement of government.
It feels more than a little strange to know that the guilt of my country using torture to seek out information that would justify a war -- knowing full well that that information did not exist -- weighs much more heavily on me than on the Vice President who authorized it. It feels worse to know that, from the television set, it apparently weighs more heavily on me than a hundred other very important people combined.
I have been trying to figure out why it is that evangelicals and Catholics, according to polling, are more supportive of the torture of prisoners than others. I grew up as a Catholic, which would seem to give me some small interpretive advantage, but I cannot decipher it. When I was young I read the Bible from cover to cover, and I am trying to think back to all the portions of the New Testament in which Jesus taught the efficacy of torturing your prisoners, and cannot quite place it. I think my Bible had different words in it; I know now that have had a mistranslated copy, one of those older ones going around before we recrafted God in a more sensible image.
I can only presume that to be the case because churchgoing men, men of Jesus, men who pray very loudly and very earnestly and who make quite certain that all of us see it, men who know, in their hearts, that they represent God, have managed to find solace in that book for nearly every action that their animal instincts have told them to take. It takes only a mere lawyer to craft the reasons why torturing a captured prisoner is not, despite the clear language and past application of the law, illegal. But it takes a truly religious man to declare it moral as well -- and a full-fledged Prophet to proclaim that those that oppose torture are the craven ones among us.
On a more positive note, Charles Krauthammer, who will make a special point of dropping passing mentions that he is a psychiatrist during every argument, is quite assured that those that do not support torture are not, despite appearances, deranged, merely opportunistic:
So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. [...]
You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.
You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.
The problem, of course, is that while we are focused on the very important, very earnest question of what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, the psychiatrist Krauthammer does little to comfort the likes of me, people who objected to torture at the time, still object to torture now, object to torture even if Democrats knew about it, and object to torture even if the rest of the nation has been reduced to pants-wetting terror. And he does even less to comfort those of us who object to torture when it is used in an attempt to gain political cover for a preemptive war.
From the religious among us I can fathom that I am amoral, but from the psychiatrist Krauthammer it seems evident that I do not, in fact, even exist. There are only two classes of people in the world, those that approve of torture but recant, or those that approve of torture and stick to their guns -- no other opinions need to be engaged, because no other opinions are even possible. This, then, is why Newt Gingrich can get so much traction for his argument that Pelosi is the corrupt and amoral one, here: because Newt is engaging in the only debate about torture that is allowed to exist, the debate between tacit approval and full-throated endorsement.
Here is where we are. The thought that torture is, in fact, illegal is not a part of the debate. The premise that torture is, in fact, immoral is not a part of the debate. Both of these would seem conversation enders, to me, but that is because there is something deeply wrong with my non-existent, hell-bound, non-contradictory self, something the rest of the rational world is not burdened with.
Instead, we are left with Vice President Dick Cheney -- I would say accused war criminal Vice President Dick Cheney, if I wanted to be pissy, but that hardly seems worth a battle -- leading the debate over whether torture is effective.
Not whether legal; not whether moral; not whether (cough) Christian; not whether civilized; not whether banned by international treaty. Whether it is effective -- that is the main point here.
And from the other end, the likes of the psychiatrist Krauthammer and the political strategist Rove leading the debate over whether or not knowledge of torture by multiple persons is itself an immunization against it being illegal, which is such a brilliant fucking thought that I cannot even conceive a reply.
There is nothing else that really can be said. We are at the point where arguing that torture is an abomination that should not be countenanced is not just outside the realm of discourse, but very nearly a maudlin thing. To argue the point from a mere moral standpoint is like rending your shirt and screaming from atop a peach crate -- what can possibly be said? And from the legal standpoint, what arguments could possibly be made, what other pictures could we possibly see, that would change what we already either know or should have known or should already be prosecuting, if we had a government that gave the slightest little shit about the law as applied to those who simply declare themselves above it?
We now have been told, by multiple persons in positions to know, that torture was used in attempts to coerce information about a link between Iraq and al Qaeda that never existed, in order to justify a war waged under false pretenses.
So what else needs to be argued, in order to for the Attorney General of the U.S. to figure an investigation might indeed be warranted? I am deadly earnest in the question -- what part of that sentence, above, marks it as not worthy of investigation as likely criminal act? We have confession to the crime seemingly nightly, on television; we have unquestioned statements that the torture in question indeed happened; we have enough detail about the events themselves to know that it was, in fact, torture. We have a Congress that has proven, in the span of mere days, that it is completely incapable of even investigating the events without making it first and foremost a partisan, political battle.
There is a point in which ignoring a crime implies acquiescing to the crime, but more to the point, there comes a point when refusing to take action against criminal acts implies complicity in those acts.
I was flipping through my own writings, last night, and indeed was able to find ample evidence that, despite my own thoughts to the contrary, I may not actually exist. Despite my own anger or petty stabs at logic, the Iraq War is not one second closer to ending because of anything I ever wrote. Evil, petty, vindictive men are no closer to being punished. We are no closer to thinking government might indeed be for the benefit of its citizenry, as opposed to an unwholesome burden to be dismantled. Those that walk with God still support torture, but the devil take you if you acquiesce to the gays. Those that say the pen is mightier than the sword are, to be blunt, idiots, for even in America, even in 2009, the pens used to write the very laws themselves mean absolutely nothing, when those that control the swords can say they do not.
So I suppose I want to give a small shout of thanks to all in this world who can get up in the morning, look at the news pages, and engage any of these debates on the possible positive aspects of torture -- torture, of all things -- without resorting to a mere unbroken stream of epithets. Like me, they also do not exist; unlike me, this thought does not seem to have broken them.
But on torture, I am at a loss. I cannot write arguments about why we should not torture -- or why we must prosecute it, when it occurs -- without mucking through arguments of ethics, civilization and morality that would, indeed, be little else but maudlin, and even this contemplation of it is maudlin enough. I cannot express my thoughts on those that abide, sanction, or even encourage torture as a mere policy difference, to be used or not used according to which political party is in power, without resorting to invective, pure and unabridged, unbroken by any other words more substantive than the or you or any phrases more polite than the horse you rode in on, and I am fairly sure that will no effect, because it has been drilled into our heads many, many times that vulgarity is worse than the torture itself -- there is absolutely no value in getting emotional over such petty things.
I have no idea how anyone does it.
I suppose, however, that even now there is a bright side, for if we simply shut up about torture, even as the Vice President continues to wander the airwaves declaring it as a good and noble value, we clear the deck for more productive national efforts -- like perhaps fixing health care.
I am not sure how I feel about enshrining the torture of American prisoners as a valid American value in order to get my child the possibility of better health insurance, but I am quite sure that the efforts to convince all of us on the absolute logic and wisdom of it will, at least, finally be bipartisan.