Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for "repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide" and urging future Foreign Service officers to be "guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed."
As I write it is late Tuesday afternoon. The quote, from which my title is taken, comes from a column by Roger Cohen about which I wrote July 24, in I am so tempted to violate copyright
Our traditional media has failed miserably in informing the American public about policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience and so such policies have endured. Today I propose to remind myself, and those who choose to read this diary, of policies fundamentally at odds with our national conscience. That is, they should be, because if they are not, if they are acceptable, then we are lost already and there is no point in our being here.
I propose to begin with nothing but a series of quotations. Each block quote that follows for the next stretch of this diary is taken verbatim from The Dark Side, the new book by Jane Mayer which should be mandatory reading for everyone holding or seeking public office, elective or appointive, and probably for all who are going to cast votes for such offices. I am realistic enough to recognize that even most people who frequent Daily Kos will not read the entire book. That is part of my justification for the material I will now quote.
from p. 239:
Jamadi's death posed an unwelcome question going to the heart of the Bush Administration's secret interrogation protocol: Could the CIA legally kill a defenseless prisoner?
p. 242:
Another key difference was that unlike the prisoners in Guantanamo, those in Iraq were supposed to be covered b the Geneva Conventions. Furthermore, the prisoners weyre not all suspected terrorists; many were petty criminals, ignorant of useful intelligence. Many more had been mistakenly swept up in raids.
p. 244:
But unlike the terror suspects renditioned from elsewhere in the world, those taken from Iraq during this period of American occupation were supposed to be protected by international law, making their secret removal to other countries potentially serious, prosecutable war crimes.
p. 253:
An autopsy showed that Jamadi had six fractured ribs; it is unclear when they were broken. The CIA officials in charge of Jamadi did not give him even a cursory medical exam, although the Geneva Conventions require that prisoners receive "medical attention."
p. 258:
It appeared that in the view of the Bush Administration the killing of Jamadi broke no laws.
From P.267, with material Jack Goldsmith wrote in his book
Yoo's assertions of absolute power for the commander in chief in dictating the treatment of wartime captives "had no foundation." It was so extreme that it would mean the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and all laws written by Congress regulating warfare, were illegitimate.
From p. 268:
It was not until this moment that Goldsmith, who was just a bystander, realized that the NSA lawyers had been barred from seeing the legal foundation for their own agency's program.>
From p. 271:
"Brutalization became bureacratized," said one former CIA officer."
The next two are from p. 272:
soon after Mohammed was arrested, two sources said, his American captors told him, "We're not going to kill you. But we're going to take you to the very brink of death and back."
The cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories were likened to "sodomy" by an official involved in an investigation by the Council of Europe, the agency that effectively polices the European Convention on Human Rights. He believed,"It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone's sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation."
From pp. 280-81, after the 9/11 Commission had issued its report:
The White House adopted twenty-two of the twenty-four recommendations. The call for "humane treatment" was one of the two that the Bush Administration explicitly rejected.
p. 284:
Yet the doctor did nothing to stop the abuse.
From p, 287, quoting Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen with a valid passport picked up in Macedonia, and kept and mistreated despite questions raised all along by people who had custody of him or who knew about his case:
"Torture? I'm not sure was torture is. I'm not a lawyer. But it is my belief that I was tortured. Whoever says that's not torture should just have it done to them. They should feel it in their own mind and body. The whole time, I was in fear for my life. I was deadly afraid of what might happen next."
p. 293:
Meanwhile, as some of the former defenders of "enhanced" interrogations looked for political cover, Addington angrily defended the program, insisting that they had stand by it because to do anything less would expose the CIA to criminal charges.
From p. 294, discussing communications between Goldsmith and James Comey about the NSA spying program that had led to the confrontation at the hospital bed of John Ashcroft:
They were both so paranoid by then about the powerful backlash they had provoked inside the administration that they actually thought they might be in physical danger. Goldsmith and Comey, who knew more about the domestic surveillance program than practically anyone else in America, also feared that their communications were being monitored. To foil possible surveillance, they talked in codes
The book has 12 chapters. Every blockquote above comes from only two chapters, 10, entitled "A Deadly Interrogation" and 11, entitled "Cover-up." And I have not cited all the relevant examples therein.
I could quote so much more, for example, the words of Antonin Scalia (!!!) in the Rasul case, quoted on p. 301:
"Indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive" strikes at "the very core of liberty."
Or perhaps the words attributed to Cheney in opposing moving people onto the books, as those words appear on p. 305:
If they were moved out of the dark, he warned, "They'll all get lawyers." Once that happened, he reasoned, the government would no longer be able to interrogate them freely.
But there is sufficient to make the picture clear. We have, at least since 9/11/2001, and quite possibly before, been living under a regime that does not accept that there are any bounds on the actions they wish to take, whose only use for the law and lawyers is to give them legal cover for the actions they intend to take, or to provide ex post facto legal justification equivalent to immunity without the President having to exercise his pardon powers, and certainly not before his reelection in November of 2004. The key players played games with the Courts, lied to the American people, courts and judges, the Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
And many of them knew how wrong were the things they were doing. Here from near the end of the book are some remarks about James Comey, from p. 311:
(He had been taken aback, he told colleagues, that when General Michael Hayden,who at the time was the Director of the NSA, had "read him in" to the program with a disconcerting welcome, saying, "I'm glad you're joining me, because now I won't have to be lonely, sitting all by myself at the witness table in the John Kerry administration.")
a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience and with our Constitution, our international agreements, the core principles of the great religions, even at odds with basic human decency.
if that conscience is well and truthfully informed . . .
What do we say? Do we say that those driving the administration's policies, primarily Richard Cheney and David Addington, lack consciences, that they are sociopathic? What about all the other people in the administration who at various points protested, but finally acquiesced? Comey and Robert Mueller threatened to resign, and thereby were able to rein in somewhat some of the more egregious actions of the administration. But only somewhat. What about Condoleeza Rice, and Colin Powell, and the people in the Justice Department who were being bypassed with rules and laws being ignored in the making and issuing of policy? Why did no one who had sworn or affirmed to support the Constitution resign and go public on behalf of that Constitution? Certainly once they saw the material from Abu Ghraib, people knew. Those who had been partially read in to the enhanced interrogation procedures had to know that it was not simply an application of the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) protocols used to train our pilots and others in how to resist interrogation. Why did they not speak up?
Some in the press knew. James Risen had been working on the story of the NSA spying for quite some time, but the NY Times succumbed to pressure from the administration and did not publish the story until after the election of 2004, and then only when Risen's book on the material was going to be published. How can we the people have "well and truthfully informed" consciences to do our part when the press abandons its responsibility to inform us?
Will those for whom we seek their election agree to abide by the principles of our American system of government, or will they be tempted by how this administration has illegitimately expanded the power of the executive? Will we continue to tolerate policy that is fundamentally at odds with our national conscience???
Or was Ron Neitzke wrong? Which means Roger Cohen in writing about him was wrong, and my writing about both of them is wrong? That we either have no national conscience to be shocked, or we are now so inured that we limit the scope of our consciences only to those things we can claim directly affect us?
I'm sorry, I cannot end this diary as I usually do. Somehow the word "peace," even if accompanied by multiple question marks, does not seem appropriate.
Today I go to a wake, and tomorrow a funeral, for a student who died last Friday. I teach because of people like him, the ones who are the future of our nation. But will we leave them a future, or have we waited too long to speak out, to demand that the principles of a constitutionally limited government were too important to abandon, no matter how much fear might be thrown at us? Do we care so little for those who died so that we might have the freedoms and liberties that we offered as a beacon to all, which is why so many of our ancestors came to this nation?
Political candidates, if you want my support, if you want my money, please tell me how you will change this mess. Please tell me what commitment you are willing to make, right now, as you run for office, to rectify the wrongs done by the leadership of this nation, to restore some semblance of dignity, of the good name of the United States. Who will be held accountable? How will we know that the abuses are not continuing?
Because if you cannot make such a commitment, you are admitting that it is already too late, that our democracy is gone, that our rights and liberties exist only at the whim and discretion of whoever wields the executive power. That is not America, not even the flawed America in which I grew up, No, that America struggled mightily to expand liberty, to give voice to the voiceless, to increase political participation.
I was born in May of 1946, after we had established a principle that following orders is not a defense, that one could be executed under the doctrine of command responsibility if one's subordinates did atrocities even without your permission, because you had failed to command them properly. I grew up struggling with what that meant as I lived through the Civil Rights era, through an expansion of the rights of the accused - Gideon, Escobedo, Miranda. I have seen rights expand for women and for minorities, that seniors were not forced out of jobs and their pensions were guaranteed. I received a world and a nation that offered more opportunity to more people, that believed in similar opportunity for people around the world.
And now? What is America? What does it mean to us? What does it mean to people overseas?
if that conscience is well and truthfully informed
We cannot shut our eyes, or accept the assurances of those in power to trust them. They have abused that power. And if we have consciences, we cannot remain silent and passive. Or else we have only one choice, to admit that we have abandoned our national principles, that conscience no longer matters, merely our own comfort, and to hell with anyone else.
I refuse to accept that. So I wrote this diary. That is one step. It is not enough. But at least I have taken that first step. And as the Games of this Olympiad are about to begin in the land of the ancient Middle Kingdom, I remind myself of the saying from that land, that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
And now ? ? ?