Remember when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and Scott McClellan said
this?
"These images do not represent what America stands for, nor do they represent the high standards of conduct that our military is committed to upholding. What occurred was wrong and it will not be tolerated."
That was then. Now conservatives are saying that torture is part of the war on terror. Many people have already pointed to Sen. John Cornyn's comments calling Gonzales opponents "political insurgents." I think that's part of a larger campaign.
So far the torture resurgence is coming from the conservative media. Here's an
op-ed by Andrew McCarthy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Gonzales, aside from being an intimate of the sitting Republican president, is also, alas, one of those sticks-in-the-mud who thinks we shouldn't treat al Qaeda terrorists as if we had a treaty with them, and that we shouldn't accord the privileges and immunities of honorable warfare to barbarians. For such positions has be been castigated by a hastily assembled group of retired military brass with a recent history of anti-Bush activism, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the usual cabal of "human- rights activists" who, though they've never met a terrorist they wouldn't coddle, don't seem to get particularly whipped up over humans whose work day is interrupted by hijacked jumbo jets crashing through office windows.
This column was read on the air today by Rush Limbaugh. If he's inclined, Rush can pick from a richness of torture boosters. Also in
National Review, Lee Casey and David Rifkin. This one's even more telling.
Ever since the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse photographs surfaced nearly a year ago, opponents of the Bush administration's policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have used those images in their ongoing effort to discredit the American legal position on "detainees." That position -- which correctly denies captured al-Qaeda and Taliban members the rights and privileges granted to honorable prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions -- was outlined by Gonzales, based on legal advice received from the Departments of Justice and State, in a memorandum to the president dated January 25, 2002.
Quick - how many Abu Ghraib prisoners were members of the Taliban? Well, that's easy - zero. How many of them were al-Qaeda members? I'll refer to Seymour Hersh's
article in The New Yorker.
Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however--by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers--were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of "crimes against the coalition"; and a small number of suspected "high-value" leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.
So be aware of what Gonzales supporters are doing. They are deliberately rewriting the history of Abu Ghraib, saying that they like - like anyone abused by Americans - were terrorists connected to 9/11.
Again, what's the goal? I think it's ultimately the labeling of any opponents of torture as sympathetic to terrorists.