Here are a few paragraphs from a wonderful essay on the Bush/Cheney torture and abuse policy/scandal, by the columnist Anthony Lewis in the upcoming issue of The Nation.
http://www.truthout.org/...
The Torture Administration
By Anthony Lewis
The Nation
26 December 2005 Issue
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and proceeded to carry out their savagery, many in the outside world asked how this could have happened in the land of Goethe and Beethoven. Would the people of other societies as readily accept tyranny? Sinclair Lewis, in 1935, imagined Americans turning to dictatorship under the pressures of economic distress in the Depression. He called his novel, ironically, It Can't Happen Here.
Hannah Arendt and many others have stripped us, since then, of confidence that people will resist evil in times of fear. When Serbs and Rwandan Hutus were told that they were threatened, they slaughtered their neighbors. Lately Philip Roth was plausible enough when he imagined anti-Semitism surging after an isolationist America elected Charles Lindbergh as President in 1940.
But it still comes as a shock to discover that American leaders will open the way for the torture of prisoners, that lawyers will invent justifications for it, that the President of the United States will strenuously resist legislation prohibiting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners-and that much of the American public will be indifferent to what is being done in its name.
The pictures from Abu Ghraib, first shown to the public on April 28, 2004, evoked a powerful reaction. Americans were outraged when they saw grinning US soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners. But it was seeing the mistreatment that produced the outrage, or so we must now conclude. Since then the Bush Administration and its lawyers have prevented the release of any more photographs or videotapes. And the public has not reacted similarly to the disclosure, without pictures, of worse actions, including murder.
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One more legal interpretation by the Bush lawyers, especially clever, should be mentioned: It concluded that the Convention Against Torture (and its enforcement by criminal statute) did not apply to actions taken against non-Americans outside the United States-for example, the torture of Jamadi in Abu Ghraib under CIA auspices. A soldier who tortured would still be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But under this legal theory no criminal law would apply to a CIA torturer. It was to preserve this impunity that Vice President Cheney fought to exempt the CIA from the ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment proposed by Senator John McCain and passed, 90 to 9, by the Senate.
When George W. Bush was asked about torture in early November, he said: "Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture." How could he say that after the hundreds of convincing reports of torture and maltreatment? One possible answer is that he has not allowed himself to know the truth. Another is that his lawyers have so gutted the law governing these matters that not much, in their view, is unlawful.
But there is another explanation for Bush's words: confidence that words can overcome reality. Just as a large part of the American people could be led to believe in nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 bombers, so it could be persuaded-in the teeth of the evidence-that "we do not torture."
