HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


THE TORTURE-IRAQ CONNECTION

Release of the Bush administration's memos justifying "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding has provoked considerable chatter among the pundit and political class. Right-wingers make the astonishing claim that releasing the memos has endangered U. S. national security. We hear the argument that it would be just a terrible precedent to prosecute officials from previous administrations for acting in "good faith" to protect the country. What they're saying is that criminals, if they're high enough in the government, should get a free pass.

Torture is contrary to everything we're supposed to represent. When we torture it takes away any credibility we have in arguing for human rights in repressive regimes around the world. It means that our enemies can torture and we really can't say much about it. The fact that torture does not elicit reliable information is another point, but certainly not the most important argument. In this commentary Frank Rich points out that the Bush administration was far less interested in protecting the country than in finding some justification for their filthy war in Iraq. The column is at www.nytimes.com:

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.