At one point I considered just running the image of the Iraqi prisoner cowering before the dogs (from the latest Seymour Hersch New Yorker article), under a headline consisting of Bush’s over-the-top praise for Rumsfeld. (“You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror. You are doing a superb job. You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.”) I didn’t, because I didn’t want to increase the chances of needing to have another conversation like the one I had when my 6-year-old son appeared unannounced behind me while I was reading the paper at breakfast the other day.

(If you really want to see that quotation juxtaposed with that particular picture, you can do so courtesy of Lambert at Corrente: “superb job“. Great minds, and all that.)

What I will do here is encourage you to read Joshua Micah Marshall’s analysis of the newly released Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib: I took some time this evening…

Marshall’s main reaction? Well, the report could have been worse; it doesn’t sound as if every American in the system was engaged in organized abuse of all the prisoners. But what it does describe blows a huge hole in the “handful of bad apples” theory.

According to the report, all Iraqi prisoners were at high risk of abusive treatment during their initial arrest and processing. Which is disturbing enough, given that 70% or more of them were apparently innocents swept up by mistake. And with no means for family members to get information about them, these innocents simply ended up being “disappeared” for weeks or months. But for those deemed to be “high value” detainees (i.e., those suspected of actually knowing something useful), abuse continued even after the transfer to the detention facility, with the military intelligence folks overseeing a process of “softening up” prisoners using the methods all of us (including impressionable 6-year-olds) are becoming all too familiar with lately.

This is the same sort of stuff that has been happening in our name at the extra-legal Gitmo detention center. It’s not an aberration. It’s policy. And the policy flows from the top.

Lambert from the aforementioned Corrente flirts with Godwin’s Law by pointing out the chilling similarities between the current situation and the Third Reich, in which it wasn’t necessary for Hitler to specifically order things like the gassing of Jews. He merely had to create the conditions in which underlings knew that actions like that 1) would produce the kind of results der fuhrer liked, and 2) would get the blind-eye treatment from superiors. After that, human nature took over. Anyway, see: Abu Ghraib torture: Hersch drops the other shoe.

No, the US is not the same as Nazi Germany, any more than the Iraq war is identical to Vietnam. We are still many steps short of that degree of evil. But that’s where this path leads.

Those of you who still support Bush, who are still inclined to vote for him in November, please think about this. How far down that path are you willing to travel? How many of our nation’s fundamental moral values are you willing to sacrifice in the name of partisanship? Because that is absolutely where we are headed. And the people running things willl not turn aside on their own. They think they’re doing a superb job, and that we owe them a debt of gratitude.

We owe them something. But it isn’t gratitude. Help deliver it at the polls in November.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, May 11th, 2004 at 7:08 am and is filed under war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.