Round Two

You know the story as well as I do: the two explosions; the 78 year-old runner blown to the street; the smoke lifting; the stunned man filming the event, who can only keep saying “Oh, my God.”

So it’s happened again, a dozen years after September 2001. We have spent billions of dollars on “security,” we’ve lost significant amounts of freedom, we have allowed the government to strip us of rights in order to “protect” us. In addition, we’ve lost the ability to think, and fallen victim to fear. Does anybody really think that having zillions of people scrutinize us as we empty our pockets and take off our shoes and belts and go through metal detectors at our airports is making us safer? Wouldn’t a simple lock on the cockpit door have done the trick? And why, since hijacking has been around since the 60’s, wasn’t it standard procedure to lock the cockpit?

So yes, I watched the videos compulsively yesterday, until it occurred to me—it wasn’t doing my stomach any good. Nor was it being particular useful to the people of Boston, so why was I doing it?

Later I wondered—under what circumstances would I ever put a bomb (or two or four, however many there were) in a crowd full of innocent people? Would I ever? Would I ever have so much hurt, so much pain, that it would give rise to that level of rage and bile?

I hope not.

OK—Adolf Hitler. When would I have the necessary knowledge to justify putting the bomb under his desk? Would I need to have seen the concentration camps? Would hearing accounts be enough? Would just seeing the Jews crammed in the cattle cars be sufficient?

So now the country is watching a city block of Boston, Massachusetts, and scratching their heads and saying, “why do they hate us?” The answer, most people think, is that there is such a thing as evil, and the people who perpetrated this deed were evil.

Well, I think there’s an alternative explanation, and the New York Times reported on it today. “US Practiced Torture After 9/11,” announced the headline, and my response was, predictably, “duh….”

Of course we were practicing torture—will anybody in the world forget that sadistic photograph of the female soldier, her cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, her foot resting on top of a heap of naked prisoners? We admitted that we water-boarded, it was reported that the justice department had written memos, and that we had signed off on these “interrogation” techniques, but that no—national security, we couldn’t read them.

So it was a true “dog bites man” moment for me, but not, apparently for a Republican guy named Asa Hutchinson, who served under Bush as head of the Drug Enforcement Agency and undersecretary of the Homeland Security. He was the Republican balance to a bipartisan report, and he initially started out believing that no, there was no torture committed. But here’s what the New York Times has him saying:

“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.

“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”

He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”

Yeah? Wanna ask the rest of the world?

I read once that there was a British maxim—a man is judged by how he treats his enemy. And nations as well; that said, how well do we score?

Well, the Army Field Manual on Interrogation may reveal a hint or two; section M allows for interrogation sessions for up to 40 consecutive hours.

“Doesn’t sound like much,” you say. Right, but try staying awake from 8AM Monday morning to midnight the next day—that’s 40 hours.

And the very fact that it was officially permitted led to other things, not officially permitted. Here’s one chilling sentence from the Times story:

The C.I.A. not only water boarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

Oh, and here’s another one:

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Nor does the report spare the Obama administration:

While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

Well, you know where I land on this issue. Obama didn’t want to focus on the past, he said, he wanted to focus on the future, going forward.

Lovely sentiment.

Bullshit.

No president is gonna go after a former president, for the simple fact that every president is going to BE at some point a former president.

So now we know. Oops, so sorry—looks like we went a little overboard.

Is that enough?

Let’s see—what time is it, over there in the Hague?