Sherry Chandler

This week I received another in a succession of jingoistic e-mail jingles from people who consider themselves my friends on the basis of something like the fact that we once went to high school together or worked in the same office. This one, complete with pictures of steely-eyed soldiers (clean and white), let me know that they’d be fighting for my freedom. Even if I wanted to be so foolish as to get out on the street and demonstrate for peace, well, they’d fight for my right to do that.

Did it ever occur to these people to wonder why I would want anybody to go to war for my right to demonstrate for peace? Are those pacifists among us just assumed to be so hypocritical? craven?

Anyway, I usually just delete these e-mails, figuring there’s no point escalating things. Anybody who would persist in sending this kind of stuff to a person who has published a chapbook of peace poems, contributed to half a dozen “against the war” anthologies, and publishes a blog regularly declaring a pacifist stance — well, those people just aren’t bothering to look at what’s right before their eyes.

Which seems to me to be true of so much lately.

As, for example, the completely surreal fact that our Congress is currently parsing, not sexual relations, but torture.

And our president is having a snit, making threats. If our lawmakers don’t give him cover to do whatever he wants in the way of torturing our enemies, well, then, he’ll just “shut the program down” and then we’ll be sorry.

Or, as Dahlia Lithwick explains in Slate:

The president himself raises the real reason for the change in the torture standard. He can’t get his interrogators to interrogate people as long as they are afraid of being dragged into court to answer for it later. … the president was emphatic in his contention that “as long as the War Crimes Act hangs over their heads, they [interrogators] will not take the steps necessary to protect” Americans. The War Crimes Act of 1996, passed by a Republican Congress, made it a felony to violate the Geneva Conventions. But while it sounds like Bush seeks to offer interrogators legal clarity, what he really strives to offer them is legal immunity.

…

The best evidence we have that Bush has no real interest in clarifying the new legal standards for “torture” is this: He refuses to be specific about what sorts of conduct he has authorized. If Bush really wanted the CIA to have perfect clarity about which behaviors are tolerable and which are not, he would identify with great specificity the various “alternative” techniques he has approved for them. But last week, the president declined to do so, claiming that he “cannot describe the specific methods used—I think you understand why—if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning.” Bush cannot be specific about what he’s allowed because it might reveal to terrorists exactly how much water-boarding they must to learn to endure. Perhaps. But then he cannot claim that what he seeks to do is clarify the law for interrogators.

The new legal standard is indeterminate for both the prospective torturers and their victims. And that’s precisely how the president wants it.

The legal standard that Bush wants is a prohibition of torture that “shocks the conscience.”

But I think all of us who are adults know that conscience is a slippery beast.

The people who send these e-mails are good solid citizens who, like our president, were C students in school. Unlike our president, they have worked hard. They go to church and Sunday school, stay off the welfare rolls, keep their houses clean and their lawns mowed. In short, they have made respectible lives for themselves. But they don’t appear to want to think even if they are able to do so, and I don’t want to rely on their consciences.

For that matter, I don’t want to rely on my own.

I want to rely on that increasingly fabulous American “rule of law.”

Back to Lithwick:

I suspect that the Bush administration doesn’t seek to clarify the definition of torture so much as to confound it. The whole objective of defining, refining, and then redefining the rules has become an end in itself. It keeps our attention trained where the president wants it: on the assertion that old bans on torture don’t work and that this conflict is unlike any conflict contemplated under existing international law. All this murk and confusion has begun to be the object of the game and not a casualty of it.

I once suggested in the context of presidential signing statements that legal obfuscation is enormously attractive to President Bush. It means all but the most highly credentialed law professors and government lawyers are constantly confused; it means subsequent legal claims that interrogators “did not know that the practices were unlawful” have real credibility. And perhaps, most importantly to this White House, it obscures where things have gone awry up and down the chain of command. One possibility, then, is that all these eleventh-hour redefinitions of torture are presidential attempts to “afford brutality the cloak of law,” in the words of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. But increasingly, it seems clear that its real purpose is simply to brutalize the law.

Or as the NYTimes says, (like my high school classmates) Bush seems to have:

…a deeply seated conviction that under his leadership, America is right and does not need the discipline of rules. He does not seem to understand that the rules are what makes this nation as good as it can be.

DK over at Talking Points Memo has a good post on this issue.

18

I saw askant the armies;
And I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags;
Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody;
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

— from Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed