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Torture (revised and extended)

As is doubtless clear by now, I read randomly, rather like an autodidact, chasing whatever rabbits strike my fancy, picking up whatever leaps to hand and seems worth reading when time permits, collecting fragments without a plan.

And so though we get The New Yorker, it mostly ends up in recycling, or passed off to one of the young women to helps to tend to our precocious daughter. I wish, however, to draw your attention to the present edition, dated June 25, 2007. Seymour M. Hersh's continuing investigation of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib continues, and it is his carefully worded suggestion that the present Administration sanctioned torture not only at that prison in Iraq, but at Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Sanctioned and knew, while retaining something like the illusion of plausible deniability.

Torture.

This is no little word, no small thing. It is easy not to know this has gone on, for we are asked not to think about it, to pretend it did not happen or does not matter.

It did happening. It is happening. On our behalf.

This is how we are fighting the war on terrorism. One of the ways.

We are losing.

We have, perhaps, lost. Not -- yet -- the war on terrorism. But our better selves.

Do not turn a blind eye.

Do NOT turn a blind eye.

We must ask about the prices paid, and who pays them.

I have known three men who served in Viet Nam. Only one of them has managed to function more or less properly in the world, after. And one of them killed himself last Friday. He will miss knowing his grandchildren. His youngest brother, my oldest friend, will miss knowing him.

These are the prices paid.

It behooves us to know what we are buying, and what we are paying.

In the cool of the morning, let me add a couple items. The first comes courtesy my father, who ran onto a 2005 U.S. Army Intelligence and Interrogation Handbook while researching the Barbary Pirates (I come by it honest):

"Terrorists are a fact of contemporary life. They are dedicated, intelligent, well financed, resourceful, and astute planners. They are difficult to identify and are not easily captured or interned. The use of terrorist tactics worldwide has increased significantly over the past 25 years, and this trend is not expected to abate in the future."

Surely winning such a war means more than "nothing blew up in the homeland today." (And am I the only one uncomfortable with that word, "homeland" and its resonances of Nazi Germany?) And surely we will not occupy anything like the high moral ground to which this country aspires if we begin the conflict -- this protracted battle with a culture and tradition for which we have little respect and about which we choose to know nothing -- by stooping to the shortcut of torture. And without even asking the question, Does torture produce usable results? Which, apparently, most veteran interrogators would answer in the negative.

And then there is this McClatchy Newspapers report, buried on p. A7 of this morning's Lexington Herald:

"After spending $19 billion to train and equip 346,500 Iraqi security forces, the Pentagon doesn't know how many of them are on the job or whether their weapons have been stolen or turned against American forces, according to a bipartisan congressional report released yesterday."

Is bare, minimal competence too much to ask for?

Or is the real answer to be found in knowing to whom that $19 billion was paid?

Posted by grant on June 27, 2007 9:32 PM | Permalink