Frank Rich: We’re Nazis
Or, at least, the Bush administration is according to both himself and Andrew Sullivan.
“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.
Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.
By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”
Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.
There are a couple of problems with this analysis.
First, a comparison to the Nazis is so needlessly incendiary and over-the-top as to be ridiculous. If the New York Times had any reputation as an objective source of news and analysis left I’d say the editors of that publication should be embarrassed. I don’t think anyone needs a history lesson about the Nazis, but it’s worth noting that Hitler and his goons rounded up members of certain racial and cultural demographics completely arbitrarily and herded them into concentration camps where they were beaten to death, starved to death or executed in one of the Reich’s cruelly efficient murder factories. The Bush administration, on the other hand, has detained known terrorist criminals in prison camps where they receive constant medical attention, a menu of good food, and living environs that are respectful of their culture and religion. And yes, these detainees do undergo periods of intense interrogation that includes thermostat manipulation (hot room/cold room), light slapping, fear, intimidation and waterboarding. Or, at least, tactics that make the detainees feel as though they’re going to drown.
To be perfectly honest, the Roosevelt administration (Franklin, not Teddy) and its treatment of Asian American citizens during WWII bears more resemblance to the Nazis than anything the Bush administration has done.
Second, Rich’s invocation of the Abu Ghraib scandal is blatantly unfair. The antics of a few soldiers at Abu Ghraib were not sanctioned by the military or the Bush administration. If any criticism for that incident is to be laid at the feet of the military or President Bush it should have to do with a failure of oversight and a breakdown of the chain of command, not state-sanctioned torture.
Third, like most liberals, Mr. Rich is advancing his argument through the use of emotion and not logic. He invokes the grim specter of the Nazis (the title of this column is “The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us") and makes disingenuous comments about Abu Ghraib, and those are easy arguments to make. If you make people remember those pictures of naked prisoners stacked on top of one another, and if you talk about locking people in rooms and depriving them of sleep, making them terribly hot or cold and/or making them feel as though they’re going to drown, you will tap into people’s emotions.
But is emotion what we need when deciding national security policy? I don’t think it is. Logic tells us that our soldiers and intelligence officers need to have at their disposal interrogation techniques that will work. That will bring to light actionable intelligence that will make us safe. If we can get that sort of data through techniques that make detainees amazingly uncomfortable but leave no lasting damage, why shouldn’t we?
Of course, there’s always the question about whether or not these techniques actually will bring out intelligence, but I tend to leave that to the experts. And that, in fact, is an important point to remember in this debate with emotional fools armed with mountains of hyperbole and very little logic like Frank Rich and Andrew Sullivan (and the partisan opportunists who jump on their bandwagon): Do these tactics work to garner intelligence on terrorist activities and keep us safe?
I believe they do, because to believe otherwise is to believe that our soldiers, our intelligence officers and the Bush administration are putting detainees through this stuff for fun. And why in the world would they do that when it would be easier and much more politically expedient to just cave to the Frank Rich’s and Andrew Sullivan’s of the world?
At the end of the day, I think the real debate should be about whether or not these tactics work. Because if they do work to keep us safe, why shouldn’t we be water-boarding the hell out of these terror detainees?
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