Andrew Sullivan takes on the defenders of Bush's torture regime (in this case, NRO's Peter Wehner) and writes this, a must-quote that stands on its own:
Now, you could argue that the administration, after initial understandable over-reach, has tried to set things right. But you would be wrong.
They still refuse to take responsibility for torture and abuse and murder on their watch; and the CSRTs they eventually came up with have been revealed as kangaroo courts in which acquittals are deemed out of bounds and in which countless military lawyers have cried foul. It would be great if we had had a chance to set up clear guidelines in advance, with Congressional support, to give prisoners Geneva protections and non-habeas but robust military trials in what is, as everyone concedes, a very challenging conflict. But this president decided against that, to ignore the advice from the professionals and from the military lawyers, and to do it his own way, with appalling results. Once this record has been compiled and the indecency of Bush's "new kind of war" revealed, it seems to me that no Supreme Court that gives a damn about the Constitution or the ancient traditions of Anglo-American justice or humane warfare would give the benefit of the doubt to a president like this one. Not if the word "court" and "justice" are to be deemed within the same universe.So Pete concedes that this administration has seized thousands of innocents, and tortured and abused many of them, and released many of them. But he has a secondary point:
The notion that Bush-administration officials were intentionally issuing orders and seizing innocent people to be picked up off the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq to be tortured and abused strikes me as absurd.Now of course it may be true that the administration would, in an ideal world, have preferred that every person they seized was actually guilty; and that every person they tortured gave up accurate information. Police states would love it if this were true as well. But the point is that this cannot happen and has never happened in the real world - and recognizing this fact is a core principle of Western civilization. If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool. It matters not a whit what fantasy the president had cooked up in his own mind about what he was doing. This is what he was doing. Major Gen Antonio Taguba, trusted enough by this administration to run an earlier report on the abuse scandal, puts it plainly enough:
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."... My rage at Bush has not caused me to accuse the man of war crimes. Bush's war crimes are what caused my rage. I started this war not as a Bush-hater, but as a Bush-defender. I started it dismissing the first rumors of torture at Gitmo as enemy propaganda. But no one with open eyes could have believed that it was made up even four years ago, let alone now. But, yes, with every new revelation and every spurious defense and every new lie, it is impossible not to feel anger. In fact, in my view, it is vital to feel anger. And not to let it subside.
I realize that the people over at National Review aren't paid to put their principles before their party, but even so I cannot help but wonder... how do these people sleep at night? There is no amount of money in the world that could convince me to defend the torture of another human being, nor any political allegiance so strong that it could overwhelm my own moral code.
And to think that conservatives once claimed their movement was built atop values....
