By FRANK RICH
10/14/07 "New York Times" --
- -“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 has been scarcely more
response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war
crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me
cynical, but when Laura Bush
spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in
Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism
than another administration maneuver to change the subject
from its own abuses.
As Mrs. Bush spoke, two
women, both Armenian Christians,
were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten
by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has
been silent. That incident followed the
Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17
Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA,
which had
already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting
incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The
State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its
billion dollars in contracts, won’t even
share its investigative findings with the United States
military and the Iraqi government, both of which have
deemed the killings criminal.
The gunmen who mowed down
the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company
managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted
as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered
in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of
“Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out
what happened. A new bill
passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will
have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current
form.
We can continue to blame the
Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should.
Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the
recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his
efforts,
issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi
law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi
Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for
the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we
have now fought longer than we did in the one that put
Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.
I have always maintained
that the American public was the least culpable of the
players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a
brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign
designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11.
Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that
should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence
of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had
they done so, more Americans might have raised more
objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began
at the top.
As the war has dragged on,
it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too
slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have
followed the original sin.
In April 2004, Stars and
Stripes
first reported that our troops were using makeshift
vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier
complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in
Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by
the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more
to come. Not until early this year, four years after the
war’s first casualties, did
a Washington Post investigation finally focus the
country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans,
many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed
Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.
We first learned of the use
of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees
were
strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before
the
first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked
few questions. When
reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors
in Iraq (180,000, of whom
some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now
outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned.
Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties
are kept off the books.
It was always the White
House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the
war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney
secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of
photos of military coffins. But the administration also
invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared
sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a
free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a
free war.
Instead of taxing us for
Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead
of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the
table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of
contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes.
With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary
force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population,
the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever
went down in Iraq.
We ignored the contractor
scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary
army has been a leading indicator of every element of the
war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but
also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our
rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney
cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a
bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was
briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe,
American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the
fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great
“success” in bringing security to Baghdad.
Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an
Iraq war combat veteran who directs
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans
of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come.
Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to
answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop
their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be
deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”
This potential scenario is
just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest
to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to
ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The
extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of
the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult
to those in uniform receiving as little as
one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour
Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this
long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.
Similarly, it took until
December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission
Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public
pressure to
acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the
war. Even now, despite his repeated
declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi
people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in
the tragedy of four million-plus
Iraqi refugees,
a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no
pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays
lip service to Darfur.
Our moral trajectory over
the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by
a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II
veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in
a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi
prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but
America’s recent record prompted them to
talk to The Washington Post.
“We got more information out
of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than
they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an
M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess,
Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George
Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone”
in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I
never compromised my humanity.”
Our humanity has been
compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The
longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we
resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of
their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant
Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let
the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want
to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of
our country’s good name.
