What Are We Fighting For?

by Keith Cooper

From Broader View Weekly, May 8, 2009

My fellow columnist has gone to great lengths to trivialize the offenses of the Bush Administration where torture is concerned. First, he chooses to omit the word “torture” completely from his essay. This tactic is not surprising since most officials involved in the memo controversy (including Obama and those in his administration) have avoided using the term themselves. Torture is often referred to as interrogation techniques or some other innocuous representation.

My brother also presents his case using anecdotes to color the audience’s perception. Unfortunately, the analogies he offers are quaint but irrelevant to the discussion. The use of torture as a method to attempt to extract useful information is nothing like overstepping rules to come to a brother’s aid or being prevented by schoolyard rules from meting out revenge on an attacker.

The problems with Gordon’s argument are issues of principle and of fact.

For years the United States has successfully engaged various types of enemies in military and aggressive operations. During our dealings with these adversaries, our agents and service men and women were often subjected to techniques that were illegal by international standards, were immoral and unethical, and were classified as torture. Yet, out of principle, our official code of conduct prohibited the use of torture in our name. Yes, some frustrated or rogue soldiers exhibited behavior outside these guidelines, but official policy refused to stoop to the unacceptable methods of the enemy. These were guidelines that attempted to live up to the “city on a hill” image of moral superiority, which has been a model of American conduct throughout history. They also acted as a buffer to protect our own soldiers from more abusive treatment at the hands of captors.

In the early days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration urged Americans to hit the malls, travel and resume life with as much normalcy as possible. The idea behind this encouragement was simple: if we changed our principles the terrorists would have won. By this measure, we lost to terror when we allowed our government to craft definitions of torture in acceptable terms, to vet those definitions through whatever filters the Justice Department or Congress applied, and to put those definitions to practice.

We lost again when, as evidence emerged about abuses in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, we accepted administration officials’ denial of involvement and their willingness to prosecute those who carried out these orders as “bad apples.” Yes, some of these abuses even violated the abhorrent standards manufactured by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and those who perpetrated those offenses should accept responsibility for their own actions. However, it was clear that a culture existed that blurred the lines of ethics, morality and the rule of law. This culture permitted and encouraged the abuse.

Throughout history we have engaged enemies for reasons noble and dubious. Regardless of motivation, the official line was always that we were sending our young men and women to fight for American principles. By forfeiting the moral high ground we are selling out our principles and transforming America into something less than its image. Once that nation and those principles are sullied, what are we fighting for?

The fact is, as much as my brother hopes to avoid the term, the techniques approved by Bush’s counsel and employed by the CIA and our military constitute torture. Waterboarding and the practice called “walling” (where a subject is hurled against a false wall) are characterized by most experts (those without political interest at stake) as torture. Yet, both of those practices are approved in the memos of the OLC’s John Yoo and the Justice Department’s Jay Bybee.

However, even though those practices were being directed from the highest offices down through the chain of command, Bush and administration sources were emphatically proclaiming that the United States Does Not Torture. As much as some in Washington are now saying that these methods were necessary to glean actionable intelligence, the attitude of denial suggests the acknowledgement that the American public had no taste for the raping of our rule of law for fear’s sake.

I have to admit that I am surprised that Gordon advocates overstepping the bounds of law in the interest of some arbitrary code of morality. If we were to apply the schoolyard scenarios to real world situations we could condone vigilante justice on our streets. We could condone any conduct by the police in the execution of their duties. We could condone any action by the executive branch of our government that it claims is in the interest of security.

The fact is, we have guidelines in place to prevent that application of lawless “morality”. They are based on principles we hold as uniquely American. If we surrender those ideals, what do we tell our sons and daughters when we send them off to war? What are they fighting for?