There are times that I vehemently disagree with Andrew Sullivan who I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago. His wrongheaded defense of Brendan Eich is but one case in point. His continued behavior as little more than a fluffer for Pope Francis is another. But from time to time Sullivan zeros in and gets it right dead on. This is particularly true in the contact of the soon to be released U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the war crimes of the last administration which is nearing publication. The report will likely be an indictment of George W. Bush, Dick Chaney and others in the Bush/Cheney regime who made a mockery of the Geneva Conventions and authorized torture policies that are little different than those who brought severe punishment down on members of the Nazi regime and members of Japan's World War II military establishment. Ultimately, if Bush, Cheney and others go unpunished, America can truly no longer claim to be a decent, civilized country that abides by international law. Indeed, America will be no better than its foulest enemies. Here are highlights of Sullivan's spot on analysis:
As the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the war crimes of the last administration nears publication (if the CIA doesn’t censor it to shreds), you can begin to hear the stirrings of some kind of reckoning with the past. As the years have gone by, the incontestable fact that the Bush administration tore up the Geneva Conventions, brazenly broke domestic and international law, and unleashed a wave of abuse and torture and mistreatment of prisoners, has been harder and harder to deny.
The law against torture is absolute. There is never any defense of it because of perceived utility. Dick Cheney keeps boasting and bragging of the torture program he invented for the first time in American history, publicly admitting a war crime for which there is no statute of limitations in domestic and international law.
But the one place where the debate has not really broken out is in the political party that embraced those war crimes – the GOP. . . . . Very few Republican writers want to confront the topic; Charles Krauthammer actually favors the setting up of a specific torture unit, without pondering whether its shirts should be brown. Torture enthusiasts, like Marc Thiessen, are given perches at the Washington Post, while war criminals like Cheney and Hayden are given endless platforms on the Sunday morning talk shows.
But if Rand Paul runs for president, a debate will surely have to break out. David Corn – is David trying to kill off Paul’s candidacy or trumpet it? - digs not so deep again to discover unequivocal hostility to the torture of the Bush-Cheney years in some interviews Paul did in 2009.
The good thing about this stance – and the real promise of a Rand Paul candidacy – is that it will force an honest debate in the GOP. No more denialist bullshit about “EIT”s; no more pussy-footing around the fact that of course what was done was torture; and a demand for clarity about whether a future Republican president would seek to finally consign the Geneva Conventions in the trash-heap of history or whether he or she will return to the traditions of George Washington and the civilized world. We may get the wrong answer from the GOP nominee. But at least we will know where we are. And whether Americans care any more about an embrace of the barbarism so often exhibited by our enemies.
Again, I make no bones about the fact that, in my view, Bush, Cheney and others need to be tried for war crimes and, if convicted, punished severely - . Then and only then can America claim to hold a high moral ground.
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| War Criminal |
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