The Torture Nation

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping upon a human face - forever.

--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Andrew Sullivan - who has long been an outspoken critic of the previous Administration's torture policies - is writing an excellent series of blog posts right now on the torture memos that have just been released to the public. You can read them here; and also the recently leaked International Red Cross report here.

If you haven't read Andrew's posts - like this one, and this one - you should.

If you've never read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, you should. Click here for the entire book online.

If you think all that the Bush regime did can't happen again - can't happen here - can't happen to you: think again, bub.

Sullivan:

If you want to know how democracies die, read these memos. Read how gifted professionals in the CIA were able to convince experienced doctors that what they were doing was ethical and legal. Read how American psychologists were able to find justifications for the imposition of psychological torture, and were able to analyze its effects without ever stopping and asking: what on earth are we doing?

Read how no one is even close to debating "ticking time bomb" scenarios as they strap people to boards and drown them until they break. Then read how they adjusted the waterboarding, for fear it was too much, for fear that they were actually in danger of suffocating their captives, and then read how they found self-described loopholes in the law to tell themselves that what the US had once prosecuted as torture could not possibly be torture because we're doing it, and we're different from the Viet Cong. We're doing torture right and for the right reasons and with the right motive. Many of the people who did this are mild, kind, courteous, family men and women, who somehow were able to defend slamming human beings against walls in the daytime while watching the Charlie Rose show over a glass of wine at night. We've seen this syndrome before, in other places and at other times. Yes: it can happen here. And imagine how this already functioning torture machine would have operated in the wake of another attack under a president Romney or Giuliani.

It is this professionalism and bureaucratic mastery that chills in the end. Not the brutality of "the program," but the modernity and banality of the apparatus around it. As Orwell predicted, the English language had to disappear first. The president referred to waterboarding prisoners as "asking them questions." Bringing prisoners' temperatures down to hypothermia levels was simply an "alternative set of procedures." The entire process is "enhanced interrogation." Even the press has to find a way to call it merely "harsh", a term now changed to "brutal" in the NYT, even though nothing we found out yesterday was more brutal than anything we knew about before.

Mukasey and Hayden complain that the president has tied the hands of future presidents in this. Yes, he has. What Obama understands is that what is truly vital is that this dark and shameful period not become a workable precedent. It must be repudiated at the very heart of the American political system, and removed like the cancer it is.

The question of prosecution remains. It's a painful decision. My view is that those who pay the legal price should be, first and foremost, those who authorized this at the highest levels. My view is also that it is a travesty that the Abu Ghraib reservists were prosecuted, and yet far, far more culpable people are claiming it would be too divisive to prosecute them. My view is that no one is above the law, and that when a society based on law prosecutes the powerless and excuses the powerful, it is corroding its own soul.

If all this doesn't nauseate you and make you mad as hell - just what kind of person are you, anyway? Where is your humanity? Where is your soul?

Video: pictures of torture committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, 2004. Strictly NSFW. Very gruesome, and very real. That's what I'm talking about: your tax dollars at work.