“Elaborate care went into figuring out the precise gradations of coercion,” said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “Yes, it’s jarring. But it shows how both the lawyers and the nonlawyers tried to do the right thing.”
New York Times, August 25, 2009 “Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations“
“How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is that inevitable time in the normal course of human events when the details of America’s interrogation techniques employed during the Bush/Cheney administration are finally being revealed. While Dick Cheney fulminates in the background about protection of the American “patriots” who carried on our so-called “War on Terrorism,” details about the techniques continue to emerge relentlessly into the light due, if to nothing else, to humanity’s endless fascination with the dirty, squalid details of mankind’s apparently endless inhumanity to individual men.
Yesterday, in a written post, Cheney professed incredulity over the publication of recent media reports on enhanced interrogation techniques that involved, among other sterling means, threats to use electric drills in unspecified ways and rapes of either mothers or wives (as variously reported) by stating:
“The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States. The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions.”
The fact that he seems genuinely surprised and indignant that this information is now being dragged into the light of day demonstrates Cheney’s inherent inability to understand the fascination that squalor holds on the minds of ordinary mortals and places him in the role of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike attempting to hold back the inevitable flood of condemnation and disgust that will no doubt follow these disclosures. In undertaking the role of champion of the notion that bad behavior in the pursuit of laudable goals is patriotic, Cheney reveals why his presence (and those of his emulators) in our government over the last several decades has been one of the saddest chapters in all of American history.
The America in which I was raised believed, rightly or wrongly, that it was the greatest nation on earth, both in terms of power and of morality. Our focus then was less upon our status as a superpower, and more upon the “fact” of our innate moral superiority. I suspect that we took our belief in our own morality so much to heart that our neighbors frequently found us insufferable in our repeated assertions in this regard. Notwithstanding our pomposity, those assertions did have the effect of causing us to demand more of ourselves than we expected of others, and the resulting American ethic was such that we were required, as a people, to rise above the ordinary squalor and cruelty of life. We expected, and demanded, more of ourselves. And, notwithstanding their occasional amusement, our neighbors came to expect this behavior of us and admired us for it, as insufferable as we may have appeared to them at such times as we publicly wallowed in our own self-assertions of that very morality.
In other words, as priggish as we may often have seemed to the world during this era, there was a genuine sense in the world that America had truly raised itself above the usual muck and mire and was a shining example of what could be achieved by a nation that took to heart the notion that individual human rights were always to be protected against the tyranny of the majority’s wishes. I believe that our occasional public assertions of morality were forgiven by the rest of the world as the excesses of a young democracy that had truly achieved something significant. We were more honored than reviled for our self-promotion for the simple reason that there was substantially more than a mere grain of truth behind it all.
Our perceived morality gave us standing in the world. More than mere standing, it lent us a dignity from which to promote our various policies – a dignity which was unassailable even as we occasionally made a laughing stock of ourselves due to an innate and relentless American habit of self-promotion. Our dignity was represented by Presidents who wielded our moral authority with care, if not always to best effect. Our image was represented by the likes of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who had earned his right to speak out against humanity’s indignities the hard way. Whatever you may think of his effectiveness as President, his public image was unassailable and his warnings of a militarily industrialized future uncannily prescient.
Eisenhower’s quotations are well worth reading by those of you who have relegated him to the dust-bin of presidential mediocrity. Whatever the truth may be as to his real-time effectiveness as a working President, this was a man who understood, first-hand, the effects of war on humanity and who routinely preached against the evils of untamed blood lust in all of its forms. Eisenhower was the very embodiment in words and deeds of America’s self-perceived morality and, as time passed and we, as Americans, began to ridicule our own moral stuffiness, we distanced ourselves from his public image of moral rectitude. We did so at great cost, by forgetting the universal verity of many of his words.
Eisenhower could be as practical as he could be stuffy. In the context of the subject matter of this piece, consider this statement by our thirty-fourth President:
“I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.”
These are the words of a man who equally understands the value of the high, long way and the dangers and self-delusions inherent in moral short cuts undertaken in the name of “patriotism.” This was a man who was often criticized for taking an inordinate amount of time to make up his mind on critical issues, but who asserted that “I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?”
I am often dismissive of much of the criticism of my generation since I believe we added far more than we took, but I do believe my generation comes in for valid criticism in over-reacting as much as we did to 1950 American moral stuffiness. Some reaction was appropriate and necessary to save us from the smell of renewed Puritanism which permeated the era, especially in light of the fact that 1950’s Americans openly engaged in the thoroughly hypocritical and inherently degrading actions of segregation while simultaneously proclaiming their societal morality. The generational uprising in which we engaged was long overdue and necessary from this standpoint.
What my generation was guilty of is nothing more than acting in predictable human fashion when faced with the realization that goals and actions don’t match – we swung the pendulum from one extreme to the other, forgetting there was a midpoint upon which it might well be smarter to settle. Many of us reacted to the permeating smell of Puritanism by becoming drug induced and sex obsessed. One of the costs of this generational pendulum shift was for America to forget the hard-earned truths which were concealed by President Eisenhower’s very stuffiness – that the moral high ground is always a position of strength when continually maintained despite the vicissitudes of time, even if short-cuts around our moral principles seem, in the heat of the moment, more likely to yield immediate results.
Dick Cheney is living proof of our failure to remember this lesson. As tight-assed as the man is, he is nothing more than the embodiment of my generation’s failure to stop the pendulum mid-swing. In his ignorance and arrogance, he has confused his taking of short cuts in the name of patriotism for the will of the people. He has utterly failed to understand the historical lesson that persons in power who undertake activities of questionable morality with the excuse of being in pursuit of higher goals actually undermine the higher goals so proclaimed, actively lessen a nation’s integrity – and, therefore, its effectiveness, in the wide world – and, in the long run, its very safety.
In short, Cheney is as un-American as any public official ever inflicted upon America. Give me, instead, the Kingfish, Huey Long – at least in his greed he was a splendid example of one of the least desirable aspects of American culture and, in the end, did no more lasting harm than any cheap criminal can inflict. And, he came to have some redeeming virtue in becoming the inspiration for one of America’s more enduring literary classics, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. In contrast, Cheney is simply an unmitigated disaster. Cheney is no more than the latest heir to the American tradition of scoundrels who employ the big lie as a means to success. You can easily find his like in the pages of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the guise of the Duke or the Lost Dauphin. Would that he were as amusing or as transparent; would that he had been as harmless.
This is the time of year in North America when the sun’s light reaches us at a more oblique angle and light softens from that of Summer’s harshness as a consequence. Even as we welcome the softer aspects of Fall’s light knowing that we cannot stop nature from its inevitable course, we should continue shining a harsh, Summery spotlight upon the interrogation policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, for it seems to be true that epiphanies only occur in a blinding light and an epiphany is what this country so desperately needs at this time.
During the Bush/Cheney administration America strayed far from the high, moral path which sustained us as a people for so many years, and there is no conceivable way back without an honest admission of our collective failure followed closely by the employment of an effective means to expiate the sins which resulted from our wandering. What form that expiation ought to take I will leave for smarter minds and a future time; for now, it is enough to remain focused upon the imperative need for an honest admission.
And, for there to be an honest admission of our failing, we must first endure the pain of a complete, undistorted, public revelation of the facts of our failure – something that among the present holders of senior government positions only Attorney General Eric Holder seems to comprehend, and his comprehension seems either to be limited in scope or practically compromised by the short-sightedness and predilection for shortcut-taking that are the hallmarks of everyday politics. I suspect it is the latter, since he seems intellectually up to the task.
It is a time for spotlights because it is a time for a national epiphany. Most of all, it is time for statesmen to return to the forefront of the national stage and for politicians to retreat to the wings.
