It's been months since I've blogged anything. Largely it was the Abu Ghraib situation that disillusioned me, and made me loath to keep up on the endless details of scandal-of-the-day. But Mark Danner's review of two official reports on Abu Ghraib in The New York Review of Books is a must-read, and provoked me to post yet again. Perhaps if I can keep my eye on the big picture, and not get lost in details and swept up in blogcentric trivia, I will keep posting.
Anyway, Danner:
The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush's controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The decision rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," in fact, a "new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions...." ...For torture, this decision was Original Sin: it made legally possible the adoption of the various "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military's prison at Guantánamo Bay. As it turns out, however, for the administration, Bush's decision was also Amazing Grace, because, by implying that the US military must adhere to wholly different rules when interrogating, say, Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo, who do not enjoy Geneva Convention protection, and Iraqi insurgents at Abu Ghraib, who do, it makes it possible to argue that American interrogators, when applying the same techniques at Abu Ghraib that they had earlier used in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo, were in fact taking part not in "violent/sexual abuse incidents," like their sadistic military police colleagues, but instead in "misinterpretation/confusion incidents."
In other words, by using an interminable and global war as justification, the Bush Administration has an excuse to do whatever it wants. This is the "September 11th changed everything" argument run amok, run wild, even to the point where the rule of law is considered a "quaint" obstacle to be shoved aside like so many outdated niceties of etiquette. Abu Ghraib, shows that for the Bushies, the rights of man are a dead letter, and no one in the United States wants to acknowledge it.