Originally written on 22 April 2009, Edited
for posting 14 March 2018
I have continued to watch, with great disgust and mirth, the
bantering that is occurring on the question of what to do about torture in our
republic. To me there is no question: a government of “we the people,”[i]
should not, cannot, and will not ever approve or condone a policy that makes
torture, in even its most simplistic and relatively innocuous form, legal and permissible
in the main. And with all due respect to
the former Vice President of these United States, I don’t give a damn how much
valuable information you collect in the execution of “enhanced interrogation
techniques,”[ii]
such a policy, one he seems to endorse (and frankly should know better not to),
puts this nation, and those that defend it, in grave danger.
Now you ask, how can I make such a strong condemnation of a
past administration and even more so the opinion of a former senior leader
therein? Well let me start with the fact
that I was a Soldier, an American Soldier.
I served in uniform 20 plus years, of that 7 was on active duty, and
more importantly, 2 plus years of it have been in Iraq. I have voluntarily said that if it came to
it, I would lay down my life to defend this country and the constitution that
defines it. And with an ever smaller
minority of people in our population, I have backed this up with action. Actions that include the award of a Combat
Action Badge; an award I hope you can understand, is not something I was
looking to receive. Beyond my personal
imposition, I was a leader of Soldiers, a Commissioned Officer and a Lieutenant
Colonel in the US Army. This means I had
the weighty responsibility of not only being ready to answer my country’s call
personally, but I have led Soldiers and have led them in combat. I have been responsible for sending soldiers
home without significant portions of their bodies intact and I have had to pull
together those that remain after such a loss to fight on for another 9 months,
or more, of the same. I have done all
this in the very den of savagery that the former administrations have sought and
this present one seeks to defeat. I have
met, first-hand, the insurgent, the terrorist, and the one that would tear down
the foundations of what we call dear. I
know from personal experience what can happen when I, or any person who seeks
to represent these United States around the world, fails to live up to the
highest ideals that our Founding Father’s intended us to uphold. And I know, because I am a student of
history, what has happened to nations, who hold such ideals that start to toboggan
down the slippery slope in arrogance, thinking they are above common morals,
the laws they have endorsed fully, and even themselves.
We have stated clearly from the beginning that we hold
certain truths self evident, certain inalienable rights, among them and
chiefly, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”[iii] We specifically provided protections against
such things as “unreasonable searches and seizures”[iv]
and “cruel and unusual punishment.”[v] These are not negotiable founding principles,
these cannot get in our way when we find them inconvenient, because if and when
they do, my dear citizens, we are then saying that we are redefining what it is
to be American, and in a very real sense saying, that what we formerly said was
true is utterly false. When we do this,
and we do it as if we were not changing a thing (as if one could not see plain
through it that we are moving the Gibraltar’s of our founding faith) it is as
if we think we don’t have to be held accountable. There is a word for this: Hypocrisy. And my fellow Americans, any endorsement of
torture in the policy of this nation, in the laws we pass, in the excuses we
make for it, is just that, a Great Hypocrisy.
And unlike any other nation on earth that commits hypocrisy, and every
group of peoples on this planet does this (especially our enemies), our role as
the “leader of the free world”[vi]
and a nation “conceived in liberty”[vii]
sets us center stage and magnifies this hypocrisy to a degree that history can
never match. Precisely because we have
elevated ourselves and our ideals to such a high podium that the world is
jealous and jaded that we could ever live up to them, our hypocrisies, our
sins, only prove that we are false, liars, and frankly cannot be trusted to
keep our word. And because we have a
mass media venue that permeates the world around, we can’t hide it, we can’t
deny it, and we certainly cannot think the world won’t see it in the naked
public square.
So Mr. Obama stated a fact that should never been in question,
“America does not torture.”[viii] We now know that since the seminal moment in
our time, 9-11, we have taken a road of fear, a road of challenges, a road of
hard choices in the face of hard realities.
But I want to let you know, from first-hand experience, what the impact
of the revelation that America has tortured our detainees, even in isolated
cases, when it mattered most. During the
winter of 2003-2004, it was my job as an Engineer Officer as a part of 1st
Armored Division in support of the 2nd Calvary Regiment was to
improve and develop a base called Camp War Eagle (now called Camp Hope) on the
northeastern edge of Sadr City in Baghdad, to protect our soldiers an provide
their basic needs. To this end, I
oversaw numerous construction contracts, primarily with local Iraqi firms. These firms and their employees took some
measured risk to work with the coalition to begin with, given that in their
history benevolent dictatorship is the best they could really ever hope
for. But all of that changed one Sunday
evening; the evening that 60 Minutes broke the Abu Ghraib prison scandal; the
evening that the Great Hypocrisy of torture by American Soldiers was revealed
to the world. Now I never saw the
original airing, but I did see what it did on the ground. Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr Bureau
immediately took action to make sure everyone in the 9 Nissan and Sadr City
area knew that we could not be trusted.
Workers were harder and harder to come by as construction continued, IED
placements skyrocketed, and those that did come to work had to hide their cars
or path of travel to avoid being seen (as a number of Iraqis were found dead at
home the day after they made the mistake of being recognized as working with us). Never minding the horrible facts for the average
Iraqi, by April 2004, in short order what had been one of the most tranquil
parts of Baghdad had turned into a danger zone that saw a rapid rise in
American and coalition force casualties, especially when 1st Calvary
Division started to arrive to replace 1st Armor Division in these
areas. I distinctly lived through two major
events that Easter: 1) a phone call to my Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge at
Camp War Eagle in the midst of a mortar attack determining how to get him back
to Camp Victory for our planned unit roll out in a number of weeks, and 2) our
entire Engineer Battalion and those elements on the southwest corner of the
Baghdad International Airport engaging in a direct fire attack with militia
elements that tried to assault our position.
And I have now made a second year long venture to the former Babylonia,
this time in conjunction with the now famous surge, trying to “win” this
war. In the totality of it all, why did
all of these things happen; why? The
answer I can only resolve is that we let our guard down, not as Soldiers, but
as a nation and showed we could not be trusted, we could not stand up to the
standards we expected of ourselves and what is worse yet, the standards we
expected the world to uphold, but we felt somehow we didn’t have to. We were hypocrites.
The reality is if we are going to choose to fail to defend
this nation against the ones that want to destroy us, all we have to do is
continue in hypocrisy. All we have to do
is continue to chew away at the fundamental liberties we cherish. All we have to do is make excuses as to the
pragmatism and the expediency of methods we use to defend our freedoms using
otherwise reprehensible behavior. All we
have to do is prove to the world that we no longer are the beacon of freedom
that we have told them we are, and they win.
I can remember distinctly the former Vice President standing with the,
then, Chairman of the Joint Chief’s Colin Powell telling us after the
liberation of Kuwait, that significant droves of the republican guard (so much
so that we were overwhelmed) surrendered because they knew that we would treat
them well. This enabled us to quickly
secure Kuwait and the southern regions of Iraq, enabling mission success and,
pen-ultimately, the nation to be well defended again. This saved lives, this proved America could
be trusted. Let me say that again, this
saved lives, this proved America could be trusted. Doing this is what we were supposed to
do. Torture is not ever what we are
supposed to do.
This is not an issue up for debate, it is not an issue that
can be made partisan; just ask the man in the Senate that can no longer lift
his arms above his shoulders because of his stay at the Hanoi Hilton what he
thinks of torture. This is, however, a
matter of our national defense. Because
our failure to not simply stop torture from ever entering our policy-making and
law-making approval process again will put America and our homeland in danger
by creating more of the disaffection in the rest of the world that brought 4
jet liners to a tragic end on a cold fall morning in an infamous September
past. To truly defend our nation, we
have to recognize that those leaders who recklessly endorsed, nay, promulgated
such a policy are held to task. Great
men and women in our history have recognized this. Truman recognized he had unleashed a terrible
scourge on the earth at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, one that lasted well
beyond his years or the generations he then present was responsible for; the
“buck” stopped with him. Eisenhower
wrote two letters to the President prior to D-Day: one humbly thanking the President for the
privilege of command and announcing our victory on the beaches of Normandy, the
other resigning his post as Supreme Allied Commander and taking full
responsibility for the failure and loss of life that had occurred as Hitler’s
Atlantic Wall had destroyed America’s best and brightest. I, like Grant and Lincoln after the civil war[ix],
believe we cannot give a free pass to those that have endorsed a policy of
supporting torture or have actually been found to have committed acts of torture,
should not hold public trust for the nation again. If we hold our ground in this regard, then we
can prove to the world that we are not lesser than we are when we extend our
“bonds of affection”[x]
as the preeminent “shining ‘city on a hill.’”[xi]
The world’s people, and I hope we as
Americans, are surely going to remember this hypocrisy for a long time, and we
need to ask over time, can we be trusted?
If we do this, we do it right, the world will know that we made a
mistake, we have made our repentance, and indeed we can be the people we
profess to be; and that will win this struggle for all times.
[i]
Preamble of the Constitution of the United Stated of America
[ii] A
euphemism for torture used by the George W. Bush Administration
[iii]
Declaration of Independence
[iv] Constitution
of the United Stated of America
[v]
Ibid
[vi] A
common euphemism for the President of the United States and the nation itself,
especially in the late 20th Century
[vii]
Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln
[viii]
Obama, Barak Hussein, Speech to Joint Session of Congress, 24 February 2009
[ix]
Wherein, confederate officers and leaders could never hold federal office
again.
[x]
Lincoln, Abraham, Second Inaugural Address
[xi]
Regan, Ronald, Vision for America speech, 3 November 1980
