Matt Watson is the opinion editor at The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected]. George W. Bush and his supporters are fond of saying history should be the judge. As media begin to focus on the new faces of potential presidents, the current president’s career is slowly falling into its own place in history.
Indeed, we have been waiting a long time for this, after every letdown, meaningless speech and cover-up. During all of this, we were told to wait and not to jump to conclusions. Results take time. Democracy takes time. Let history be the judge.
Of course, this is simply a way of pacifying people and turning reality into fantasy. This has recently taken form in the controversial debate on torture. Under authorization from Bush, CIA director Michael Hayden announced Wednesday that U.S. interrogators used waterboarding, a method of torture that simulates drowning, three times from 2002 to 2003 to extract information from terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
What’s worse is that the White House and the CIA deny that waterboarding is a form of torture, even though the CIA (under Hayden himself), the FBI, the Pentagon and the U.S. military have banned the practice.
The CIA now has to obtain approval from the president to begin using waterboarding methods again.
The message seems to be that waterboarding is torture and therefore illegal until Bush temporarily declares it’s not torture. Of course, in White House jargon, this means waterboarding is not “authorized” at this time, but it is “legal.”
The hypocrisy runs even deeper than this. As usual, officials try to scare Americans into thinking that drastic measures like torture are necessary.
A quote from the director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, who testified with Hayden, specifically caught my attention.
“We remain concerned about Iran as a potential nuclear weapons threat,” he said during a spill about how dangerous the world is. “The earliest possible date Iran could technically be capable of producing enough fissile material for a weapon is late 2009, but we judge that to be unlikely.
“If Iran’s nuclear weapons design program has already been reactivated or will be reactivated, it will be a closely guarded secret in an attempt to keep us from being aware of its true status.”
Again, I feel the need to translate. My interpretation of McConnell’s words is that it is unlikely Iran will be capable of building a weapon in the near future, but they might. Therefore, the American people should be afraid.
This tone was set to justify any future authorization from the president to practice waterboarding. It is simply one of many attempts by the administration to play up the war on terror in order to claim immunity to the law and even good morals.
However, there is yet another aspect to this hypocrisy. Not only do the Bush administration and the CIA dance around legal technicalities to justify torture, they also do not want to believe that what they condone and practice is actually torture in the first place.
One reason, of course, is that they do not want to be accused of breaking U.N. regulations. But there also seems to exist a very small speck of genuine shame in those of our government who defend torture.
This was evidenced when Amnesty International Canada acquired a PowerPoint training manual used by Canadian diplomats. The manual listed the United States among countries such as China and Saudi Arabia under places where prisoners risk abuse and torture.
The U.S. government grew angry that we could possibly be compared to these other countries. Our ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, said it was “offensive.”
The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs never intended for the manual to be given to the public. It has since promised to rewrite the manual, but the truth is the truth. Our government rationalizes torture by diluting the definition of the term and scaring American citizens with constant talk of imminent threats.