meditations

No need to renew their passports

My favorite columnist, William Pfaff, has written an article for the IHT weighing in on the lengthening paper trail between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and a conscious strategy directed from the highest levels of the administration. Pfaff, hardly a man prone to hyperbole, minces no words and says "The question put to [executive branch] lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it."

How could we have fallen so far and so fast? Less than three years ago the US had the admiration, sympathy and support of virtually every nation on the planet. Today we are widely despised, and our moral fisc is empty, all in the pursuit of a policy that, as Pfaff says,

has been futile and irrational, as well as evil. The nearly universal uselessness of torture is well-known in intelligence and special warfare circles. Even if you have a key figure who does possess useful information, and you eventually get him (or her) to tell you what you want, what actual good is it?

Is it really true? Is it merely what the torturer has inadvertently conveyed to the victim that he wants to hear? Even if true, is it any longer useful?

Denial is always the first stage of grieving, so one can (and should) forgive the large portion of the country that has not yet focused on these events, or that still holds out hope that things are not as bad as they seem. But already we are far enough down this road to see that, short of a deus ex machina we're on the verge of a scandal that may darken our name for generations. Over at another venue Josh Marshall comes to the same conclusion:

We're like contestants on Wheel of Fortune with a long phrase spelled out in front of us with maybe one or two letters missing. We know what the letters spell. It's obvious. We just don't have the heart to say it out loud.

It is, of course, highly unlikely that any member of the Bush administration will ever stand trial for war crimes, but indictments for the some can no longer be laughed off. At the very least, Bush and his senior staff will never be able to travel abroad safely again. Given the president's complete lack of interest in the rest of the world that's not much of a loss (for him), but I suspect Richard Perle will soon be gnashing his teeth at the prospect of giving up his home in the south of France.

Drip, Drip, Drip...

After the post last night, I was wondering if perhaps I wasn't over-reacting to the articles in the New Yorker and Newsweek. Few others (except for those on the partisan far left) seemed to share my sense that the administration's conscious effort to bypass the Geneva Convention was one of the dark moments in our national history, at least as bad, if not worse than, the internment of Japanese during WWII.

But as the day wore on, this particular train seemed to pick up steam. Fred Kaplan writes that the associated scandal goes to the top of both the DoD and the White House, and might be the biggest since Watergate. Kevin Drum picks up the ball and Brad DeLong highlights the hypocrisy of White House Counsel Gonzales.

Finally, in the international press, the estimable William Pfaff weighs in and comes to the inevitable conclusion:

But who debauched these young American men and women soldiers? I would argue that the moral debauchery came down the chain of command from Washington.

It's still early, and there is a lot of hyperbole in the air (must every nascent scandal be compared to Watergate?) but as I said last night, the descent will be swift.