Rachel's #932: THE 'GOOD GERMANS' AMONG US, LONG VERSION

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At 01:47 PM 11/10/07, you wrote:

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>New York Times, Oct. 14, 2007

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>

>THE 'GOOD GERMANS' AMONG US

>

>By Frank Rich

>

> " Bush lies " doesn't cut it anymore. It's time to confront the darker

>reality that we are lying to ourselves.

>

>Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret

>Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush

>gave his standard response: " This government does not torture

>people. " Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of " torture "

>is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the

>definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

>

>By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto

>Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so

>ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three

>years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last

>weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America's " enhanced

>interrogation " techniques have a grotesque provenance: " Verscharfte

>Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term

>innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the 'third

>degree.' It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions

>and long-time sleep deprivation. "

>

>Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi

>(Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress

>squawk. The debate is labeled " politics. " We turn the page.

>

>There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story

>of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me

>cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human

>rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless

>humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the

>subject from its own abuses.

>

>As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned

>down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On

>this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed

>the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad's Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis

>were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already

>been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005.

>There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater's

>sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won't even

>share its investigative findings with the United States military and

>the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings

>criminal.

>

>The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-

>based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and

>enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in

>North Carolina. This is a plot out of " Syriana " by way of " Chinatown. "

>There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new

>bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have

>little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

>

>We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of

>Iraq -- and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the

>recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts,

>issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly

>second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also

>examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our

>name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one

>that put Verscharfte Vernehmung on the map.

>

>I have always maintained that the American public was the least

>culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by

>a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed

>to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the

>press -- the powerful institutions that should have provided the

>checks, balances and due diligence of the administration's case --

>failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have

>raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began

>at the top.

>

>As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a

>pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities

>that have followed the original sin.

>

>In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were

>using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a

>soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait

>eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper

>armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this

>year, four years after the war's first casualties, did a Washington

>Post investigation finally focus the country's attention on the

>shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate

>armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military

>hospitals.

>

>We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four

>Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just

>weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We

>asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that

>our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed

>to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength,

>we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties

>are kept off the books.

>

>It was always the White House's plan to coax us into a blissful

>ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual

>Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition

>of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our

>passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that

>knows there's no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily

>persuaded there could be a free war.

>

>Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax

>cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the

>table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to

>finesse the overstretched military's holes. With the war's entire

>weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1

>percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other

>way at whatever went down in Iraq.

>

>We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja

>this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of

>the war's failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our

>alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to

>contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors.

>Contractors remain a bellwether of the war's progress today. When

>Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square

>catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the

>fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge's great " success " in

>bringing security to Baghdad.

>

>Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq

>and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse

>to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer

>to the military chain of command, can simply " drop their guns and go

>home. " Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those " who

>deliver their bullets and beans. "

>

>This potential scenario is just one example of why it's in our

>national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts

>on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The

>extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-

>governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform

>receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in

>Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-

>metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

>

>Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after

> " Mission Accomplished, " for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public

>pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the

>war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that " America will

>not abandon the Iraqi people, " he has yet to address or intervene

>decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a

>disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from

>the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

>

>Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better

>dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen

>World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants

>in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of

>war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America's recent record

>prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

>

> " We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess

>or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture, " said Henry Kolm,

>90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's

>deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled

>that he " never laid hands on anyone " in his many interrogations,

>adding, " I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity. "

>

>Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in

>our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we

>resemble those " good Germans " who professed ignorance of their own

>Gestapo. It's up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to

>challenge administration policy every day. Let the war's last

>supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left

>to lose except whatever remains of our country's good name.

>

>Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

 

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Kraig and Shirley Carroll ... in the woods of SE Kentucky

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