We've Lost Ourselves

The Washington Post editorial board has a question:

AT THE SENATE intelligence committee hearing Thursday on Gen. Michael V. Hayden's nomination to head the CIA, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the nominee a simple question: Is "waterboarding" an acceptable interrogation technique? Gen. Hayden responded: "Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail." That was the wrong answer. The right one would have been simple: No.

The Congress passed a law banning this technique explicitly. The President signed it. Of course, then he made a signing statement that essentially said "I could bypass this ban if I, um, want to." Hayden gave a de facto admission that this was indeed happening.

On a day when a sergeant faces trial for threatening detainees with dogs at Abu Ghraib, we have also learned about senior official involvement in the torturing of prisoners:

As the Iraq insurgency grew rapidly in the spring of 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld complained to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in the country, that he was not seeing results from the interrogations of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers.

"Why can't we figure this enemy out?" Sanchez recalled Rumsfeld asking in frustration, according to a previously unreleased transcript of a July 2005 interview by senior Army investigators. "Was there intense pressure? You bet. You bet there was intense pressure" to extract more from the interrogations, Sanchez said -- some of it self-imposed and some of it emanating from "different levels of the chain of command."

Somewhere we have lost our way as a nation when we have to become the butchers we're fighting in order to beat them, when we have to ignore the morality Americans cherish and mandate in order to satisfy some craven bloodlust, when we have to waterboard, electrify, humiliate, sodomize, kill the enemy. This doesn't result in good intelligence, and at some level I think these higher-ups at the Pentagon know that. But they don't care. They're under a lot of pressure from whoever their boss is, and they doubtlessly get some secret satisfaction from kicking some ass of the brown people (even if they weren't terrorists but innocents sold to the Americans for the ransom money). The UN has urged the closure of Guantanamo and I don't think that would matter one bit. You can open and close bases every couple months. But until we root out and remove the element that considers torturing another human being to be legitimate and warranted, nothing will change. Because in that moment, we've lost ourselves.