Nibbling away at Liberty

“The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.”
- Edward Burke – letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol 1777.

“By no later than the summer of 2004 the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decide to torture prisoners and how they went about it.
- Mark Danner - New York Review of Books.

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money] Croupier: Your winnings, sir. Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
- From the movie Casablanca released in 1942

Like Captain Renault standing in the middle of Rick’s café, Americans are “shocked” that we tortured detainees. They are shocked that the torture went on before the “legal” opinions justifying such actions were written, and they are shocked at the extent and variety of methods used.

Hard on the heels of the April 22 release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees, new memos are coming to light detailing the sloppy and incompetent thinking of Bush Administration lawyers that enabled such torture to occur.

A lot of ink has been spilled on how torture cost America its moral authority in the world. Few have mentioned what it says about ourselves that we let it go on for so long with so little comment.

As John Danner noted, Americans have known about the torture of detainees for five years. After all, in 2006 a major news magazine ran a cover story on whether or not we should torture people. At the time this struck me as an alarm bell that America was losing its way. The sad part was the fact that this cover story did not stir any controversy. It seemed much like getting no response after running a cover story about whether or not bank robbery should be legal in an economic downturn.

Then there was the exchange between Sen. Kennedy and then Atty. Gen. Designate Alberto Gonzales in his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Gonzales made the argument if an action didn’t kill a prisoner it wasn’t torture. I watched mesmerized as Sen. Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate, seriously discuss with a future Attorney General of the United States, whether or not breaking a detainee’s arm was torture. What was more amazing was C-Span was the only network that carried this exchange.

At that time our leaders were unwilling to stand up for what was right because they felt it was more important to toe the party line. The political opposition did not stand up for what was right because they did not want to seem “soft on terrorism,” and risk their political futures.

Americans again seem to have lost the spring that drives the motor of our moral outrage. Without that outrage we are pawns to whatever scheme our government wants to implement, as our government knows it will never be held accountable.
Our acquiescence to the torture of detainees is a moral stain as deep as the stain of Jim Crow or the WWII Japanese internment camps.

We shrug off torture casually in the same way people at the beginning of the 20th Century shrugged off lynching. “Maybe” they said “we lynched a few innocent people by mistake – but heck we were bound to have hung a few guilty ones as well.” The violence became so prevalent and accepted that lynching became social events for the whole town, and on the floor of the US Senate, some Senators defended the “right” of their States’ citizens to take the law in their own hands and execute people at will.

Many have argued that while Obama works to fix the economy or reform health care he doesn’t have time for this “distraction.”

They are wrong.

To ignore torture and “move on” as both McCain and Obama have suggested is to turn around and retrace the steps we have slowly but surely taken on the road to justice.

It is just as important to fix our moral compass as it is to fix our economy. It is just as important to provide moral courage as to provide health care coverage. Otherwise the next generation will look at us with the same shudder of revulsion we feel when we see pictures of Manzanar or old photographs of smiling people posing with a dangling corpse.

If we do not hold both the Bush Administration officials who designed these programs, and Congressional leaders who acquiesced to them to account, our liberty will be “nibbled away for expedients, and by parts.”