What's all this fuss about torture? ("What fuss?" you say? Well, that's a good question too)

DWT has invited me to toss my occasional two cents' worth in the DWT blogpot (producing what may be an odd metaphorical stew). We go back a ways, DWT and I, perhaps most significantly to the years we spent passing together through James Madison High School in Brooklyn, NY. I always like to recall the stirring quote from our namesake engraved so proudly over the main entrance:

EDUCATION IS THE TRUE FOUNDATION Of CIVIL LIBERTY.

Then I recall that we students were never allowed to use the main entrance.

I like to think I would have as soft a spot for James Madison if I'd gone instead to, say, Herbert Hoover High, which I suppose would have borne some stimulating exhortation like "Depression? What depression?"

"Education is the true foundation of civil liberty." I don't know when or where Madison said it (or if he really and truly did), but it still gives me a tingle. It seems to me if anything more inspirational in the year 2005, when the sentiment isn't merely disregarded by a country that distrusts people who are too smart but is treated with outright contempt by the unholy coalition of far-right-wing wackos that's taken control of our public discourse.

I thought about this when DWT mentioned that one of the requests he's gotten most recently has been for more on torture. Only I found myself wondering, What more do we need to know?

We know that torture has been a crucial instrument of Bush administration foreign policy at least since 9/11, in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and then Iraq--not to mention the even torture-friendlier countries who accept our torture subjects in the charming practice of "rendition." Okay, sure, there's always more to learn, as when we learned recently that the U.S. is operating an international chain of Soviet-style gulags, even using some erstwhile Soviet facilities. Goodness knows what more we may learn, under the heading of "nuts 'n' bolts," but we've known the essentials--certainly all we really needed to know--for ages. We've known that from the start Vice President Dick Cheney has been the captain of Team Torture, abetted by his so-called alter ego Irving ("Lewis") Libby and the cabal of neocon sociopaths who determined that we don't need to follow no stinkin' Geneva Conventions.

We've even known the indentities of some of the "framers" of the documents underpinning the administration's pro-terror policy. People like then-White House Counsel Al Gonzalez, who was subsequently promoted to become attorney general. (If Al now appears stalled in the Justice Department, unnominatable to the Supreme Court seat he seemed destined for, it's surely less for his advocacy of torture than for the embarrassing tinge of softness on abortion in his brief judicial history.) People like then-Deputy Assistant AG John Yoo, who went on to a cushy law professorship at Berkeley and has now written a book promulgating a philosophy of foreign policy built on such nuttiness. And people like Cheney stooge David Addington, who has now been promoted to the chief-of-staff portion of the portfolio of the indicted Irving "Lewis." It's like our Dick was rubbing our noses in his undiminished commitment to torturing the bejezus out of suspected terrorists and the far more numerous hapless souls who've been caught up in our blunderingly Keystone Kops-like antiterrorist dragnets.

We also know that everybody, his brother and his sister has tried to penetrate the apparently impenetrable skulls of Cheney, Defense Secretary "Doomsday" Don Rumsfeld and the other torture enthusiasts--people from the State Department, the military and the intelligence services, past and present. People who actually deal with the real world, and understand that torture produces notoriously poor-quality "intelligence." (It appears that torture subjects develop a talent for saying what the tortureers want to hear.) That it exposes our soldiers and intelligence agents abroad to the same treatment, which is why the U.S. has traditionally afforded the full protections of the Geneva Conventions. That it does simply hideous and virtually irreparable damage to the image of the U.S. in the rest of the world. In common with so much else in this administration's foreign policy, it ensures a limitless supply of future terrorists.

(There is irony here. The Constitution works so hard to make sure that the U.S. military is totally under civilian command, and frequently in our history it has been left to the civilian government to rein in the military command. Now it's the people who've been out in the field, in both the military and the intellgence services, who have provided voices of reason to ocontrast with the militaristic looniness of the administration.)

All of this without even mentioning, as the right-wing hard-liners know we liberal wusses inevitably will, that torture is icky.

Torture is what thugs and despots do. You know, the minions of Hitler and Stalin and Pinochet and their brethren. Torture in the furtherance of "freedom" is, shall we say, problematic.

All of this is known, and has been for some time. The facts aren't even much in dispute. So why hasn't it all caused a scandal to bring this government down?

It might be argued that the subject is too abstract, too far from the daily concerns of average Americans. But then we had the short-lived Abu Ghraib Follies. Suddenly there were PICTURES! Aha, the yawning TV people pricked up their ears--pictures might make for ratings-grabbing TV. Only the pictures were, for the most part, too revolting, too humiliating, even too unreproducible for widespread circulation, and they dropped amazingly quickly out of view, not to mention out of consciousness.

Oh, there was a lot of legalistic skirmishing about how far up the chain of command the abuses represented by those horrifying pictures went. But there was never any real question, was there? Weren't the "intelligence-gathering" techniques exemplified by Abu Ghraib the whole point of the intellectual framework for torture that had been hammered out at the highest levels of the administration?

So why was there so little outcry? So little demand to pursue the scandal wherever it led? Partly, of course, because the administration had taken pains to make sure we were at war, knowing that the American people historically ask few questions while wars are in progress. Partly too, large numbers of Americans just didn't want to know any more about the shocking details revealed in those pictures, taken so terrifyingly casually and in such terrifying quantity. And then, for many other Americans, as Karl Rove could no doubt have explained, making torture a formal instrument of American policy didn't really raise issues. Many Americans felt more secure with the (erroneous) belief that the administration was being so resourceful and tough in advancing our "national security."

The reality, of course, is that it would be hard to imagine policies better designed than the administration's to weaken our security, to give aid and comfort, not to mention moral and material support, to the enemies of our concept of "freedom."

Now THERE is a story. If only someone could figure out how to interest the American public in it. I think James Madison would have grasped the problem, and the solution. But then, I don't think Madison was prepared for the likes of George W. and Dick and Don, and Karl and Irving, and Rush and Sean and Annie and Bill O.