IMPEACHING BUSH AND CHENEY HAS NEVER ONLY BEEN ABOUT RETRIBUTION

Life during wartime-- in wingnut Andre Zucca's gay Paris

Barring a fascist takeover, 9 months from now Bush will be packing up his crap, selling the stage prop "ranch" in Crawford and moving in to a mansion in the Turtle Creek area of Dallas-- or, if he gets indicted for war crimes, to his estate in the desolate, inaccessible Paraguayan Chaco. One of the reasons-- and there were many-- why I was so enthusiastic about our newest Blue America candidate, Texas' Larry Joe Doherty, is because, as an attorney, he understands why it is essential, for the sake of our nation's history (and soul) to hold Bush, Cheney and their cronies accountable for their criminal behavior. No retroactive immunity or preemptive pardons will ever sit well with this guy.

History's judgment is important, if for no other reason, because it is what we leave posterity-- aside from Bush's multi-generational crippling debts. There is a great danger that future administrations could attempt to build on the tyrannical precedents lain down by this Regime.

In France during World War II, much of the political right collaborated with the Nazis, some, in fact, with great enthusiasm. Many rightist French may not have appreciated that German invaders were occupying their nation but they sure did like everything else fascism and the Nazis stood for. After the war, there were mixed responses. Many people are aware that women who were intimate with Nazis had their heads shaved and were branded "whores," and there were some high profile instances of retribution against collaborationists. But, there was also a heartfelt desire to "heal the wounds" and there was an awful lot of winking and nodding. The political right was soon in the saddle again.

Yesterday I found a fascinating story in the Guardian by Charles Bremner about a Parisian photo exhibition that purports to examine life during wartime. The exhibition is the work of wingnut Andre Zucca, who actively collaborated with-- and worked for-- the Nazi occupiers. The vision of the occupation it paints is one of bland normalcy and it has shocked many Parisians who lived through the brutal and devastating occupation-- at least ones who were not right wing traitors-- or who understand enough about history to be offended.

Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor, ordered a notice, in French and English, to be handed out at the door of the municipal exhibition of colour photographs that have stirred ghosts that Paris preferred to forget. The 270 never-published pictures avoid the “reality of occupation and its tragic aspects," says the warning.

In the French collective memory, early 1940s Paris was a black-and-white hell of hunger, Nazi round-ups, humiliation and resistance. Films and books have in recent decades modified the cliché. The breathtaking colour series by André Zucca, a French photographer, show as never before a gay Paris that got on with life without great hardship.

Well-dressed citizens shop on the boulevards and stroll in the parks; young people crowd nightclubs; bikini-clad women bathe in the fashionable Deligny pool. The terraces of familiar cafés are crowded and commuters with briefcases march into the Métro.

The differences are the absent traffic, the Wehrmacht uniforms and red swastikas hanging from the grandest facades. In one sinister picture-- taken in the street beside the gallery-- an old woman wears a yellow Star of David, the insignia that Jews were forced to display. According to critics, the organisers at the Paris Historical Library neglected to make it clear that Zucca, a respected prewar photographer, was working for the German propaganda machine.

Pierre Assouline, a writer, said in Le Monde: “In the shadows of these same streets, they were dying of hunger and cold. Raids and torture were taking place. Here we see only relaxation, joie de vivre, the nonchalance of a kind of happiness.” Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor in charge of culture, said that he found the exhibition “embarrassing, ambiguous and poorly explained."

Bush and "the principles" are as guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as any Nazi. All of us are implicated and complicit in their crimes. For the sake of the country we love, it is imperative they be held accountable. Today, the day after Bremner's story about the art show, the Guardian ran a book review by American attorney Ken Gude, Tortured Explanations. The book is Torture Team by Philippe Sands and Gude is obviously pained by what has transpired and points out that this is not the work of the America he knows and loves. "[N]ever before in the modern history of the United States has there been an officially sanctioned, government-wide system of inflicting torture and abuse on detainees. Until now."

Pointing to a lengthy and chilling excerpt from Torture Team, Gude emphasizes that "figuring out how and why all of this transpired is vitally important to ensuring it never happens again."

Looking back on these actions in hindsight, it is easy to see the errors of judgment. But it is important, however, to try and put yourself in these officials' shoes, feeling what must have been an awesome sense of personal failure at the loss of 3,000 lives on their watch and a deep sense of responsibility to prevent any future attacks. Initially, you must to have some sympathy for the incredible strain they would have been under. But as the catalogue of catastrophic decisions piled up, that feeling evaporates. We are left to conclude that these were the wrong people in the wrong jobs at the wrong time.

From Sands' and other retellings, we know that the policymakers who guided this debacle were victims of their preconceptions. They knew Mohammed al-Qahtani, Detainee 063, was supposed to be the elusive 20th hijacker on 9/11. Since he is the only surviving al-Qaida member of that plot, and everyone believes we are going to be attacked again, al-Qahtani must know all details of those other plots. Since he must know those things, and up to that point he had not told his interrogators anything about them, the interrogation techniques must not be tough enough. Nobody asked if the poor return was due to inexperienced interrogators that were mostly US Army Reservists with little or no training. Never was it even considered that al-Qahtani just might not know that much in the first place. No. He is al-Qaida, so he knows, we have to get tougher.

If one thing alone stands out from Sands' account it should be that the people who cooked up this scheme had no experience with interrogation and were certainly not experts on al-Qaida. Intelligence interrogation is difficult, complex work but not for these guys. Getting inspiration from the television show 24? Seriously? This is how we threw out 150 years of military culture, history, and training? After that foray into fiction predictably failed to produce the desired results, we called in the KGB. The CIA and Pentagon colluded to reverse-engineer the interrogation resistance training given to US airmen at high risk of capture by the Soviets, employing techniques based on the old KGB playbook. Add to that the recent ABC News investigation that uncovered dozens of meetings of the so-called National Security Council "Principals"-- Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Ashcroft-- who micromanaged the interrogations of specific suspects from the Situation Room in the White House. This would be a comedy of errors if it wasn't so tragic.

Sands' points the blame at the lawyers-- Beaver at Gitmo and her superior Haynes at the Pentagon-- but only tangentially fingering the one most responsible, John Yoo from the office of legal counsel in the Justice Department. It was Yoo's legal advice that for an act to be torture it would have to cause pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Under that definition almost anything would be legal.

Being a lawyer himself, it is understandable that Sands' would focus on the lawyers involved and single them out for particular scrutiny. Perhaps because I am not, I think the ultimate culpability lies elsewhere. For me, whether this kind of interrogation meets the legal definition of torture (I think it does) or whether or not it is constitutional (it obviously is not) is entirely beside the point. Caught up in a debate about whether they could do something, no one ever asked if they should do it. The United States should not be in the torture business, full stop. For those who want to go on to the merits, mountains of evidence demonstrates that abusive interrogations produce unreliable and often false information and are a poor substitute for a carefully constructed humane interrogation program. The lawyers only enabled this decision, they didn't make it. President Bush rejected the moral and practical arguments in favour of advice from John Yoo, Jack Bauer and Joe Stalin. That is how a young woman from small town West Virginia ended up dragging an Iraqi man around on the ground by leash.

Tomorrow's NY Times voices some moderate displeasure as well, and there's even a hint that some kind of action needs to be taken some time. "At this point it seems that getting answers will have to wait, at least, for a new Congress and a new president. Ideally, there would be both truth and accountability. At the very minimum the public needs the full truth. Some will call this a backward-looking distraction, but only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again."