A recurring theme to the emails I have been receiving in response to today’s posts on torture is that Americans, myself included, are naive to think that the U.S. has not engaged in torture, directly and indirectly, for decades prior to the Bush Administration.
This email from TPM Reader CH, a former interrogator himself, probably best captures that point of view:
We can talk all day about what training the military receives on Geneva Conventions, but at the heart of the matter is how people get around them. That is, in my experience, any set of rules that are established have loopholes and it ends up being the job of some to find those loopholes so that we can exploit them and still retain a level of plausible deniability as to whether or not certain actions are illegal. . . .
It’s not as if the US has never had a major role in the darkest circles of military actions knowing full well that these violations would be viewed as a violation of something idealists hold up as an example of ‘human dignity’, like the Geneva Conventions. In fact, I would argue that we’ve played in these circles all along and anyone thinking otherwise is only fooling themselves. Abu Ghraib and other events were not anomalies as much as they were unintended glimpses (due to private contractor mistakes) into these darker circles that were then broadcast to the world giving Americans and others a look at what ‘we’ do.
Essentially, this is a microcosm for what has arguably been going on for decades and for what the Bush Administration has used more ‘openly’ than their predecessors…but only ‘openly’ because people are finally coming around to the realism that often governs our geopolitical actions and are being exposed one way or another to certain dark truths. We may not like these truths, and we can act to change them if we want. However, so long as people continue to cite things like the Geneva Conventions and argue in ways that pretend as if we live in an ideal world and that ‘we’ are virtuous actors in said world, well, we are only going to help in perpetuating the bubble that so many of ‘us’ have been living in for so long. . . .
Americans are not trained to operate within that world and while naive idealists who want to hold Geneva up as something that is not ambiguous or even out-dated are trying to do good by holding people accountable for their morally ambiguous and/or illegal actions…they are only reinforcing the bubble as we know it. The bubble, with Bush’s Administration, has been burst. Why do we want to crawl back inside?
