Why Are We Condoning Torture?

from "Commonweal,"

Lay Catholic Review of Religion, Politics and Culture, current issue online.(June 17, 2005)

ET CETERA

We Know the Facts

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and a contributor to the New York Review of Books (NYRB), has been documenting the plight of those caught up in war, and the lies told by those who wage war, for years. Commonweal readers may recognize his name from the reporting he did from Central America in the 1980s, especially his exposé of the murder of one thousand innocent peasants by American- trained members of the Salvadoran army (The Massacre at El Mozote). He has been similarly courageous in his reporting for the NYRB about the systematic torture of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere by the U.S. armed forces (Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror).

The June 23 issue of the NYRB features Danner’s commencement address to English Department students at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches. The speech is an eloquent, if disheartening, reminder of the fact that under the George W. Bush administration "our government decided to change this country from a nation that officially does not torture to one, officially, that does."

Danner reminds us that, despite the administration’s denials, the fact that torture was condoned by officials at the highest levels of government is well documented in both official Army investigations and elsewhere. "The heart of the scandal, the wrongdoing, is right out in front of us. Virtually nothing of great importance remains to be revealed," Danner writes. Is the Bush administration really above the law?

Danner quotes at length a typically disingenuous answer given by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to a question about the abuse of prisoners. "Never in my experience has frank mendacity so dominated our public life," Danner concludes.

Unlike the Watergate or Iran-Contra scandals, Danner writes, there have been no congressional or judicial investigations of this administration’s wrongdoing. "Those high officials responsible are still in office. Indeed, not only have they received no punishment; many have been promoted."

Danner asks why the American public remains so complacent about this scandal, about this betrayal of the most basic American values. It is a hard question to answer, sometimes even to pose. But someone has to keep asking.