[Newspoetry] Breaking News? Yet Another Jeremiad?

[DL Emerick]

Bush administration and major media conspire to obscure issues of human
rights abuses.

For instance, even the New York Times article implies, baldly, that the CIA
was pressured into adopting "harsh" interrogation - and that the CIA
officers were "nervous" and uncertain as to just how far they could go,
especially when it came to combining "harsh" techniques.

More critically, the article contains the most probable big lie of all.  The
article asserts that the CIA did not know how to conduct such harsh
interrogations techniques - and that it had to improvise, based on what it
had learned, variously, from such "well-respected" sources as (a) the old
Soviet tyranny, (b/c) the tyrannies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and (d) that
human rights fiasco down in Peru.

Somehow, the old School for Americas is not mentioned.  Somehow, the
persistent whisper of history, from people of third world countries are
dismissed -- the widespread reports have always too often been discounted as
"mere" rumors, by the counter-intelligence operations gangs - whose aims are
ever to obscure the truth by providing "secret access" to officials and
their alleged policy making processes, in notorious clever background
campaigns of disinformation.

That whisper is too soft a term for the undertones of those "rumors".  The
proper terms border upon whimpers and moans, of anguish and trauma, at
having been the subject of a "torture" probe's "harsh" interrogations.

THE BIGGEST LIE, though, IS FAR SIMPLER.  Even now, the major media are
focusing, verbally, on the term "torture" - and discussing matters mostly as
a matter of whether the US definition comports with the understanding of
that term as "pain resembling what its object might experience were it to be
suffering from organ failures.".  How neat and clean!!!  How precise and
antiseptic!!!  How obfuscating!!!

THE CRITICAL OBSCURATION HERE IS THE CONSIDERABLE ATTEMPT TO STEER PUBLIC
ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE OTHER STANDARDS OF HUMAN DECENCY FOR THE TEXTS
EXPRESSLY ALSO BAN CRUEL AND INHUMANE TREATMENT OF PRISONERS.
Disinformation campaigns work to contain "damage", when they can't prevent
it, by shifting to some extreme matter.  The White House today, for
instance, repeated the empty remarks of Bush, to the effect that the
President has declared torture abhorrent and does not [PUBLICLY] condone its
use.  But, we have seen all too often that whatever Bush says PUBLICLY
better taken as a falsehood, because his secret classified directives all
too often give the lie, as to the policy that he asserts, publicly.

Worse yet, the newly revealed existence of the secret policy memos has not
yet led to the precise publication of any of them - which event would be
"contrary to law" because they have been classified, to hide their monstrous
character from the world and the American people.  Their purported character
resembles nothing so much as the secret policy sessions of the Eichmann
group in Germany some 70 years ago.  The few officials today, who have
spoken out, have talked of the need for moral courage and of moral
character, to oppose the seductive wiles of power, the urgencies of official
action, which are always the "innocent" ways of the most profound evils.
Evil is most powerful, said Arendt, precisely when it wears the most banal
of faces, routinizing the performance of evil, by the lower echelons.

Moral courage and moral character, my friends, is not something that you can
find, by examining your own actions, according to your own moral
convictions, introspectively.  Levinas, among others, has denounced such
introspective ethics.  Ethics, he says, lies between us, when we regard each
other physically, as mutually frail human beings who are, sadly, inevitably
alien to one another, but wholly dependent as well, for our mutual survival
even unto our joys in living.  The Levinasian Philosophy of the Other would
always have us look at the other, face-to-face.

The standard for human decency is not simply a limited question of
circumstance, of how you would apply some abstract principle, of mutuality,
of how you might treat another person, like yourself.  It is, says Levinas,
the question of how you actually do treat another person, even though you
know that he is quite different and highly unique, just as you believe
yourself to be such.  This question leads us to regard the person, the
difference of being, and not to some error-prone worship of the abstract
principle of equality - for that way tends toward the most insidious of all
standards for standards, to think that we are following the Kantian doctrine
of treating others by a just law, on the grounds of formal equality, as
evidenced in claims of mutuality, always hypothetical to be sure.

Let us look in the face of those that we have treated - to see if we have
treated them harshly, inhumanely, cruelly.

When we do, we might see that the evil effects of the worst - which is the
absoluteness of "torture" itself -- can not be confined to the narrow
momentary questions of a tiny duration - as to whether the person subjected
to extreme pain might die, there and then, or come close to death.  No, such
narrowness is contrary to all that medicine has learned about the long-term
impact of injuries.  Yet, even here, in the very worst of cases, the
obscuration continues - for the purported legal standard pretends that the
effects of "torture" events never causes deep traumas or serious
psychological injuries.  These injuries truly never heal and often seriously
impair the later life, if any, of the person surviving the "moment" of
torture.

Indeed, what would be your reaction, if you were tortured - or "merely"
treated indecently, by such harsh interrogation techniques - especially when
you knew subjectively that you possessed no information of any character,
vital or otherwise?  Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been arrested by the
US and its agents, in massive security sweeps, in the last few weeks.  The
momentary success of such random arrests necessarily may have reduced,
somewhat, but quite incidentally, the alleged levels of violence in Iraq.
However, from a human rights point of view, you would have to ask, and even
to see what is happening to these tens of thousands of people.

This is the moment of torture and human rights abuse, seeking its small
moments of temporality, lowering the standards of humanity, for a gain that
can not be sustained, at the price of inflicting larger long term losses,
soon afterwards.  I would predict, I am almost certain, prophetically, that
when these tens of thousands are released, in the coming months, the levels
of violence in Iraq will reach even higher and more deadly levels.  That is
what happens when you torture people - when you subject them to harsh and
indecent treatments - when you treat them like objects and not like human
beings.

Common Humanity may be a high standard, but we will never reach it, nor even
come nearer to it, in Iraq, or in America or anywhere in this world, by
increasing our practices that are antithetical to it.

This is the argument of the Bush lawyers.  They are generally morally
confused about the standard for the rule of law.  The standard for law lies
in the difference between private opinion and public opinion.  Bush's
lawyers have constantly asserted - solely on the basis of their own present
holding of power, alone -- that their private opinion, as to what the law
ought to be, is the law that is now ruling.  They have, in short, no moral
faith in the rule of law, as that which might be transcendent, above all
people, and their own private opinions.  In the hubris of power, they have
effaced the law, obscured its features, and arrogantly inserted their own
chosen images as the proper idols to be worshipped.  But, law is never so
accidental, never so speculative - though ever tyranny would have you
believe that only its claims to power matter.

Law is not the personal whimsy of kings and other such tyrants, of men like
Saddam Hussein, Stalin or Bush.  These latter are men who inspire terror,
who rule by fostering fears.  They would ever hold humanity down, to glory
in the vanities at their own elevations and personal powers.  Such is
foolish vastness of moral evil in all their empires.  Yet, it is their
ideology that ever commonly pervades the many who now would rule in their
name.  Such is the sad moral tale of the Bush war gang's criminal
conspiracy, against Iraqis, or Americans, even against all humanity.