thanks to
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wcg for
this link to a piece by a former Commandant of the Marine Corps and a former CENTCOM commander on how we need to respect *our own* moral standards and not simply sacrifice them whenever we find ourselves in a difficult struggle
thanks to
tacnukesoul for
this piece on how simply playing three-card monte with prisoners isn't the same thing as "closing" Gitmo, and
this piece suggesting the former president still has something he needs to say to the US people and to the world.
I'm surprised I haven't heard much discussion of
a major shift in US security policy. I guess part of it is that the people I work with day to day are more IT people than policy people. And that the rest of the office is focused on other things. Still, it's a mjor shift (IMO in the right direction).
ETA: Andrew Sullivan's letter to Mr Bush is long. The passages describing torture are difficult to read. But this is at the core of it, for me:
You have also claimed that defending the security of the United States was the paramount requirement of your oath of office. It wasn’t. The oath you took makes a critical distinction: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It is the Constitution you were sworn to defend, not the country. To abandon the Constitution to save the country from jihadist terrorists was not your job. Yes, of course your role as commander in chief required you to take national security extremely seriously, but not at the expense of your core duty to protect the Constitution and to sincerely respect—not opportunistically exploit—the rule of law.
And the core value of the Constitution, and of your own rhetorical record, is freedom. ... Because the war you declared has no geographic boundaries and no time limit, the power of the executive to detain and torture without bringing charges—the power you introduced—is not just a war power. Because the war on terror is for all practical purposes permanent, the executive power to torture is a constitutional power that will become entrenched during peacetime.
... by condoning torture, by allowing it to take place, and by your vice president’s continuing defense and championing of torture as compatible with American traditions, you have done enormous damage to America’s role as a beacon of freedom and to the rule of law.
America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men. The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture, or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moral and spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great a distortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam. To believe that because the American government is better than Saddam and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Americans are somehow immune to the same temptations of power that all flesh is heir to, is itself a deep and dangerous temptation.
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