"T" is for Torture

Manliness is not all swagger and mountain climbing.
It's also tenderness.
--Tea and Sympathy (1956)

Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly
--Martin Luther King

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
--Oscar Wilde

Well, you know, God bless him [Bush], bless his heart,
the President of the United States, a total failure,
losing all credibility with the American people on
the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject
--Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House
_______________

Per Pelosi's quote on Bush: In the South, it is customary to end the worst damnation with, "God bless," as in, "She sure has a lot of energy, god bless her." This is not a statement of flattery; it translates: "She's a is a royal pain in the ass, a tiresome prima donna, but her daddy is a deacon in the church." God bless her.

The title is not the latest Sue Grafton novel. It is the formula used by the George Bush administration to address the post 9-11 terror threat. And it is a formula inspired from the most formulaic of sources, the television show "24" starring Bad Boy for the American Way of Life, the fictional counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer. It is the ultimate in life imitating art. Tit for Tat; Torture for Terror. (The Fiction Behind Torture Policy.)

Both Jane Mayer's recent book, "The Dark Side," and Phillippe Sand's "Torture Team" reveal movers and shakers in administration policy who referred to the Bauer character as their inspiration. John Yoo, Justice Scalia, Michael Chertoff and staff JAG Diane Beaver all worshipped at Bauer's fictional feet:

According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on "24" organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show "reflects real life."

Reality and fiction is blurred in the minds of our leaders. But life and movies are not the same. Bauer is the inheritor of a great cinematic legacy of men who speak softly but carry a big stick. Like in the Old West, Bauer is judge and jury out of expediency: he regularly deals with ticking time bombs; 12 times per day in the t.v. world. He is a hero; but in real real life, the ticking time bomb is a rare event.

The problem with Bauer is that he operates outside of the law. The implication is that our judiciary and legislature is so weak or clueless that the Executive needs hand over the reigns of society to a kick-ass agent like Bauer who is unafraid of doing the dirty work. He is a one-man corrective to a dissipated, pansy-ass society. Without Jack Bauer we may as well be Switzerland, f'chrissakes!

Lithwick says Bauer's heroism, "to the extent one finds torture heroic" is that he,

"accept(s) the consequences of his decisions to break the law. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system, and accepts the consequences of the system's judgment. The "heroism" of the Bush administration's torture apologists is slightly less inspiring. None of them is willing to stand up and admit, as Bauer does, that yes, they did "whatever it takes." They instead point fingers and cry "witch hunt."

Pity the torture architects didn't look at another Kiefer Sutherland character from the movie, "To End All Wars" (2001), a true story based upon the book Through the Valley of the Kwai by Capt. Earnest Gordon. It concerns his survival of Japanese brutality during World War II while being forced to build a railroad through the Burmese jungle.

Gordon comes to the awareness that killing doesn't satisfy nor amend even grotesque offenses, and maintaining one's humanity is the only course to redemption. The U.S. as a nation does need redemption, but it does need to operate from a moral position if it is to continue to be a beacon of democracy.

We saw the film locally, introduced by the minister of the local Presbyterian church who knew Gordon for 20 years in his capacity as dean of the chapel at Princeton University. Though they were friends, he never spoke of his war experience, and she only found out about the movie by happenstance, a year after his death. Though the Christian symbolism at the end is a bit heavy-handed, it was faithful to Gordon's conversion experience following his three years as a POW.

These legal eagles who enable the interrogators to cross the line disparage the very laws and civility they are ostensibly fighting for. Ranger recently had an exchange with a retired M/SGT E-8 on the topic who said he doesn't "give a shit about the Geneva Convention." Which suggests he doesn't care about the Constitution, either.

Easy come, easy go.

--Jim and Lisa