Noble, Noble Cruelty

The front page of The New York Times, May 14, 2009, shows a photograph of Explorer Scouts participating in a program that trains them to kill terrorists. Jennifer Steinhauer reported for the Times that the training could involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as facing down terrorists and taking out active shooters who bring gunfire and and death to college campuses. In a simulation raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout. "Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he’ll shut up." As A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy said in the article, "This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl. It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boys Scouts."

A knee in the back and taking out shooters on campus is the path to honor and bravery. Is it a path to a merit badge? In any case, violence is now noble, and its practitioners see themselves as self-sacrificing knights.

America is medieval. It is saturated with cruelty justified by paranoia and xenophobia. So saturated, in fact, that the United States government cannot face the truth that under the Bush administration, it committed crimes against humanity when it tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the aptly named "black sites" all over the world.

President Obama wants to close the book on the Bush administration, but many, myself included, want to keep it open on the page where George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condaleeza Rice are proven to be sadists in the worst tradition of Tomás Torquemada.

This late 15th-century Dominican friar, called by one contemporary, "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order," sought to protect Christianity by burning people at the stake, forcing confessions by torture, and hounding Jews and Muslims out of Spain.

Cheney, the American Torquemada, has been making the talk show circuit, hammering the heretics who still believe that torture is illegal, claiming that President Obama has made America safe for terrorists and trying to preempt any investigation of his national security activities while in office. He, along with George W. Bush, denied that the US was using torture to get intelligence from prisonders, then when the torture became public knowledge, they first said it was a matter of a few bad apples disobeying orders, then they started to justify it.

As they sought information to protect the Homeland (at least they didn’t call it the Fatherland), Bush and Cheney worked hard to be the saviors of their country. They tortured detainees to get information that they claimed would prevent another terrorist attack.

They would not tell us what information they had gained through waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, because doing so would reveal sensitive intelligence sources. Presumably that would lead to the deaths of spies loyal to us, the strengthening of terrorist cells, and finally more terrorist attacks. However, after seven years of Bush-Cheney intelligence gathering, Osama ben Laden still roams freely, and stories of American torture are used to recruit new suicide bombers for al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas.

Despite the blackout on the intelligence gathered from detainees, information about many suspected terrorists have been handed over to journalists. One example is Captain James Yee, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and Muslim Chaplin in the US Army. Yee was assigned to the Guantanamo Bay prison. In 2003, while going home on leave, he made headlines when he was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, because, according to government agents, he was carrying suspicious documents. He was then subjected to the same treatment as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: the agents shackled and blindfolded him and jammed soundproof earmuffs over his ears. He was taken to a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he spent 76 days in solitary confinement. Eventually he was charged with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. These are capital offenses.

Despite all the media hoopla and the posturing by the Bush administration and the military, no evidence against him was ever presented. In 2004 all the criminal charges were dropped, and Yee was released from custody. Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, Commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, cited national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence, and reportedly made his decision after consultation with government lawyers and intelligence officials.

Miller’s statement implied that the evidence against Yee, if presented in a court of law, would have shown him to be a dangerous spy. For our protection, the general released a person he believed to be a dangerous man back into our society.

Yee resigned from the military. His purported danger to our security was ignored by the US Army when it granted Yee an honorable discharge and awarded him a medal for "exceptional meritorious conduct."

Richard Cheney yammers on, as does Rush Limbaugh. Bush and Rumsfeld remain silent, as do the former Justice Department lawyers who worked hard to convince them that the wrongs they all committed were right. Despite the torture, the lies, the twisted logic, the romantic assertions of patriotism, Osama ben Laden is still at large.

Maybe they should turn over all anti-terrorist activities to the Boy Scouts.