In 2004, after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, you told al-Hurra, the U.S.-sponsored Arabic television station, � ���"This is not America. America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect.� �� � You went on to say: � ���"The people of Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent.� �� �
Oh my goodness, you don't mean a politician could be . . . gasp . . . hypocritical?
Then how could you have authorized them? Maybe it was unclear to you at the time that most of the gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraib depicted techniques that you and your defense secretary authorized. This is an explanation in some ways, even if it is not an excuse. Photos can jar us into recognition of reality when words fail. Most of us hearing of � ���"stress positions� �� � or � ���"long-time standing� �� � or � ���"harsh techniques� �� � do not visualize what these actually are. They sound mild enough in the absence of further inquiry. Those photographs did us all a terrible favor in that respect: they removed any claim of deniability as to what these techniques mean. And yet you responded to Abu Ghraib by extending the techniques revealed there and codifying them in law, in the Military Commissions Act, for use by the CIA. Your administration ordered up memos in your second term to perpetuate these abuses. It is hard to escape the conclusion that you were dissembling in your initial claim of abhorrence and shock; or were in denial; or were not in control of your own administration.
It is important to note here that Bush had command responsibility and Constitutional responsibility regardless of failures to "control" his subordinates. He did not investigate or punish. He protected, concealed, and lied about what was happening.
I don't believe you were lying. I believe you were genuinely horrified. But that means you now need to confront the denial that allowed you somehow to ignore what you directly authorized and commanded: using dogs to terrorize prisoners; stripping detainees naked and hooding them; isolating people in windowless cells for weeks and even months on end; freezing prisoners to near-death and reviving them and repeating the hypothermia; contorting prisoners into stress positions that create unbearable pain in the muscles and joints; cramming prisoners into upright coffins in painful positions with minimal air; near-drowning, on a waterboard, of human beings� ��"in one case 183 times� ��"even after they have cooperated with interrogators. Those Abu Ghraib prisoners standing on boxes, bent over with their cuffed hands tied behind them to prison bars? You authorized that. The prisoner being led around by Lynndie England on a leash, like a dog? You authorized that, too, and enforced it in at least one case, that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, in Guantà �namo Bay.
Yes, Bush could have been horrified, although I doubt he was. But he most certainly was lying when he said the United States did not torture.
In defending these policies since you left office, you have insisted that all of these techniques were legal. But one of the key lawyers who provided your legal defense, John Yoo, is on record as saying that your inherent executive power allowed you to order the legal crushing of an innocent child's testicles if you believed that it could get intelligence out of his father. Yoo also favored a definition of torture that allowed literally anything to be done to a helpless prisoner short of causing death or the permanent loss of a major organ. The Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture offer blanket legal bans on anything that even looks like torture. Yoo set up a mirror image: a blanket legal permission to do anything abusive to a prisoner, hedged only by the need not to kill him. If that is your defense of the legality of torture, it is a profoundly weak one.
But leave the question of legality aside. Skilled lawyers can argue anything. Examine the moral and ethical question. Could any moral person who saw the abuse of human beings at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Camp Cropper, Camp Nama, and uncounted black sites across the globe and at sea believe it was in compliance with America's � ���"respect� �� � and � ���"law and freedom� �� �? As president, your job was not to delegate moral responsibility for these acts, but to take moral responsibility for them. You said a decade ago: � ���"Once you put your hand on the Bible and swear in [to public office], you must set a high standard and be responsible for your own actions.� �� �
The point of this letter, Mr. President, is to beg you to finally take responsibility for this stain on American honor and this burden on a war we must win. It is to plead with you to own what happened under your command, and to reject categorically the phony legalisms, criminal destruction of crucial evidence, and retrospective rationalizations used to pretend that none of this happened. It happened. You once said, � ���"I'm worried about a culture that says " � ��˜If you've got a problem blame somebody else.'� �� � I am asking you to stop blaming others for the consequences of decisions you made.
In other words, turn yourself in.
What are you responsible for, exactly? Books have been written on this.
Sullivan goes on to detail at length in passages I'm omitting, some of the torture Bush authorized. This is all very well written and someone should read it to the former president. At some point, however, a member of the Bush family is not going to be willing to trouble his pretty little mind with this. A prison cell would focus Dubya's concentration. Sullivan then concludes that there is no role in restoring our republic for its citizens or our representatives or our laws. Only the former dictator himself can set things right through his own benevolence:
Only you can do what's needed. Only you can move this country forward by taking full responsibility for the past and supporting the current president in his abolition of torture and abuse and in his conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The decisions you made were complex; it may well be that you only subsequently grasped the full import of the actions you took in good faith; that you were misled about, or misunderstood, what � ���"harsh interrogation� �� � meant. All presidents are human, and taking responsibility does not mean self-flagellation.
And what happens when the next president disagrees with these two? What deters Sullivan's greatest fear of repetition of these crimes? The fear of having to say "sorry"? Should we apply that punishment to lesser crimes as well? Sullivan then goes on to suggest falsely, and contradicting his own evidence, that Bush can apologize without actually admitting guilt, since we can all pretend that this president did not know his subordinates were committing crimes.
The model is Ronald Reagan, who denied he had ever traded arms for hostages in Iran but eventually realized that that was indeed the consequence of the actions he took, the men he appointed, and the policy he pursued. Reagan's speech to the nation on this matter was, in my view, his greatest, because it revealed humility and integrity. � ���"First, let me say,� �� � he told us in 1987,
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