See How We Are

Torture. Accountability

Most people would say torture- bad. Then you have Dick Cheney. He is fighting Senator McCain's bill that would put an end to torture. Most of us agree that accountability is good - not this administration that allows Rove to stay in his position with his security clearance when we all know he leaked classified information.

Senator McCain was on Fox News Sunday yesterday defending his bill. As someone who was actually tortured I believe he has the moral high ground here.

...how many people turn against the United States of America when they hear that we are torturing people? Chris, it's not about them. It's about us and what kind of country we are.

He is exactly right - it's about us. In WWII the Germans wanted to surrender to us instead of the Soviets because of who we were and how we treated prisoners. What have we become?

Fareed Zakaria said this:

Ask any soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, "Abu Ghraib." A few months before the scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations. Most telling, 61 percent of Iraqis polled believed that no one would be punished for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Of the 29 percent who said they believed someone would be punished, 52 percent said that such punishment would extend only to "the little people."

America washes its dirty linen in public. When scandals such as this one hit, they do sully America's image in the world. But what usually also gets broadcast around the world is the vivid reality that the United States forces accountability and punishes wrongdoing, even at the highest levels. Initially, people the world over thought Americans were crazy during Watergate, but they came to respect a rule of law so strong that even a president could not break it. But today, what angers friends of America abroad is not that abuses like those at Abu Ghraib happened. Some lapses are probably an inevitable consequence of war, terrorism and insurgencies. What angers them is that no one beyond a few "little people" have been punished, the system has not been overhauled, and even now, after all that has happened, the White House is spending time, effort and precious political capital in a strange, stubborn and surely futile quest to preserve the option to torture.

It's about us. If we have become what we are fighting against who has won the war on terror?