Bill Kristol wrote a column worth reading in the New York Times this week. He talks about a Fourth of July ritual among friends of actually reading the entire Declaration of Independence. He writes,
So the signers of the declaration made the bold and doubtful choice
for independence. Their fellow citizens ratified the choice. But they
might have been slow to act if the worthies had not moved first.
For, as the declaration itself notes, “all experience hath shown, that
mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than
to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are
accustomed.” The people are conservative. Liberty sometimes requires
the bold leadership of a few individuals.
How an intellectual who can produce such a cogent, even moving, affirmation of American liberty can also support the Bush administration of torture and lethal blunder escapes me. And yes, Major Irony Alert. But it’s worth reading.
For my part, I recommend spending the day with Washington’s Crossing, David Hackett Fisher’s magnificent retelling of perhaps the pivotal campaign in the American Revolution. It will make your heart soar patriotically. And when he writes how George Washington banned brutal treatment of British prisoners, so as to set an example of the American "new order of the ages," well, that will make you weep at what we have lost. At least for now.
It appears Kristol is substituting Neocons for the Founding Fathers. Only a select group of right-wing intellectuals knows what’s best for the world. And the capital of this world is Jerusalem.
Excellent point about the treatment of British prisoners during the Revolution, and yet another irony in this most ironic of ages. That the United States of America now deems torture an acceptable way to preserve what we stand for — and defends it with the sham excuse that this is a “different” kind of war requiring different methods — really does make you weep for what we’ve lost.
Alexander Orlov and others wrote many decades ago about methods used in the Moscow show-trials to extract absurd confessions from Stalin’s political rivals in the 1930s while leaving them pretty enough to appear before the cameras.
These include — surprise, surprise — simulated drowning, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for long periods of time, and other methods we have heard so much about. Repeated over a period of months the prisoners were exhausted and driven to despair.
Chronic sleep deprivation is particularly diabolical. Anyone who claims this is not torture because it does not involve hot irons has never experienced it. Combined with other methods such as disinformation and threats (such as of further mistreatment, arrest of one’s family members, etc.) it often results in confessions simply to end the torture.
One such individual’s implication of others, is then used to obtain further confessions. The result is an absurd network of pseudo-corroboration that cannot be challenged due to claims of classified methods and sources.