In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.
But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics. . . .
The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked the conscience of the world. Now Cheney has publicly condoned the abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a slippery slope of lawlessness. . . .
The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed.
On Aug. 24, the United States took an important step toward moral clarity and the rule of law when a special task force recommended that in the future, the Army interrogation manual should be the single standard for all agencies of the U.S. government.
The unanimous decision represents an unusual consensus among the defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies. Members of the task force had access to every scrap of intelligence, yet they drew the opposite conclusion from Cheney's. They concluded that far from making us safer, cruelty betrays American values and harms U.S. national security.
And the 09-24-09 issue of the New York Review of Books has a hard-hitting book review essay on the recently published book by General Richard Myers, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005. The review is titled "The Complicit General." In it Phillipe Sands is harshly critical of Myers for failing to include in his book a discussion of the dissent from the military leaders, as well as the State Department, as the decisions about torture were made and carried out.
Instead, Myers writes that "most everybody involved in the decisions" shared the view that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaida. That may be technically true, since Secretary of State Colin Powell and the top military leaders' opinions were deliberately shut out of the decision-making process and therefore were not "involved in the decisions." But the very statement itself is highly deceptive and covers up what appears to be Myers' own cover-up -- that there was in fact serious dissent within the military command.
Sands also reports from an interview he conducted with Myers in 2002 that Myers mistakenly thought that the enhanced interrogation techniques in question were all in the Army Field Manual. When Sands informed him that none of them are, Myers was surprised and, according to Sands, "inadvertently reveals the full extent to which he has fallen into a fog."
That was in 2002, and yet, in his new book, Myers does not address this question and still vehemently maintains that he did not believe himself to have signed off on torture.
Myers was the military man who should have stood up to Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Yet obviously he did not. It seems questionable now that he even passed on to them the objections of the military leaders who reported to him and were charged with giving their assessments.
Not that it would have mattered to dick and rummy.
What irony. We put civilian government officials in charge of making the major decisions about war in order to put restraints on those whose job it is to fight. Yet in this situation, it was the military leaders (including Colin Powell, though he was then part of the civilian force) who warned against torture, and civilians -- without military any service time among them -- who insisted on it.
Ralph
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