[NYTr] Frank Rich: The 'Good Germans' Among Us

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

The New York Times - Oct 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html

The 'Good Germans' Among Us

By FRANK RICH

"BUSH lies" doesn't cut it anymore. It's time to confront the darker
reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department
of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard
response: "This government does not torture people." Of course, it all
depends on what the meaning of "torture" is. The whole point of these
memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep
pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales,
we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since
photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As
Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The
Sunday Times of London, America's "enhanced interrogation" techniques
have a grotesque provenance: "Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or
intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo
to describe what became known as the 'third degree.' It left no marks.
It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep
deprivation."

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi
(Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress
squawk. The debate is labeled "politics." We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story
of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me
cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights
atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism
than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own
abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned
down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On
this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed
the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad's Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were
killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been
implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has
been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater's sugar daddy
for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won't even share its
investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi
government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a
Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and
enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in
North Carolina. This is a plot out of "Syriana" by way of "Chinatown."
There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new
bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have
little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of
Iraq - and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the
recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued
the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second
only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our
own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war
where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put
Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least
culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by
a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to
stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the
press - the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks,
balances and due diligence of the administration's case - failed to do
their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more
objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a
pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that
have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were
using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a
soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight
months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor
procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year,
four years after the war's first casualties, did a Washington Post
investigation finally focus the country's attention on the shoddy
treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at
Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four
Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks
before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few
questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors
in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security
personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned.
Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off
the books.

It was always the White House's plan to coax us into a blissful
ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual
Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of
photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our
passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that
knows there's no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily
persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax
cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the
table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to
finesse the overstretched military's holes. With the war's entire
weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1
percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other
way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja
this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of
the war's failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our
alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to
contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors.
Contractors remain a bellwether of the war's progress today. When
Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe,
American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified
Green Zone. So much for the surge's great "success" in bringing
security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq
and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to
come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to
the military chain of command, can simply "drop their guns and go home."
Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those "who deliver their
bullets and beans."

This potential scenario is just one example of why it's in our national
self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to
ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal
contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing
Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving
as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square
to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in
our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after
"Mission Accomplished," for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure
to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even
now, despite his repeated declaration that "America will not abandon
the Iraqi people," he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the
tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number
of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do
so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized
than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II
veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a
top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war.
Until now, they have kept silent, but America's recent record prompted
them to talk to The Washington Post.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or
Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90,
an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's
deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that
he "never laid hands on anyone" in his many interrogations, adding,
"I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in
our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we
resemble those "good Germans" who professed ignorance of their own
Gestapo. It's up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to
challenge administration policy every day. Let the war's last
supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left
to lose except whatever remains of our country's good name.