In Which I Go Out on a Limb, and Oppose Evil

A little earlier this evening, I happened to catch David Brooks discussing on NewsHour the Senate’s rejection of the Bush Administration’s efforts to seek wide latitude to interrogate terrorism suspects under a “reinterpretation” of the Geneva Conventions. Brooks had this to say about the conflict between the White House and the Senators who refuse to go along:

It's happening, first, because, despite best efforts over months, they haven't been able to come together, in part because the White House has not done a good job over the years of having congressional relations, but in part because both McCain and Bush feel this in their core, McCain, that you don't torture, Bush, that I have to prepare the way for presidents 50 years from now to do what they need to do. [snip]

I think they think, a, it's a matter of national honor, national pride. This goes to the core of a lot of people. And a lot of people may think what I think, is that maybe you do get some information out of torture, but there's an ideological conflict, and it's important to have a little moral clarity in the world, in a little moral standing in the world to fight the broader war.

Did I just hear David Brooks say that torture is an ideological matter? Oh of course not. Surely he knows better. But then he went on to say this:

Now, the White House case, they do have a case. One, as the president said, it's the Geneva Convention is vague. Two, that, you know, when our soldiers are -- our Marines are captured, they're not going to be treated fine. The idea that there's going to be any reciprocity is nonsense. And, third, that we're in a different technological age, that if we capture somebody, they know about some plot that's about to kill millions of people, don't you want us to be able to do whatever we need to do?

Mr. Brooks, torture is not an ideological issue. It is the difference between right and wrong. The reason that we regard the terrorists as evil is because they commit evil acts, and because of this we have the moral authority to track them down, bring them to justice, and kill them if need be. But their evil acts do not justify our evil acts. It is not right for Billy to beat up on the kindergarten kids just because Tommy does, and it is not acceptable for us to commit evil because the terrorists do. These are the moral lessons that we teach children, not adults. Adults who do not recognize that torture is evil are morally bankrupt. To even dignify the subject by debating it is a sign of moral bankruptcy. Infanticide is not an ideological issue. Rape is not an ideological issue. Torture is not an ideological issue. There is nothing to debate.

And I will go farther. It is not just that those who seek to justify torture are morally bankrupt; they are also anti-American. The United States is not a set of lines on the map, it is an idea - the idea that a nation founded on the principles of liberty, justice, and freedom can survive and prosper. Those who seek to justify torture stand in opposition to that idea, and thus in opposition to America. They are too lazy and too stupid to understand that there is no conflict between our safety and our ideals, and we can not and must not jettison one to protect the other.

If you believe in what is good, and you believe in America, you can not accept torture. There is nothing to debate.

Truth is Hard; Lies are Much Too Easy

I haven’t weighed in on the controversy over the ABC 9/11 film because I don’t have any new information – I can only repeat what is widely available at Eschaton, DailyKos, Firedoglake, and elsewhere. But the attitudes and obvious bias of ABC/Disney in this affair compels me to speak about this, wearing my historian’s hat.

I hate it when people lie about history.

I’m a professional historian. I have specialized training, a title, a paycheck, membership in various professional organizations and a few publications to my name. Because of this, I feel a strong personal and professional responsibility to historical truth. Now, “truth,” when talking about history, is complicated. We might all agree on certain facts – Custer and his men were wiped out at Little Bighorn – but what do those facts signify? And even getting the empirical facts straight can be tricky – did Richard III have the two princes in the Tower killed or not?

But some pieces of empirical information are easier to pin down than others. By their own admission, the film ABC/Disney plans to show contains improvised and “composite” scenes - read “fiction” – even though they are claiming the film is based on the 9/11 Commission Report. They are presenting this as “true,” as the real thing, when they openly admit that not all of it is. And the fictionalized parts are not trivial – some of them clearly depict the Clinton Administration as making a deliberate choice not to kill or capture bin Ladin when they had easy opportunities to do so. That’s a very serious charge, and needs serious evidence to back it up.

The truth is that we know that the people behind the film have Republican ties, and we must conclude that the anti-Clinton stance is deliberate, and deliberately timed. Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, bothered me because it perpetuated a version of history that is not supported in any way by the evidence. As Americans are not deeply historically-minded, I was concerned that his film would convince many people of a set of “facts” that were without basis. But I also believe that Stone genuinely believes that Kennedy was, or probably was, killed as the result of a conspiracy. If I recall correctly, the scenes in which the conspiracy was portrayed were presented as speculation, not unvarnished fact. I’d give him a low grade if he turned that film in as a term paper, but I probably wouldn’t flunk him. Bad historical analysis is not necessarily dishonest historical analysis.

ABD/Disney and the producers of the 9/11 film are up to something else. Even if you argue that the “facts are in dispute,” the principals are all alive and available for rebuttal. Stone couldn’t ask Jack Ruby for his perspective, but ABC/Disney is presenting a “j’accuse” against the Clinton Administration without any evidence to back them up and without any acknowledgement that the officials involved have vigorously disputed the claims the film makes. As I write this ABC is backpedaling, claiming the film is “unfinished.” (Funny – it wasn’t “unfinished” enough to prevent sending it to Rush Limbaugh.) Let us hope that their revisions lead to a more honest portrayal, one that at least recognizes that the version of events in the first draft have been hotly disputed by the players involved. We can not go back and change time itself, but we can rewrite history to make it something utterly alien to any honest version of the truth. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen this time.

The Mess in Mexico

There’s an interesting article in the Washington Post this morning about the role of religion in Mexico’s political crisis. What? You say you didn’t know there was a political crisis in Mexico? Not surprising. Our media has been doing an astonishingly bad job of covering this story. The presidential election was very close, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the apparent loser, has refused to accept the announced results. Followers of the populist, left-of-center former mayor of Mexico City have been staging protests all over Mexico. They have made prominent use of images of the Virgen de Guadelupe, something which has angered Cardinal Norberto Rivera, who has called the protestors “crazies.” Church and state issues are an even more serious game than here in the U.S., as the article points out, and even resulted in a war, the Cristero Revolt in the 1920s.

What is astonishing is how little play this is getting in the U.S. Millions of López Obrador’s supporters are likely to reject the final result if his opponent Felipe Calderon is declared the winner and inaugurated in December. They remember well 1988, when Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, another left-of-center politician from López Obrador’s party almost certainly had the presidential election stolen from him by Carlos Salinas, who proved to be monumentally corrupt. The PRI, ruling party at the time, was strong enough to ride out the controversy and keep Mexico stable. The situation today is potentially more fragile, and the Mexican people more politically engaged. The potential for chaos is real, yet a quick perusal of LexisNexis shows only sporadic reporting in the U.S., unlike the almost hourly updates on the JonBenet Ramsey case. But hey, who cares about political instability on our border when there’s a little girl’s death to exploit?

Olbermann the Historian

It is rare that anyone in TV news bothers to make an historical case about anything. Here Keith Olbermann shows what could be done if the media took the time to think about the past and not assume that old news is irrelevant. I saw it, and I'm sold, but then, I remember the past, too.