Twisting, Ripping and Discarding The Constitution
To Battle Muslim Extremists Means They Are Winning

By William Finucane

Shame.

That was and is my overwhelming sense: Horror upon horror in emotional waves roll over me as I look at the pictures. Iraqi men hit, hooked up to electric wires, and others with hoods over their heads as they climb all over each other, frightened by attack dogs while stark naked, with American women pointing at the men’s genitals and giving the thumbs up; to our great disgrace, the women are American soldiers.

Then there is the naked Iraqi man being treated like a dog and led around on all fours by a leash, and more and more and more.

The shame is mine, and that of all Americans. We did this. Yes, there are surely some enlisted and officer types in the Army who would have little qualms about this sort of behavior, but the circumstances even for that minority would have to be right for them to dare commit such acts. And that is where questions are now appropriately being focused; who were the CIA operatives involved. And just who were the American civilian contractors, and what kind of laissez faire authority was given them under the Bush Administration’s ongoing desire to privatize everything?

These are questions we have to answer for ourselves. Unfortunately, in the eyes of all in the Muslim world, the ones doing this to them aren’t differentiated; they are simply the American people.

All of this can be investigated, prosecuted and settled; already it is clear the investigation can go all the way through the Pentagon to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and very likely onward to President George W. Bush and his "team." But to the victims the abuse is the fault of all America.

This is not about a few soldiers being guilty, or a few majors, a general or two. This is not even the question of what kind of an administrator is Defense Secretary Rumsfeld?! And even if this nation were to impeach George W. Bush for setting in motion polices resulting in the torture Americans have performed on Iraqi prisoners, it would not be quite what the nation needs, although the process might result in such a healthy revelation of policies and procedures that the result could be the same. Nonetheless, what the nation needs is a clear understanding of what has happened in the Iraqi prisons.

We – Americans – have taken a huge step backwards toward barbarism in this ‘preemptive’ war.

No, of course not all of us have consciously forsaken our national values, or even conscientiously shelved our personal morality in order to take up the awful practices of ancient history, filled as it was with merciless barbarism often perpetrated under the guise of religious zealotry. Yet we must bear in mind that we currently have a president who repeatedly declares himself a ‘born again’ Christian, and who exhibits moral zealotry.

And under the Bush Administration, what we have done is let the profound truth of war, which we have known well in our brief yet historic rise to global power and dominance, be overshadowed by the monstrous attack of 9/11. As a result we enabled the current administration to cast aside our values, together with our hard-won democratic ideals.

If the damn monsters comprising al Qaeda can and will hit us with unthinkable tactics of terrorist warfare, well the Bush Administration’s answer is to rip the Geneva Convention rule book into shreds. We all bear guilt because of our quiescence; we didn’t shout, "No," when the Bush people curled their lips and declared that no Taliban or al Qaeda personnel are going to get the protection of the Geneva Convention from us.

No quarter, the Bush Administration declared: We will jail them and treat them as they treated the 3,000 Americans who died. To hell with any conventions, history or law, if we capture them, we will want answers and we’ll want them now.

Then of course Mr. Bush revealed what we now know was a long-standing plan to attack Iraq. But the sorry truth here is that everything America has done as policy in Iraq has been a mistake. Everything, with the sole exception of the individual actions of American soldiers, both enlisted personnel and officers, has been for the wrong reasons. Thankfully, the great majority of our military men and women are in fact reflective of who we truly are, and their individual and sometimes collective actions have shown those values to the Iraqi people in countless small and large ways.

But Mr. Bush and company declared we would stop the terrorist connection between Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, at whatever cost. Yet now we know there was no connection. In the greatest of ironies, of course, we have developed a self-fulfilling prophecy; the terrorists have rushed into Iraq because Saddam Hussein is gone, and because the Bush war plan did not include a post-victory policy that would stabilize the nation. Instead of such common sense, our soldiers were ordered to protect the oil fields while the nation’s museums, filled with antiquities and the ancient artifacts representing the soul of the country were looted and destroyed, and honest Iraqi citizens – the great majority – were forced to watch while the lowest elements of their society proliferated without challenge.

It was no great secret that once Saddam Hussein’s hold on Iraq was released, there was likely going to be civil war! Anyone who stayed abreast of history or of current events knew this, and that was of course much less than what the state department and intelligence agencies knew. Yet the Bush Administration had no contingency plan to maintain order after toppling Hussein, his criminal family and their political party. It was catch as catch can, and the ones who caught it the most were our young men and women.

The greatest farce of all was the great illusion of Weapons of Mass Destruction, WMD’s. Mr. Bush and his choreographers, including Colin Powell – to his great, current distress – made it perfectly clear that they knew WMD’s existed. When the dust settled and it was clear WMD’s couldn’t be found, the Bush Administration followed its tactical pattern; it shifted smoothly into a new reason for the pre-emptive war: "We are freeing the Iraqi people and given them a chance to enjoy democracy," they declared.

And of course there were bad guys to be arrested, so we arrested them. No democracy ensued. That would take time, officials announced. The United States has been in Iraq a year and has captured thousands of Iraqi citizens, many of whom were simply in the wrong place at the proverbial wrong time, or were rounded up because it was impossible to differentiate them from insurgents, etc., etc. (Shades of Viet Nam; they all ‘look alike,’ so who is the enemy?)

Somewhere along the line, what with all the shifting around of command authority, and with the increase in violent and ugly terrorist-style insurgency, the fact that American regulations still demanded that the Geneva Convention apply to all Iraqi citizens and military personnel was lost in the shuffle.

This is not a surprising result given that the Bush Administration had already tossed all such considerations overboard in relation to suspected terrorists and guerrillas, having found a convenient term – enemy combatants – that allowed such people to be killed outright without reservation, or if captured to be held and interrogated in any manner possible, and then imprisoned without rights for as long as considered necessary.

Obviously it is here where we have started fighting like the uncivilized hoards of old, thinking nothing of our enemies, viewing them as non-people. This bloodthirsty mindset filtered down from the highest reaches of the Bush Administration, down through the officer corps and the intelligence agencies to the newly empowered private contractors, and finally to the field officers, non-commissioned officers and ultimately to the corporal and buck privates. It was a short step from this new open-ended American approach to a credo declaring that these bastards better give answers to us or we will wrench the humanity out of them.

Having seen torture work in the past, in all parts of the globe, the CIA, the American civilian warriors, and the Pentagon planners knew just what to do. Make the Muslim men – very concerned with their personal modesty – into sexual victims; beat them, force some into homosexual positions, let others be led around like dogs, and all the more damnably by a woman holding the leash.

These ‘interrogation techniques were specifically meant to humiliate all the Muslim men who were known to be incarcerated. It worked. Many are shamed for life. And all of America earned shame in Muslim eyes, and undoubtedly the undying hatred of those men who were abused.

Most of the Americans who perpetrated these acts knew exactly what they were doing and what effect it would have, but they did it anyway. They reverted to an equivalent of drawing-and-quartering, the rack, or chemical suasion and the like of which was given a modern polish by the Nazi’s and by Stalin’s Russians.

Perhaps the methods employed by these dishonorable Americans was more studied, more intended to harm psychologically than physically, but the vast gulf between what America stands for and what these Americans did cannot be bridged by any rationale that the Bush Administration has to offer.

Americans have a Constitution with its roots in the Magna Carter and perfected by an understanding of the epochs of Western civilization; it is buffed brightly by the examples of its practical application throughout the mostly honorable history of this young nation we call the United States. But we did not bring those values to Iraq. Instead most Americans stood silent while George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Paul D. Wolfowitz and other ideologues of this current administration brought to Iraq a study in power politics, and in the process besmirched America in front of the world.

If there is one thing the Constitution is supposed to do it is to keep all men at an honored equality. In this concept is a basic fairness that cannot be forsaken without cravenly discarding the very values the United Stated is founded upon, and for which so many American men and women have given their lives.

Instead, in this instance, prison tactics that mirrored those of Hussein himself have been employed. And the fact that some Iraqi’s and Arabs of other nations have shown a facility for barbarism – the killing of civilian Americans and the burning, mutilation, dragging and hanging of their remains, or the videotaped beheading of captives – does not justify Americans walking away from the historic values that have made this nation great.

Mr. Bush and his cohorts let the hounds of war run loose because of an apparent belief in an ideological goal whereby the end result justified the means. He uncorked the senselessness of Western retaliation versus Muslim hatred – intended or not – and he has set the road to peace on a straight up-hill course for years to come.

That is the terrible result of belligerent and self-righteous policies, fueled by a certain type of homegrown religious zealotry; the ‘born again’ absolutism of Mr. Bush. And from all of this devolves something even more terrible; the potential shredding of the Constitution simply because it is suddenly harder to follow when dealing with so many people who have been brought up to hate Israel, America and the West, first and most of all, and secondarily all non-Muslims.

The awful mistake that Mr. Bush and his associates have made is to view the Constitution as a hindrance. It is not. The Constitution is all we really have to separate us from such haters and the regimes that they have fostered.

I am personally ashamed to watch the Constitution being subverted and ripped apart for the sake of battling terrorists. It means they are winning.