New Quaker Notebook

And we wonder why the Pope won't attend the White House dinner in his honor next week.

On Wednesday ABC News reported that top administration officials, including Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice, all signed off on "enhanced interrogation techniques" in 2002; in a follow-up report yesterday, the AP reported that they "took care to insulate President Bush" from the decisions made by this National Security Council's Principals Committee.¹ Today the decider-in-chief himself said:

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people," Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

According to the news sources, the discussions were so detailed that "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic."²

Here is what Colin Powell had to say about the meetings:

Powell said that he didn't have "sufficient memory recall" about the meetings and that he had participated in "many meetings on how to deal with detainees."

Powell said, "I'm not aware of anything that we discussed in any of those meetings that was not considered legal."

These are the words of a man practicing memory loss prior to his standing before the War Crimes Tribunal.

1. "Cheney, Others OK'd Harsh Interrogations," AP/NPR News, April 11, 2008. See "Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'," ABC News, April 9, 2008.
2. "Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks," ABC News, April 11, 2008.

Apples Don't Torture

If you follow the Bush administration's torture trail, as Philippe Sands does in his new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), you won't be looking at breadcrumbs. It's human blood—yes, innocent human blood—spilled at the command of a high-profile coterie of villains and criminals, while others get the blame. His book won't be out until May 13, but Sands has a startling preview in this month's Vanity Fair. Those who've had a chance to read the book are already talking about war crimes charges. Here's Andrew Sullivan telling Chris Matthews something he doesn't know:

"The latest revelations on the torture front show—the memo from John Yoo—as well as revelations in Philippe Sands' new book, mean that Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be at some point indicted for war crimes. They deserve to be."

Crooks and Liars has the short video evidence. Admittedly Sullivan's list is too short, since it ought also to include George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, and Alberto Gonzales, but I would certainly invite Sullivan to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Beyond Iraq, or Not

I suppose it's a good sign that 89 percent of Americans now see the war in Iraq as a drain on the US economy, but we'll just as likely leave Iraq as we entered it—for all the wrong reasons. In a show of opposition to the US occupation of Iraq, Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called for a million-man march in Najaf on April 9, the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. That also happens to be the day after Gen David Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker are set to tell Congress that it's all good in Iraq. So let's get ready to spend another $102 billion in Iraq. Oh, wait, that's a drain on the economy. Are we chasing our tails here or something?

We should be furious that we allowed another Martin Luther King Jr anniversary to go by without honoring the radical Christian message of his opposition to war. Instead he has become a champion of nonviolent protest for social change. We miss a crucial part of the complex man. Suppose, instead of Vietnam, he speaks to us today of Iraq:¹

"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Iraq. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Iraq. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."

And so, merely by replacing "Vietnam" with "Iraq" and "China" with "Iran" we can see that so little has changed:

"If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Iraq. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad Iran into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Iraq immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Iraq, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Iraqi people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways."

1. Rev King's 4 April 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence is still powerful, but also, alas, apparently timeless, as we watch another country suffer under American militarism. See how easily the speech can be made to fit our situation in Iraq today.

Bush: We Torture. So?

Apples Don't Torture

Beyond Iraq, or Not