In the America I thought I grew up in, George W. Bush would have been drummed out of office the moment the American people realized he was rendering people to be tortured by ruthless dictators. September 11th changed how we thought about our vulnerabilies, and it made us rethink things like our visa application process, and the sharing of information between our various intelligence agencies. But it should not have changed our principled support for human rights, due process, and the constitution.

I don’t recognize this country anymore. A Vice-President, polling at 19% with his chief of staff under multiple indictments, is publicly lobbying to allow cruel and inhumane punishment of people ‘suspected’ to be our enemies.

One of my earliest political memories is of my father fulminating against President Ford for pardoning ‘that crook Nixon’. My father was no liberal, and he would go on to become one of those famous Reagan Democrats before swearing off both parties. The country I grew up in was willing to force a popularly elected President out on his arse when it became obvious that he had no respect for the rule of law.

To some extent, the unforgiving attack on Bill Clinton over l’affair Lewinsky followed in this pattern. Even when the public was willing to give Bill a pass, there was a certain logic in demanding our public officials be held to the highest standards of conduct.

My public school fed me a steady diet of outrage over the human rights abuses of the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. The term ‘political prisoners’ was a dirty term. Our right to dissent was celebrated at every turn.

And when the Reagan administration flirted with the South African regime, or Latin American right-wing death squads, the left led a successful counterattack. If our country sometimes fell short of our own principles, we knew what we stood for, and what we stood against.

We stood against totalitarianism. If we sometimes allied ourselves with tyrants, we did so in the interest of combatting the greater evil of the Soviet Union.

But consider where we stand now:
From Dana Priest’s Q & A in today’s Washington Post about our secret gulags in Eastern Europe:

Washington, D.C.: Dana-Congratulations on the amazing article. However, as a reader, one paragraph really jumped out at me:

“The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.”

Could you elaborate on your decision not to publish the names of the countries? Frankly, I find it amazing that The Post would withold such information from the public. Don’t you have a duty to the public — both American and foreign — to report the news?

Dana Priest: The decision was made by our executive editor, Len Downie, after many hours, over many days, of conversation and debate with a small number of people, myself include. So I can’t speak for Len on whether it was an easy decision, but it certainly didn’t feel like it. To me, it was a question of weighing the relative benefit to the story of naming the countries (exposing an illegal act in that country, authenticating a program that’s been denied by the administration and that rests of unnamed sources) versus the potential risks of naming the countries; most notably that they might decide to curtail valuable counterterrorism cooperation with the US and that they might be subject to terrorist retaliation. Using the formulation “several Eastern European countries” seemed to address the authenticity and impact question.

Imagine our World War Two allies refusing to acknowledge that they were holding Nazi prisoners because they were being tortured. These unnamed countries are operating gulags to hold people suspected of being our enemies. These people have presumably plotted to kill innocent civilians. And yet, our allies are unwilling to even admit they are assisting us in taking these people off the street. It looks as though the Eastern Bloc is still intact, but they have new masters. We have become what we were supposed to vanquish.

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