A version of this originally appeared at West Virginia Blue.
What Meteor Blades said:
The British government did not attempt to write itself out of the Geneva Conventions. However, as America’s chief ally in the war Tony Blair helped George Bush concoct, it certainly tainted itself with abuses of the sort given the seal of approval by Gonzales. So the cognitive dissonance that sounds when we hear Tony Blair trying to take the moral high ground in this matter is deafening. As Ronan Bennett writes in this morning’s Guardian:
Turney may have been “forced to wear the hijab”, as the Daily Mail noted with fury, but so far as we know she has not been forced into an orange jumpsuit. Her comrades have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.
They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly “rendered” to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.
That is one of the many reasons why we at West Virginia Blue write so much in opposition of U.S. torture policies.
This is one of the many reasons why Senator Jay Rockefeller should hold a Senate investigation on the torture of prisoners by U.S. forces — either by the CIA, private contractors or military services.
As chairman, Mr. Rockefeller has promised to conduct more vigorous oversight of the spy agencies than did his Republican predecessor. He is asking whether having a separate CIA detention and interrogation system is necessary and worth the toll on the American image abroad.
“The widespread reports about secret prisons and torture, whether accurate or not, have damaged the United States’ reputation around the world and hindered counterterrorism efforts with our allies,” he said.
Senator Rockefeller, torture and degradation of prisoners are never appropriate for intelligence gathering.
The Iranian acts against these British sailors and Marines should be condemned. It is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to parade captives before a camera and to require them to write propaganda letters under duress. When Rush Limbaugh described the abuse of captives at Abu Ghraib as no worse than a “fraternity prank,” I thought of how I would have reacted if U.S. prisoners had been treated in such a manner. I would have been outraged and demanding we fought and annihilated any country that would treat our people in such a manner. I knew when Abu Ghraib happened, we had lost in Iraq and no “victory” on the battlefield would make up for the abject surrender of our morals. The crimes at Abu Ghraib were not the work of a “few bad apples” like West Virginia’s Lynndie England. The crimes at Abu Ghraib (see wvblueguy’s diary here) were the result of official U.S. policy from the so-called commander in chief who approved “alternative interrogation techniques” and the vice president who told the people under them to “take the gloves off.”
When a top administration official like Alberto Gonzalez writes that the Geneva Convention is a “quaint” document that no longer applies to the United States — a country that had been a beacon of justice and liberty — would conduct itself, it sends a signal to the rest of the world that such reprehensible and immoral acts are acceptable.
The United States is a world leader and look where we’ve lead.
Instead of being able to take the high moral ground — the ground where that beacon once shone — we have to look at how such a tyrannical country as Iran abuses its captives and know that we are worse than Iran in how we treat our captives. We cannot look down from the moral high ground on Iran because we’re sunk even deeper in the muck than they are.