Outis

Imagine you wake up one day with blood on your hands.

There are no memories, no mementos, no clues. Just the blood.

That’s weird.

A few weeks later, you’re making a sandwich. As you reach for a butter knife your hand freezes in mid air. Your other arm is also paralyzed. You can’t move. For hours.

By this point, you don’t have any white sheets left. It happens every morning. The mattress is stained. You’ve moved a large trash bin into your bedroom.

That’s when the harassing phone calls begin, followed by the handwritten notes.

Sometimes, your hands feel like they’re on fire.

* * *

This past January, the New Yorker published an investigative report titled “The Coming Wars” by Seymour Hersh, the American journalist best known for his recent coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and, during the Vietnam war, of the My Lai massacre.

Drawing on interviews with military and intelligence community figures, Hersh describes how the administration of President George W. Bush has rewritten the rules for the covert use of force. Indeed, as he writes, the term covert is not even accurate given the changes that are afoot:

Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees… “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’

It’s a telling choice of words. The science of physics has taught us that whereas the color white contains the entire spectrum of visible light, the color black reflects no light whatsoever.

Imagine, then, a democratic government wherein the appointed civil servant who is in charge of defending both the nation’s living beings and its way of life, has decided to make a war machine that is “black” — a lethal force that, like Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll, will not be seen in the light of day.

Moreoever, this secretary of defense has sought to improve upon previous U.S. violations of international law and human decency not by creating a more powerful global network of law enforcement agencies but, rather, by fostering the growth of illegal, terrorist activities and groups:

Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities.

The U.S. would thus actively undermine the law enforcement powers of other governments as well as its own.

* * *

Let’s assume this account is true. Is it possible, let alone wise, to defend one’s family from criminal acts by becoming a criminal? Should a person who is worried about the possibility of suffering a violent, horrendous death at the hands of a murderer become one so as to better “understand” and “deal with” the enemy?

Should firefighters become arsonists? Should doctors wound their patients? Should democratic governments lie to the citizenry?

It has been said, by members of the Bush administration, in fact, that terrorists are evil — and, thus, undeserving of human rights — precisely because same terrorists do not respect the distinction between civilian and soldier.

Why, then, does this same administration seek to obliterate the distinction between legal and illegal activities, at the behest of the president? For whoseover kills another human being in the shadows of the law, whatever their intentions, has killed a civilian, not a soldier.

If the laws of the U.S. are insufficiently “hardened” to fight this administration’s interpretation of the “Great War On Terrorism,” the legitimate response is not to occult U.S. activities from the law, itself.

If terrorists are those who use “unlawful combat” in order to set the terms of engagement with their enemy, what do we call a government that accepts those terms of engagement by responding with yet more unlawful combat?

I’m sorry to ask such an obvious question of my fellow Americans, but: does might make right?

If so, whatsoever will happen to America if, by God’s unknown design, it should cease to be the mightiest nation on earth?

* * *

Let’s assume this account is false. Let’s assume that all of the warriors and spies quoted by Hersh are liars and that their accounts are false.

Let’s assume that the Bush administration would never engage in unlawful combat abroad. Let’s assume that neither the Pentagon nor any other branch of the U.S. government under the direct command of the executive branch would violate U.S. laws in order to fight the Great War on Terrorism or even the not-so great War on Terrorism.

Let’s further assume that the human beings who constitute this particular administration are incapable of violating the Constitution.

Now, let’s rewind the clock to September 10, 2001. Who, amongst us, expected to see the World Trade Center collapse and the Pentagon building breached?

In other words, most of the world and certainly most Americans were wrong to believe that no such atrocities would transpire on the following day.

Given that error in our assumptions regarding the world we live in, given the shock and horror that our mistaken assumptions engendered, what would happen within American society if it turned out that we were also wrong to assume that the Bush administration is not engaged in unlawful combat abroad?

What is the price we pay for a clean conscience if it can only be purchased on the black market?

Do we fight wars to protect our laws or do we fight wars to break our laws?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2005 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.