Editorial: U.S. ought to re-examine its moral, ethical codes

The appalling torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan is
more than a military or political problem. It is an ethical crisis
that exposes the bankrupt neo-con moralism which protects America
from stem cells and nudity, but ignores real questions of human
decency and international law.

This week has seen new reports of forced sodomy, dog attacks and
other tortures. But the specifics are only part of the discussion.
The United States has already proven how hypocritical its foreign
policy can be, and to what degree it views militaristic might as a
means to achieving righteousness.

The Iraqbodycount.net group estimates well over 15,000 civilians
have met violent ends since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. The
number of individuals subjected to torture by U.S. forces is
largely unknown.

While Bush did not personally endorse any specific incidents of
torture, his administration does deserve direct blame for
inadequate guard training and an intentional disregard for the
rules of war.

And Congress is not innocent either: The Senate is days away
from confirming White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as the next
U.S. Attorney General. Gonzales personally wrote a memo
recommending that the Geneva Convention should not be applied to
the “conflict with al-Qaeda.”

(By Bush administration standards, it seems that half the
population of Iraq might have al-Qaeda connections.)

And as much as anything, the abuse scandal raises questions
about what the American people really care about.

Are we the morally upstanding nation we purport to be? Or is our
righteous outrage restricted to cases of petty indiscretion and
spectacle?

When Janet Jackson exposed a naked breast on television,
literally thousands of people wrote Congress and the FCC demanding
stiff penalties for indecency. Congress acted within weeks, and the
maximum fine for indecency was raised from $27,000 to $500,000.

But when photographs of staggering tortures surfaced in Iraq,
outstanding citizens like Rush Limbaugh suggested the abuse was no
worse than what happens on college campuses:

“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and
Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives
over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and
then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good
time. You know, these people are being fired at every day.
I’m talking about people having a good time, these people,
you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow
some steam off?”

The lawyer for convicted U.S. soldier Charles Graner similarly
compared the torture to the routines cheerleaders do in high
school.

The torture problem is a military and international political
crisis that proceeds along the chain of command from the president
to private soldiers. It is also an ethical crisis that suggests
citizens need to re-evaluate how much faith they place in the
government to make moral judgments and how vocally they protest
serious transgressions.