Two gems from this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The first requires no comment at all:
Republicans’ exasperation with the administration and the president himself was evident in a private meeting of Republican Senate committee chairmen this week in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s office. Mr. Frist at one point said he’d like to sit down with Mr. Bush and ask which two or three people in the administration could tell him what’s really going on with Iraq, according to one person in the room. “I don’t think he knows who could do that,” replied Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar. |
In the second, Newt Gingrich rides to Don Rumsfeld’s defense in a piece headlined “Double Standards on Abu Ghraib,” arguing that we should discount outrage abroad at the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners because Arab governments and media failed to denounce previous Mideast atrocities:
Some have called for Donald Rumsfeld to resign. However, he has led the process of exposing the wrongdoing and investigating the charges. Moreover, he will see to it that the accused get a fair and honest trial, where there is a presumption of innocence until guilt is proven and the guilty are punished. That due process is something we as Americans should be proud of, and unequival about… While we publicly uncover and explicitly demonstrate our commitment to punish the guilty for their crimes under our rule of law, we should not play into any double standard where America is allowed to be condemned by anyone who accepts Arab viciousness, terrorism, mutilation and barbarism as normal behavior. |
So let’s put aside the small matters here — like that Rumsfeld’s “leading the process” didn’t seem to involve actually finishing reading the Pentagon’s own report on the prison torture. Let’s not waste too much time pointing out that, whatever the historical record, the war for the trust of the Iraqi people has become our fight, and Abu Ghraib was a disastrous, perhaps decisive defeat, and on that ground alone, before you even begin to weigh justice and morality, you have to judge this as Rumsfeld’s failure.
The heart of this is simple: Yes, Newt, there is a double standard here. The double standard is that, on the one hand, our leaders steadfastly insist (all the way up to the Supreme Court) that their treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror” is and must be outside the law — and on the other, the moment that we learn that awful things have happened in our lawless prisons, we suddenly get religion and invoke “due process.”
The soldiers, contractors and commanders responsible for the Abu Ghraib horrors deserve “due process,” for sure. So does every single human being incarcerated by the U.S. government. These are not disconnected matters — something to keep in mind as we hear Abu Ghraib written off as an isolated case, a few loose cannons, a handful of bad apples who rolled off the reservation. As Sidney Blumenthal argued earlier this week, and Anthony Lewis points out in today’s New York Times, when you set up a prison system and explicitly declare that it is beyond all legal oversight, you can hardly be surprised when the atrocities start.
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