Ronald Reagan: vengeful, score-settling, Hard Left ideologue
(updated below - Update II)
This is a perfect illustration of how severely our political spectrum has shifted in the last two decades and how depraved and extremist our political and media classes have become:
Torture is an impermissible evil.Except under two circumstances.The first is the ticking time bomb. . . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. . . .
Some people, however, believe you never torture.Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty.But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation.It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.
The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States willclearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.
The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in thecriminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturerswho are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.
No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . . Each State Party shall ensure thatall acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week-- 54 percent -- said theuse of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified.
The views that Ronald Reagan not only advocated, but signed a treaty compelling the U.S. to adhere to, are ones that are now -- in the view of our dominant media narrative -- the hallmarks of The Hard Left: torture is never justified; there are "no exceptional circumstances" justifying it; it must be declared to be a serious criminal offense ; and -- most of all -- the U.S., as Ronald Regan put it, "is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution." Reagan's explicit view that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" permits signatory nations (such as Spain) to prosecute torturers from other countries (such as the U.S.) is now considered so fringe that it's almost impossible to find someone in mainstream American debates willing to advocate it.
If you now believe about torture and prosecutions exactly what Ronald Reagan advocated in 1988 -- orwhat Israel today advocates-- then, according to our establishment narrative, you are, by definition, a member of the Hard Left. And nobody who believes what Reagan advocated could possibly, in Krauthammer's words today, be entrusted with national security decisions. We've gone from Reagan's "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "Each State Party isrequired[] to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory" to the moral depravity of the Charles Krauthammers' explicit endorsement of torture and the virtually unanimous view of political and media elites that advocating criminal prosecutions for those who torture is confined to the vengeful, leftist masses.
It's certainly true, of course, that Ronald Reagan was very pre-9/11, but the concept of uniquely scary Islamic Terrorists was hardly unknown. Our client-tyrant in Iran was overthrown by them in 1979; we funded and supported them in Afghanistan in the early 1980s; U.S. Marines occupying Lebanon were attacked by them in 1982; Jewish community centers in Argentina were exploded by them in 1984; and Reagan himself invoked their Grave Threat in order to justify theAmerican bombing of Libya in 1986 and the killing of the adopted infant daughterof its leader. We were bombing, occupying, interfering in and trying to control Muslim countries way back then, too. Yet even with all those Islamic Terrorists running around, Reagan insisted that torture could never be justifiedunder any circumstancesand that those who do itmust becriminally prosecuted.
It's certainly true that Reagan, like most leaders, regularly violated the principles he espoused and sought to impose on others, but still, there is an important difference between (a) affirming core principles of the civilized world but then violating them and (b) explicitly rejecting those principles. Doing (a) makes you a hypocrite; doing (b) makes you a morally depraved barbarian. We're now a country where the leading "intellectuals" of the conservative movement expressly advocate torture on the pages ofThe Washington Post, and where most of the political and media class mocks as Far Leftism what Ronald Reagan explicitly advocated and bound the U.S. by treaty to do: namely, "prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."
It's literally true that if you say todayverbatimwhat Ronald Reagan said in 1988 about torture and the need to prosecute those who do it, then you are immediately and by definition a rabid score-settler from the Hard Left who is unfit to be trusted with national security decisions. Conversely, the views that Reagan vehemently rejected by words and by treaty -- that torture can be justified in some circumstances; that torturers should be shielded from prosecution; that other countries have no right to prosecute the torturers from other countries under "universal jurisdiction" -- are now not merely acceptable, but are required views in order to be not only a conservative, but to be a centrist. That's how severely the political spectrum and our elite consensus on these questions have shifted -- descended -- even from the time of the right-wing Reagan era when American exceptionalism and military aggression thrived.
UPDATE II: On an unrelated topic: I have numerous emails asking me to comment on thedecision of the Obama DOJ to drop its prosecutionof two former AIPAC officials for alleged violations of the Espionage Act. I have no time to write about this today, but despite being as vigorous a critic of AIPAC as can be, I absolutely believe the Obama DOJ did the right thing. From the start, the Bush DOJ's prosecution of these non-government-employees (as opposed to itsprosecution of DOD employee Larry Franklin) was abusive, dangerous and wrong -- clearly an attempt by the Bush administration to criminalize the core activity of investigative reporting. I wrote about my reasons for finding that prosecution so pernicious back in 2006 (here), and I largely agree with what AIPAC critic Spencer Ackerman wrote today about this matter (here). No matter how harmful one might believe AIPAC to be, the end of this prosecution is something everyone who cares about press freedoms and even free speech should cheer
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan
I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
This message has been edited by j2saret on May 3, 2009 7:17 PM
I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, "Great American Hypocrites", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown.
The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and 'enhanced interrogation' now is that some modern-day officials appear proud of themselves.
By A.J. Langguth
May 3, 2009
As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle.
I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses.
At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator's files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent's Southern Cone.
Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been naive enough to be at first surprised and then appalled by the degree to which our country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.
Our interference, which went on for decades, was not limited to one political party. The meddling in Brazil began in earnest during the early 1960s under a Democratic administration. At that time, Washington's alarm over Cuba was much like the more recent panic after 9/11. The Kennedy White House was determined to prevent another communist regime in the hemisphere, and Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was taking a strong interest in several anti-communist approaches, including the Office of Public Safety.
When OPS was launched under President Eisenhower, its mission sounded benign enough -- to increase the professionalism of the police of Asia, Africa and, particularly, Latin America. But its genial director, Byron Engle, was a CIA agent, and his program was part of a wider effort to identify receptive recruits among local populations.
Although Engle wanted to avoid having his unit exposed as a CIA front, in the public mind the separation was quickly blurred. Dan Mitrione, for example, a police advisor murdered by Uruguay's left-wing Tupamaros for his role in torture in that country, was widely assumed to be a CIA agent.
When Brazil seemed to tilt leftward after President Joao Goulart assumed power in 1961, the Kennedy administration grew increasingly troubled. Robert Kennedy traveled to Brazil to tell Goulart he should dismiss two of his Cabinet members, and the office of Lincoln Gordon, John Kennedy's ambassador to Brazil, became the hub for CIA efforts to destabilize Goulart's government.
On March 31, 1964, encouraged by U.S. military attache Vernon Walters, Brazilian Gen. Humberto Castelo Branco rose up against Goulart. Rather than set off a civil war, Goulart chose exile in Montevideo.
Ambassador Gordon returned to a jubilant Washington, where he ran into Robert Kennedy, who was still grieving for his brother, assassinated the previous November. "Well, he got what was coming to him," Kennedy said of Goulart. "Too bad he didn't follow the advice we gave him when we were down there."
The Brazilian people did not deserve what they got. The military cracked down harshly on labor unions, newspapers and student associations. The newly efficient police, drawing on training provided by the U.S., began routinely torturing political prisoners and even opened a torture school on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to teach police sergeants how to inflict the maximum pain without killing their victims.
One torture victim was Fernando Gabeira, a young reporter for Jornal do Brasil who was recruited by a resistance movement and later arrested for his role in the 1969 kidnapping of Charles Burke Elbrick, the U.S. ambassador. (Elbrick was released after four days.) In custody, Gabeira later told me, he was tortured with electric shocks to his testicles; a fellow prisoner had his testicles nailed to a table. Still others were beaten bloody or waterboarded. When Gabeira's captors said anything at all, they sometimes boasted about having been trained in the United States.
During the first seven years after Castelo Branco's coup, the OPS trained 100,000 Brazilian police, including 600 who were brought to the United States. Their instruction varied. Some OPS lecturers denounced torture as inhumane and ineffectual. Others conveyed a different message. Le Van An, a student from the South Vietnamese police, later described what his instructors told him: "Despite the fact that brutal interrogation is strongly criticized by moralists," they said, "its importance must not be denied if we want to have order and security in daily life."
Brazil's political prisoners never doubted that Americans were involved in the torture that proliferated in their country. On their release, they reported that they frequently had heard English-speaking men around them, foreigners who left the room while the actual torture took place. As the years passed, those torture victims say, the men with American accents became less careful and sometimes stayed on during interrogations.
One student dissident, Angela Camargo Seixas, described to me how she was beaten and had electric wires inserted into her vagina after her arrest. During her interrogations, she found that her hatred was directed less toward her countrymen than toward the North Americans. She vowed never to forgive the United States for training and equipping the Brazilian police.
Flavio Tavares Freitas, a journalist and Christian nationalist, shared that sense of outrage. When he had wires jammed in his ears, between his teeth and into his anus, he saw that the small gray generator producing the shocks had on its side the red, white and blue shield of the USAID.
Still another student leader, Jean Marc Von der Weid, told of having his penis wrapped in wires and connected to a battery-operated field telephone. Von der Weid, who had been in Brazil's marine reserve, said he recognized the telephone as one supplied by the United States through its military assistance program.
Victims often said that their one moment of hope came when a medical doctor appeared in their cell. Now surely the torment would end. Then they found that he was only there to guarantee that they could survive another round of shocks.
CIA Director Richard Helms once tried to rebut accusations against his agency by asserting that the nation must take it on faith that the CIA was made up of "honorable men." That was before Sen. Frank Church's 1975 Senate hearings brought to light CIA behavior that was deeply dishonorable.
Before Brazil restored civilian government in 1985, Abourezk had managed to shut down a Texas training base notorious for teaching subversive techniques, including the making of bombs. When OPS came under attack during another flurry of bad publicity, the CIA did not fight to save it, and its funding was cut off.
Looking back, what has changed since 1975? A Brazilian truth and reconciliation commission was convened, and it documented 339 cases of government-sanctioned political assassinations. In 2002, a former labor leader and political prisoner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was elected president of Brazil. He's serving his second term.
Fernando Gabeira went home to publish a book about kidnapping the American ambassador and his ordeal in prison. The book became a bestseller throughout Brazil, and Gabeira was elected to the national legislature. In an election last October, he came within 1.4 percentage points of becoming the mayor of Rio de Janeiro.
But in our country, there's been a disheartening development: In 1975, U.S. officials still felt they had to deny condoning torture. Now many of them seem to be defending torture, even boasting about it.
That's what the school of the America's was all about right pig fat? Teaching all of Regan's south American dictator satraps how and who to torture. I guess you are right Ronnie was no namby pamby liberal he was a full blown right wing nut monster, after all he had the traitor ollie north working in his basement.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan
I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
