Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (31 page)

And America—from its founding—has also been defined not by the creativity of our torture techniques or by the merciless interrogation tactics we use, but by the humane treatment we accorded even our most inhumane enemies. Throughout our history, our distrust of political leaders meant that we did not want to vest them with the power to abuse prisoners, nor did we want such conduct to define who we are. Historian David Hackett Fischer, in his book
Washington’s Crossing,
recounted the treatment of British and Hessian prisoners of war by George Washington’s Continental Army:

Washington and his officers set a high standard in their treatment of Hessian captives at Trenton. He issued instructions that “the officers and men should be separated. I wish the former may be well treated, and that the latter may have such principles instilled in them during their confinement, that when they return, they may open the Eyes of their Countrymen.”

Not all Americans wanted to do these things. Always some dark spirits wished to visit the same cruelties on the British and Hessians that had been inflicted on American captives. But Washington’s example carried growing weight, more so than his written orders and prohibitions. He often reminded his men that they were an army of liberty and freedom, and that the rights of humanity for which they were fighting should extend even to their enemies…. Even in the most urgent moments of the war, these men were concerned about ethical questions in the Revolution.

It was George Washington’s values, not those of the medieval torturer glorified by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and embodied by Dick Cheney, that defined America’s political identity. In 2007, the
Washington Post
published a lengthy article reporting on the elite American Army unit responsible for interrogating Nazi prisoners of war during World War II. These American warriors had become disgusted by the reporting of torture and other abuses perpetrated by the Bush administration and cheered on by the Republican Party, and they spoke out:

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them….

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria….

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques…The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.

“During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Being an American who believed in the core political principles of the country always meant adhering to these standards and embracing these values. Today’s Republican Party, acting contrary to its election rhetoric of conservatism and limited government power, has repudiated, trampled upon, and made a mockery of the core principles defining our country.

Today in the right-wing world, the very ideas that they spent the last several decades loudly touting and that long defined America have become the hallmarks of leftist radicalism. And the media has dutifully ingested this new framework. Thus, our Beltway establishment first looked the other way, then acted to protect the President of the United States once it was revealed that he was spying on the communications of American citizens in violation of the leftist doctrine called “law.”

And, to be sure, none of this is specific to John Edwards. As O’Reilly warned, all Democrats who believe in radical theories such as search warrants and prohibitions on torture are of suspect loyalties:

“Talking Points” believes most Americans reject that foolishness. And it has become a problem for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Senator Obama is much closer to the Edwards view than Senator Clinton is, but the Democratic party can easily be branded as soft on terrorism. It’s tough to make distinctions in this area.

Indeed, under the rule of the “love-my-country-but-fear-my-government” party, it is no exaggeration to say that the United States has turned into a lawless surveillance state. If that sounds hyperbolic, just review the disclosures over the course of recent years concerning what databases the federal government has created and maintained—everything from records of all domestic telephone calls we make and receive, to the content of our international calls, to risk-assessment records based on our travel activities, to all sorts of new categories of information about our activities obtainable by the FBI through the use of so-called National Security Letters. And none of that includes, obviously, the as-yet-undisclosed surveillance programs undertaken by the most secretive administration in history.

This endless expansion of federal government power by the small-government, states-rights wing of the Republican Party is no longer even news. They barely bother to espouse these principles
except when it comes time to win elections.
In April 2007, leading conservatives Andy McCarthy, David Frum, and John Yoo participated in an event to argue for this Orwellian proposition: “Better More Surveillance Than Another 9/11.” In the right-wing mind, there is the ultimate irony: We need to empower the federal government to maintain comprehensive dossiers on all Americans; otherwise, our freedoms might be at risk from The Terrorists.

The results of this complete abandonment of alleged small-government principles by the Republican Party are as predictable as they are dangerous. This November 11, 2007, report from the Associated Press is extraordinary, yet barely caused a ripple:

As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States change their definition of privacy.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says
the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco, California.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines….

“Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms,” [privacy lawyer Kurt] Opsahl said. “The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights….

“There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy.”

“It’s just another ‘trust us, we’re the government,’” he said.

At the end of 2007, the nonpartisan groups, Privacy International and Electronic Privacy Information Center, released their annual survey of worldwide privacy rights. The United States had been downgraded from its 2006 ranking of “Extensive Surveillance Society” to “Endemic Surveillance Society,” the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore, and Malaysia. The survey uses a variety of objective factors to determine the extent of privacy protections citizens enjoy from their government, and the United States now finishes at the bottom for obvious reasons, including the vastly expanded domestic surveillance and data-collection powers ushered in during the Bush presidency, all exercised with virtually no oversight.

The same political party that spent decades tricking Americans into believing that they stood for limited government has now ushered in a virtually limitless framework of government spying and unchecked power. Its top officials are telling Americans that we must fundamentally redefine what we understand privacy to mean when it comes to the power of our own government to spy on us. The right-wing faction that formed weekend militias to guard against a tyrannical government it claimed to hate and distrust now meekly and submissively cheers on every expansion of power, including powers completely anathema to core American freedoms.

Despite all of that, this same party will deceive Americans by giving lip service to these limited-government principles in order to win in 2008. In November 2007, Rudy Giuliani spoke to the Federalist Society, where he repeatedly invoked Reagan’s limited-government principles and railed against Democrats “because they want to impose and give more and more responsibility to the central government.” Fred Thompson’s campaign website proclaimed that “we must allow individuals to lead their lives with minimal government interference.” Every Republican candidate has repeatedly paid homage to these ideals. As it always does, the GOP will endlessly claim throughout 2008 that its newly selected Leader is the Guardian of Limited Government and the protector of Real Americans against power-hungry politicians.

Compassionate Authoritarians

Yet again, one finds that GOP leaders do not merely fail to adhere to their claimed principles and the images they strive to project. They are, in reality, the very opposite of those principles, the antithesis of their campaign images.

In April 2007, various Republican presidential candidates attended a meeting of the conservative economics group Club for Growth. Afterward,
National Review
’s Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to the Cato Institute’s president, Ed Crane, about what the candidates said. The brief report filed by Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Mitt Romney could not say—at least not until he engaged in a careful and solemn debate with a team of “smart lawyers”—whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind. But in today’s Republican Party, Romney’s openness to this definitively tyrannical power is the moderate position. Ponnuru goes on to note,

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

It was almost as though Giuliani was positioning himself in this race as the “compassionate authoritarian”—“Yes, of course I have the power to imprison you without charges or review of any kind, but as President, I commit to you that I intend (no promises) to ‘use this authority infrequently.’”

The leading Republican candidates for president either embraced or were open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President, George Bush, not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents—including those arrested not on the battlefield but on American soil.

What kind of American isn’t just instinctively repulsed by the notion that the President has the power to imprison citizens with no charges? And what does it say about the current state of our political culture that one of the two political parties has all but adopted as a plank in its platform a view of presidential powers and the federal government that is—literally—the exact opposite of the principles on which this country was founded? Even that renowned “liberal” Justice of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, has pointed out how very un-American such powers are: “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.”

At around the same time Giuliani and Romney were providing their extraordinary answers,
The Atlantic
’s Andrew Sullivan cited the views on this matter of Winston Churchill, whom Republicans love to trot out as their prop to symbolize “resolute strength”:

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist.

The extent to which the Great American Hypocrites of the Republican Party are hostile to our most basic constitutional traditions and defining political principles of limited government really cannot be overstated. They simply do not believe in them.

Indeed, Rudy Giuliani expressly does not believe in what Antonin Scalia described as the “very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system.” And Mitt Romney has to convene a team of lawyers before he can decide whether he does. And Ramesh Ponnuru can pass along these views as though they are the most unremarkable things in the world, nothing that warrants comment, just the latest position of the Republican candidates, like whether they believe in adjustments to the capital gains tax or employer mandates.