The senate just passed bill prohibiting water-boarding, the president has promised to veto it. The justice department's office of legal counsel now says that they haven't determined that waterboarding is legal. Of course, the other half of that is missing: they haven't determined that it illegal either.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/opinion/14kristof.html?hp

Will a new president bring relief? There is reason for hope.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

If the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe. Instead of using American political capital to push for peace in the Middle East or Darfur, it is using it to force-feed Mr. Hajj.

President Bush is now moving forward with plans to try six Guantánamo prisoners before a military tribunal, rather than hold a regular trial. That will call new attention to abuses in Guantánamo and sow more anti-Americanism around the world.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed last year to close Guantánamo because of its wretched impact on American foreign policy. But they lost the argument to Alberto Gonzales and Dick Cheney. So America spends millions of dollars bolstering public diplomacy and sponsoring chipper radio and television broadcasts to the Islamic world — and then undoes it all with Guantánamo.

Suppose the Iranian government arrested and beat Katie Couric, held her virtually incommunicado for six years and promised to release her only if she would spy for Iran. In such circumstances, Iranian investments in public diplomacy toward the United States wouldn’t get very far, either.

After Mr. Hajj was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2001, he was beaten, starved, frozen and subjected to anal searches in public to humiliate him, his lawyers say. The U.S. government initially seems to have confused him with another cameraman, and then offered vague accusations that he had been a financial courier and otherwise assisted extremist groups.

“There is a significant amount of information, both unclassified and classified, which supports continued detention of Sami al-Hajj by U.S. forces,” said Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, adding that the detainees are humanely treated and “receive exceptional medical care.”

Military officials did acknowledge that Mr. Hajj was not considered a potential suicide bomber and probably would have been released long ago if he had just “come clean” by responding in greater detail to the allegations and showing remorse.

Mr. Hajj’s lawyers contend that he has already responded in great detail to every allegation. One indication that the government doesn’t take its own charges seriously, the lawyers say, is that the U.S. offered Mr. Hajj a deal: immediate freedom if he would spy on Al Jazeera. Mr. Hajj refused.

Most Americans, including myself, originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were “the worst of the worst.” But evidence has grown that many are simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest.

Some were aid workers who were kidnapped by armed Afghan groups and sold to the C.I.A. as extremists. One longtime Sudanese aid worker employed by an international charity, Adel Hamad, was just released by the U.S. in December after five years in captivity. A U.S. Army major reviewing his case called it “unconscionable.”

Mr. Hajj began his hunger strike more than a year ago, so twice daily he is strapped down and a tube is wound up his nose and down his throat to his stomach. Sometimes a lubricant is used, and sometimes it isn’t, so his throat and nose have been rubbed raw. Sometimes a tube still bloody from another hunger striker is used, his lawyers say.

“It’s really a regime to make it as painful and difficult as possible,” said one of his lawyers, Zachary Katznelson.

Mr. Hajj cannot bend his knees because of abuse he received soon after his arrest, yet the toilet chair he was prescribed was removed — making it excruciating for him to use the remaining squat toilet. He is allowed a Koran, but his glasses were confiscated so he cannot read it.

All this is inhumane, but also boneheaded. Guantánamo itself does far more damage to American interests than Mr. Hajj could ever do.

To stand against torture and arbitrary detention is not to be squeamish. It is to be civilized.

A failure to see beyond the abstractions and the euphemisms has led to a dangerous civic passivity in this country. We must strive to see beyond the words and to see our actions for what they really are. After all, the world thinks that America is doing this. And is the world not right; aren't American citizens ultimately responsible for the actions of their government? Therefore, let us shine a bright light on what many choose not to see.

Start by imagining waterboarding, examine it unflinchingly, without turning away. (If you are think that your imagination is not up to it, the film, Four Days in September, shows the Brazilian police using this technique.) This is what my government sanctions. I am horrified.

Fritz Stern has an interesting piece "Lessons From German History" where he speaks about the dangers of civic passivity. I have included a few interesting excerpts below (click on the continue reading button). He worries about our future now and I worry he may be right.

I know that I have underestimated the power and consequences of the policies current government in Washington. I know that I have not done enough. I challenge all of my colleagues, those of you reading this blog, to turn your personal and professional energies to shining a bright light on what many do not want to see.

or in the current issue of Foreign Affairs

Excerpt:

From "Lessons from German History"

To have witnessed even as a child the descent in Germany from decency to Nazi barbarism gave the question, how was it possible? an existential immediacy. Along with others of my generation, I wrestled with that question, trying to reconstruct some parts of the past and perhaps intuit some lessons.

Today, I worry about the immediate future of the United States, the country that gave haven to German-speaking refugees in the 1930s. (In 1938, at the age of 12, I came with my family to New York.) We refugees are grateful to the United States for saving us and for giving us a chance for a new start, if often under harsh circumstances. We loved and admired this country that, when we arrived, was still digging itself out from an unprecedented depression, under a leader whose motto was "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," while his German contemporary preached fear in order to exploit it.

The United States was the best functioning democracy of the 1930s -- that "low, dishonest decade" -- and under President Franklin Roosevelt it was committed to pragmatic reform and maintained inimitable high spirits. I have not forgotten the unpleasant elements of those days -- the injustices, the right-wing radicals, the anti-Semites -- but the dominant note of Roosevelt's era was ebullient affirmation.

Twenty years ago, I wrote an essay called "National Socialism as Temptation," about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranked Adolf Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany's savior, a leader charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler's success in fusing racial dogma with Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudoreligious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they did not think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proved wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis' cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into a flag-waving martial Mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudoreligious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, 24 hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, "The national government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life." German elites proved susceptible to this mystical brew of pseudoreligion and disguised interest. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility toward the liberal-secular state and its defenders; they were also filled with anti-Semitic beliefs, although with some heroic exceptions.

Let me cite one example of the acknowledged appeal of unreason. Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, a Nobel laureate in physics and a philosopher, wrote to me in the mid-1980s saying that he had never believed in Nazi ideology but that he had been tempted by the movement, which seemed to him then like "the outpouring of the Holy Spirit." On reflection, he thought that National Socialism had been part of a process that the National Socialists themselves had not understood. He may well have been right. The Nazis did not realize that they were part of a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.

Although modern German history offers lessons in both disaster and recovery, German has remained the language of politics in crisis. And the principal lesson speaks of the fragility of democracy and the fatality of civic passivity or indifference; German history teaches us that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable.

Most recently, the White House self-righteously brayed that an errant Newsweek report about the conduct of U.S. interrogators at Guatanomo Bay has damaged our image abroad and caused riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan that cost lives. It is, of course, an inadequate and incomplete explanation— and a claim that should be worthy of intense scrutiny. Where will the White House claim get this deserved scrutiny? Probably on the Daily Show, Comedy Central’s “fake news” program that revels in pointing out intellectual inconsistencies, faulty reasoning, and hypocrisy.

Much of the mainstream media will focus instead on Newsweek’s journalistic failure, which does deserve attention. The right’s spin machine will add fuel to this fire in another sleight of hand designed to deflect attention from the impact that our own government’s ill-conceived policies have had on our image abroad; and let’s not forget the cost in lives.

We might also remind ourselves of the U.S. government’s errors in reporting the facts during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Newsweek’s failure pales in comparison.