Stress positions

Been watching the amazing caveman race-to-the-bottom that is election 2008, have you? Probably more than you like. In a way, it reminds me of that classic board game, Clue, where there are three groups of cards – suspects, weapons, and locations – and at the start of the game one card from each group is taken out and secreted away; ultimately the winner is the first one to surmise which cards they are. Colonel Mustard did it in the Parlor with the Candlestick Holder, right? Well, particularly on the Republican side, you’ve got maybe three issues that all the major candidates demagogue about, based on G.O.P. polling data – say, immigration, detainee abuse, and the broader “war on terror”. So Rudy, Mitt, Fred, and Huck range about trying to guess what the winning positions will be. (Hmmm…. the Undocumented Mexican Gardener did it in the Anbar Awakening Council with Stress Positions.) They try to outdo each other to the point where it gets pretty ugly. Thus are major national policies born.

Take torture (please). Now I ask you, what is more lame than Romney’s comment that, yes, he’s against torture, but he will not discuss specific techniques because he doesn’t want “the people we capture to know what things we are able to do and what things we are not able to do”? This is essentially the same line Bush has been handing out for a couple of years, and it amazes me still. Does anyone anywhere believe that the people we identify as terrorists have never heard of waterboarding or any of the other methods our interrogators so gleefully employ? There’s nothing new about torture, particularly… just variations on a theme. And enough people have been in and out of U.S. custody over the last few years for word to get around, trust me. (Let alone the fact that many of these detainees come from countries where torture is routinely applied on detainees, such as U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.) Mitt and some of the others on that stage are signaling that the current regime will continue, quite probably get worse on their watch. Their reassurance to the concerned among us? Trust us.

Mitt’s crib on this topic comes from Cofer Black, former C.I.A. official and head of counter terrorism at the Agency (for 3 years, not 30, as Jeremy Scahill has usefully pointed out), now top management at Blackwater International, the mercenary army that has been benefiting very richly from lucrative contracts proffered by the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, and more. Black is a nasty piece of work – a fact amply reflected by his career choices – and there appears little doubt that he is serving as an important part of Mitt’s virtual brain on national security matters. One can imagine Black playing an important role in a Romney administration, perhaps assuming a major cabinet position. (I can already see him taking softball questions from the Pentagon press corps – maybe they’ll make a sex symbol out of him, as they attempted to do with Rumsfeld early on…… yes, Rumsfeld…). The problem is much bigger than Mitt, though. Every administration sets precedents. Torture has long been a part of our foreign policy (domestic policy too – see Chicago, New Orleans), but Bush has made it a much more open option. If this is seen as tolerated by the majority of Americans, that will be bad in a whole lot of ways.