The War on Integrity

"Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not."
Henry Fielding

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
Abraham Lincoln

You know the Bush Administration has gone fanatically mad when the tone of the conservative Economist starts to overflow with incredulity and disbelief at our leaders' views regarding torture.

For me, it seems crazy that this debate even exists. Maybe because my own grandmother (pictured above) was tortured by the Nazis as a fighter in the Polish Resistance. She was 5 years younger then I am today when she, her brother and her father were arrested. The information they were thought to have was apparently a threat to the national security of the Nazi regime. They were tortured, regularly, for months. (My great-grandfather died in the prison, after one too many "interrogations". His abused body fit into a box that my great-grandmother was able to take home herself.) The Nazis obviously didn't bother with a trial when they arrested them, and when they were done extracting information from her and her brother, they shipped them off to nearby concentration camps. (Both survived years at the camps, and were liberated by American troops in 1945.)

Now, I'm not going to be as inflammatory as to call the treatment of detainees by our government as Nazi-like acts, but I am starting to worry that it is getting harder and harder to see the distinction. It doesn't even matter that many interrogation experts have said that little, if any, useful information can be gained under the psychological or physical stress of torture. It doesn't even matter that the practice of torture goes against the very laws that were established in response to the horrendous behavior of the Nazis during WWII (and therefore, in my mind, dishonors every man, woman and child that died to end that war.)

What matters is that the lines are getting blurred and the shit hasn't even begun to hit the fan. 9/11 was horrible, but it was nothing like what the people of Europe had to endure. In 1930s Germany, people didn't just wake up one day and decide to do horrible things to their neighbors; fear, anger, and later - power - helped them down that slippery-slope of of inhumanity that one often finds in the midst of a war. If at this point, the most powerful country in the world is freaking out and saying that it is justifiable to use torture to fight our enemy, what would that country be willing to do if it was truly under the threat every side felt during WWII?

In a recent Newsweek poll, 75% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats said that torture was justifiable under certain conditions. In the rest of the world, torture (and imprisonment without a trial) is legal in only the most oppressive and totalitarian regimes. So what does it say about us to the rest of our world, and especially to those that doubt our message of "freedom" and "democracy", when at first sign of adversity we abandon the very values we say we are fighting for?