In Abu Ghraib, a wake-up call: Our own democracy is in danger

[Iceburg]

http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1083930912156830.xml
Sunday, May 09, 2004
GARRETT EPPS
"God," says the proverb, "looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America." Seldom in our lifetimes has our country seemed to need help from a higher power as much as it did last week.

As our national leaders lurch through the collapse of our intervention in Iraq, we have been rocked as a nation by the news that American military personnel and "contractors" at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have been engaged in grotesque and criminal abuse of Iraqi detainees in their custody.

The moral basis of our intervention in Iraq is in ruins: We found no weapons of mass destruction; we found no Iraqi ties to international terror; and the freedom and democracy we promised the Iraqi people are called into question by tactics of torture and abuse worthy of the Baathist regime we displaced. It is difficult to find even a spark of hope in the deepening gloom.

...
Those who embrace such easy explanations are deliberately turning away from the central lesson of American history. The entire genius of American democracy lies in the principle that no one -- no matter how virtuous or kind -- can be trusted with absolute, unreviewable power over other human beings.

When the fog of politics and war have cleared, I predict, the criminals of Abu Ghraib will be revealed as very ordinary men and women -- men and women who joined the military to serve and protect their country and bring honor to our democracy; men and women who lost their moral compasses, as others have done throughout history, when no one was watching to keep them honest. Trust the government?

... more http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1083930912156830.xml

[enough]

1. Yes, this is the main point -- not many are looking at it.

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Yet in the midst of the darkness, it is possible that what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" have intervened to show us the difficult way out of this national disaster. The hideous news from Abu Ghraib, by a coincidence that would seem ridiculous in a work of fiction, burst upon the nation at a crucial time.

Our Supreme Court is pondering whether to write into law the principle that an American president may, with the stroke of a pen, imprison American citizens and foreign nationals without any guarantees of due process. Our nation's founders fashioned these guarantees out of bitter experience to protect us from tyranny and our government from a slide into dictatorship.

"To see what is in front of your nose," George Orwell once wrote, "takes a constant effort." The connection between Abu Ghraib and the cases pending in the Supreme Court is so obvious we may overlook it.

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Thanks for the post, Iceburg