Turnabout Is Fair Play

Like most people concerned about how widespread torture has become in American policy, I was heartened by a District Court ruling holding that pictures of American abuse had to be released to the public. The Bush administration had argued that doing so would aid our enemies by inciting them to act against us. That sounds to me like a good reason for ending the abuse and showing to the world that it will never be tolerated, covered for, or minimized. But I'm not Bush, and he appears to prefer the cover up route. In any case, Kevin Drum points out how the judge neatly dispatched that argument:

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said that terrorists "do not need pretexts for their barbarism" and that suppressing the pictures would amount to submitting to blackmail.

"Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command."

Beautiful. I've always been a fan of this sort of political jujitsu by principled opponents of conservative excesses, because the rhetoric they use to justify themselves nearly always can be thrown back in their face. Since terms and "gut feelings" are so important in political discourse today, liberals need to take back some of the critical phrases that inhabit our discursive terrain: "values," "security," "strength," etc..

For example, when I was approached by a Republican asking me if I was going to vote for Bush, I'd always answer something along the lines of:

No, I couldn't do that. I support the war in Iraq.

Always stopped them dead in their tracks. And for my part, it was true--one of the key reasons I opposed Bush (though not the only one by any stretch) was that I supported the war in Iraq and thought it unforgivable how he butchered it. But they were so used to those terms and issues leading to a default Bush vote, that they didn't know how to respond when they were hit on their own territory.

And for the record, I agree with Judge Hellerstein one hundred percent. Terrorists don't need excuses to kill us, and submitting to blackmail is not the American way. We are a free nation, that strives to do good but does not hide from its mistakes. Or so we should be. It's high time the Bush administration remembered that.