Folks who believe the current political atmosphere is uniquely hateful have forgotten the boundless vitriol prevailing a few decades ago. During the George W. Bush administration, Republicans relied on push-button rage to suppress all criticism of the war on terror. After I appeared on a 2006 Fox News panel and criticized the Bush administration’s secret illegal financial surveillance regime, I was peppered with hostile emails including this gem: “Every know-nothing lying jackass like you should be rounded up and gassed with the Iraqi poison gas that does not exist according to you.”
I’ve never enjoyed poison gas so I eschewed following that suggestion. Unfortunately, most media outlets remained reticent about publishing frontal attacks on President Bush’s most outrageous policies. So, with a hat tip to Monty Python and Jonathan Swift, I sought to satirize my seditious thoughts into print.
On August 27, 2006, the Los Angeles Times ran my “Modest Proposal: Coerce Congress to Tell the Truth.” That piece was accepted and deftly edited by assistant op-ed editor Matt Welch, who is now the Editor at Large for Reason Magazine. Following is a tweaked version of that piece.
What about Congress?
Do Americans deserve the truth about their members of Congress? If so, citizens should be entitled to use the most advanced fact-finding methods approved by the US government.
Many people are unaware of the revolutions sweeping American jurisprudence. In June, the Supreme Court condemned the Bush administration’s torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and declared that the president is “bound to comply with the Rule of Law.” The Bush White House was outraged and is browbeating Congress to enact legislation overturning that court ruling and unleashing its interrogators.
Last month, Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury notified Congress that the administration seeks to use “coerced confessions” in military tribunals at the Cuba base. Bradbury stressed that “there are gradations of coercion much lower than torture.” Those “gradations” veered away from a 400-year trendline against using brute force to determine facts in judicial proceedings.
Congress will likely pass Bush’s Enemy Combatant Military Commissions Act, approving heavy-handed measures to get the truth from people suspected of bad things. Under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, American citizens should be permitted to use the same methods to pry the truth out of their congressmen, many of whom are also suspected of bad things.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has approved a dozen extreme interrogation methods previously banned by the Pentagon, including hooding, forced nudity, and exploiting fear of dogs. When photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq leaked out in 2004, Sen. James Inhofe proclaimed that he was more “outraged by the outrage” than by the pictures of detainees forced to pile into a naked pyramid and a US Army private female dragging a naked Iraqi guy wearing a dog collar.
Inhofe should be blindfolded, put in a straitjacket, and left in a room full of crazed chihuahuas until he explains why the US military should not be constrained to follow the Anti-Torture Act of 1996.
The most iconic Abu Ghraib photo showed an Iraqi man covered in a shroud, standing on a box, with wires attached to his body as if he were awaiting electrocution. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist spearheaded the coverup of the CIA’s use of secret prisons that pummeled detainees. Frist could be similarly wired and attired and compelled to balance atop a rickety box until he explains why he believes the Geneva Convention prohibition on making detainees “disappear” is null and void.
Exposure to extreme cold is another favorite tactic for US interrogators, despite occasional detainee deaths from hypothermia. Sen. Joe Lieberman has been the biggest Democratic apologist for Abu Ghraib in the Senate. He could be strapped to a block of ice until he explains how scandals over Bush’s torture regime helps the US win hearts and minds in the Muslim world.
But if you really want the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then you can’t go wrong by replicating the Spanish Inquisition. Waterboarding involves strapping a person to a board and pouring water down their throat and over their nostrils to make them feel like they are drowning. CIA Director Porter Goss assured Congress that waterboarding is a “professional interrogation method,” not torture. CIA agents proved their professionalism by waterboarding one detainee more than 80 times—and didn’t kill him once.
Citizens should be permitted to bring splintery planks, leather straps, and water tanks to interrogate any member of Congress who denies the Iraq war is becoming a debacle. Any public interrogations of elected representatives should strictly follow the same rules that Bush proposes for military tribunals. Anyone could make anonymous accusations against a member of Congress, and no representative would be allowed to see or cross-examine their detractors. Secret evidence would be allowed but only if it incriminated the accused. Medical doctors would be on hand for any interrogation, ready to formally certify that any resulting fatalities were accidental.
Some people may object that giving Gitmo-style equal treatment to members of Congress could tarnish the dignity of democracy. But that is rather quaint, considering all the outrageous tactics that Congress has already rubber-stamped for Bush’s war on terror. Besides, no one is forcing politicians to approve the use of coerced confessions for everyone else in the world. They still have time to avoid reaping what they sow.
No Shame on Capitol Hill
My mockery failed to shame Congress into decency. In the following weeks, legislators rushed to approve Bush’s barbaric interrogation wish-list. The Boston Globe reported that “because of the Bush administration’s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they’re talking about.” Fewer than 50 members of Congress knew what actual interrogation methods were being debated. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)—Trump’s first attorney general—boasted, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick declared, “We’ve reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.”
On September 30, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA), retroactively legalizing torture that occurred prior to December 30, 2005. The act also blocked torture victims from suing the US government. In the weeks before the midterm elections, the Republican Party vilified any Democratic member of Congress who failed to vote for the MCA as a terrorist lover. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) claimed that Democrats who opposed the MCA had “voted in favor of new rights for terrorists.” Hastert’s cachet suffered after a federal judge condemned him as a “serial child molester” and sent him to prison for bank fraud.
Shortly after the MCA was signed, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that there was no such thing as habeas corpus rights for American citizens. Gonzales previously declared that President Bush enjoyed a “commander-in-chief override” regarding laws prohibiting torture.
The following year, the New York Times published classified documents revealing that the Bush torture program explicitly imitated Soviet interrogation methods from the Cold War, including manacling detainees in painful poses for long periods and pummeling them into submission. Gen. Barry McCaffrey complained, “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.” But shortly after Barack Obama became president, he effectively issued a blanket pardon for all US government torturers and torture policymakers (this means you, Dick Cheney).
In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a 600-page summary of its report on the CIA torture regime. CIA abuses included death resulting from hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and thrashing them to stay awake for seven days and nights straight. In some cases, interrogators didn’t know the language of the person they were questioning so they compensated by beating the hell out of them. Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners. Many detainees were innocent but that didn’t save their skin.
Ironically, after all the shocking disclosures about the Bush-era torture regime, some people still consider my 2006 Los Angeles Times satire to be in bad taste. Instead, plenty of folks likely agree with the conclusion of the Iraqi poison gas email dude: “The reason this country is so screwed up is because of arrogant liberal bastards like you who think they are just so much smarter than anyone else…. Your whole pathetic agenda is to attack the president. I think it is time for you to commit yourself you need serious help.”
