A few weeks back I took a trivial slap at Ross Douthat for a lame squib he wrote at the expense of poor Adrian Grenier (yeah, that Adrian Grenier) who I suspect is not quite as untalented as Ross says he is. Well, today it’s a lot more serious, thanks to an abysmal post Ross has turned in, intended by him as a major “statement” on the Bush Administration’s “torture rocks” policy.
Ross pats himself on the back, strenuously, for admitting 1) that so-called “harsh interrogation” is torture, that 2) torture is inherently immoral, and 3) that the torture policy came straight from Bush down, and emphatically through Cheney and Rumsfeld. Having “confessed” all that, Ross immediately starts backing and filling. Yeah, he just called Bush a torturer, but he’s no damn liberal! After torturing himself, not to mention his readers, Ross finally comes to this conclusion:
But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us - not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn’t get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds - to return to where I began this rambling post - the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.
Well, after 9/11, I felt angry and frightened and hungry for revenge, but I did not, in any way, “ask for” the torture of convicted murderers, much less “suspects” and much, much less innocents rounded up in police raids, who were the main victims of the Abu Ghraib outrages. I did not “ask for” Donald Rumsfeld to order the torture of suspects in Guantanamo, nor did I “ask for” him to order generals to introduce torture in Iraq, torture that was inflicted on anyone unfortunate enough to fall into American hands. I did not ask the President to encourage the use of torture, to assist in the concealment of homicides, and to lie over and over again about everything that he had done. So I guess that’s the difference between Ross and me.
