Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Emile Durkheim

     "I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country... Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."  

   The words belong to Condoleezza Rice; she said them on May 3rd, 2009 and they raise this question. Can a person or nation be said to have values if they are willing to compromise or disregard them under varying conditions?

    I think not; in fact, I have more "respect" for someone who admits that they act like Torquemada than I do for the verbal legerdemain of the Bush administration's torture team.  They discarded their alleged values when they let circumstances dictate interrogation tactics but, rather than admit the truth, they produced a series of rationalizations that spotlight the anomic consequences of letting circumstances dictate policy.

       Ms. Rice, for example,  argues that after 9/11 fears of more attacks  understandably warranted extreme interrogation tactics.  Nothing illegal supposedly occurred but that defense is only possible because the Bush administration defined torture in a manner that mocks any English dictionary on earth. Read  Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee's  memo of August 1, 2002, and you learn that for torture to exist "the damage must rise to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function." Thus, I could take a lit cigarette and endlessly scar you yet it's not torture; or I could water board you 183 times and it's entirely legal because lawyers like Bybee torture both prisoners and the English language.

       Even more important, Bush, Rice or Cheney focus on the legality of their actions but neglect their provable inhumanity. This is not hyperbole because the August 2002 Bybee memo stresses, on page 1, that "we further conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhuman or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A's (of the United States Code's) proscription against torture."

    In Guantanamo the torture template came from the Chinese Communist interrogation tactics used against American soldiers during the Korean War. The worst thing was to be forced to stand for long periods; "returnees who underwent long periods of standing and sitting reported that no other experience could be more excruciating." The Bush team precisely imitated the Chinese Communists in Cuba; they acted in a cruel, inhuman and degrading manner yet Bush and Cheney somehow want us to believe that the Chinese( or Cuban) Communists were horrible while we remain a beacon of moral light in a darkened world.

           Values do not resemble silly putty; they cannot be twisted and distorted in the service of expediency.   As Admiral Alberto Mora told the Administration in 2004, "it's a transformative issue." Whether it's water boarding or endless standing,  "the Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -even those designated as unlawful enemy combatants."

     Ironically, Emile Durkheim made the same point in 1898. With the French government's cruel, inhuman and torturous treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus as a backdrop, Durkheim argued that the only protection against such abuses was a profound and unalterable commitment to a value he called "individualism". Durkheim used the word in this sense: He meant to glorify "the individual in general". He wanted to champion, not egoism, "but sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for social justice."

        A contemporary synonym for individualism is human rights. Durkheim forcefully stressed that they provide "the only system of beliefs which can ensure the moral unity of the country" or, in 2009, of the world. Unfortunately, many critics of the Bush administration only focus on the legality of torture and inhumanity; simultaneously, former Vice President Cheney has done yeoman's work to focus the debate around the issue of efficacy. Reveal the memos that show that torture worked and America will embrace cruelty as eagerly as attorneys Bybee and Yoo.

    Spotlight legality or efficacy and you miss the greatest crime of the Bush Administration: They spit on the human rights guaranteed by Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. That article clearly indicates that what went on In Guantanamo -or in any of the outsourced sites- "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever." This moral bulwark applies to all human beings; there are no exceptions because, as Durkheim repeatedly noted, a respect for individualism is the only way to transcend the political, ethnic, religious and other differences that normally separate six billion people.

   When Durkheim wrote he was preoccupied with the loss of cultural "solidarity" created  by the industrial  revolution and especially, in the late nineteenth century, the "death of god".  How could societies create any moral consensus in a world that had suddenly lost its ultimate moral arbiter?  Durkheim meant to fill that void with human rights and his demand is even more important today than it was in 1898.

   Durkheim (and Weber) saw God disappearing; however, today gods are as important as ever. Americans tend to focus on Islam but Latin America contains roughly 70 million fervent Christian evangelicals and, by some estimates, close to forty percent of the American people are born again Christians, many arguing that the bible is the inerrant word of God the father, God the son and God the only Ghost.

   Besides the profound divisions created by the advocates of their god(s), the contemporary world is still separated by the same kind of cultural divisions that fractured the world of Sociology's founders. Only a profound and unalterable commitment to human rights offer us a way to transcend our differences and create a moral umbrella that protects everyone on earth against the interrogation  temptations of  the next obscene terrorist attack.

   So, in discussing the memos just released by the Obama Administration, let's remember the Bush administration's literal crime against humanity: They undermined the legitimacy of the only rights than can protect each of us.

    Durkheim might have argued that Common Law Three is sacred; it is so important that no end ever justifies cruel, inhuman or torturous tactics.