HANOY HILTON

Any person with the slightest compassion for the human condition couldn’t help but be moved by last night’s dramatic retelling at the Republican Convention of John McCain’s Viet Nam War story. Captured, imprisoned, tortured and held for over five years, his suffering was truly monumental, his courage almost beyond human capacity. The story was told in fine fashion by former Sen. Fred Thompson and met with thunderous applause in St. Paul.

More interesting to me, however, was the inability of those cheering patriots - all chanting “Country First,” the new slogan of the Republican campaign - to see the connection between the immorality of what was done to John McCain and the immorality of what is being done to “illegal enemy combatants” being held and tortured by the American government. We are now doing to them exactly what was done to McCain. I wonder if forty years from now there will be a political convention somewhere in the Middle East at which the story of a Guantanamo survivor will be retold in dramatic fashion. Gives one pause.

Beyond any consideration of ethics or constitutional law (neither of which seem to have been given much consideration), one must keep in mind that the singular, defining characteristic of the Bush administration is its almost unimaginable incompetence. Even if you approve of torture in the name of national security, the chances that these baffoons have actually imprisoned the right people are too small to calculate.

Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, chronicles the intentional abandonment of law in America. She recounts, in depressing detail, the step-by-step process by which the Bush administration turned away from law to justify torture. This was all done, of course, in order to obtain “actionable” intelligence, and thereby win the war on terror. What they failed to see, what most tyrants fail to see, is that once they turned to torture they had already lost the war.