They've Done It Again

Even though I knew better, I somehow kept hoping that we wouldn't actually invade Iraq. Part of me wasn't willing to accept that the people in charge could actually be so stupid, although with each passing day it seemed more and more inevitable. I spent days depressed after the war began, and the long slide down into the current morass began.

I was also depressed for a long time after the 2004 election. Part of me wasn't willing to accept that the American people could fall for the jingoism and smear tactics of an administration that was clearly failing. Yet, enough people did that, with some mischief in Ohio, Bush was re-elected.

And here we are. The Senate has joined with the House to give this President extraordinary, and extraordinarily ill-defined powers. Despite the failure in Iraq, despite the documentation by our own government that his War on Terror strategies have been making things worse, not better, they have given this man powers beyond that any President has even had. What details are already known about the bill are profoundly disturbing, and they've been so in flux that it's quite unlikely that anyone voting for the bill actually knew all of what it contained.

So here it is again, that awful feeling when something awful, something so awful I couldn't even really believe it would happen has happened, and I know that the months and years to come from this will be bad, in ways that are both utterly predictable and yet unfathomable. In the near term, we'll be finding out just exactly what they've handed over to the administration. If we're lucky, somewhere far too long from now, the Supreme Court will invalidate it, probably after we hear some new mind-warping administration legal argument that we actually are experiencing a rebellion or an invasion, so suspending habeas is just fine. (If we're not lucky, Scalia, Thomas and Alito will have a new buddy on the bench by then, and then who knows?) Beyond that, it's too hard to see. Or rather, the options are too numerous and too horrible to imagine in detail.

Now, I need to go off and spend a little while lingering in a fantasyland where the people in power cared about what made America great, so Senator Clinton's words on the Senate floor made a difference to someone.

During the Revolutionary War, between the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which set our founding ideals to paper, and the writing of our Constitution, which fortified those ideals under the rule of law, our values – our beliefs as Americans – were already being tested.

We were at war and victory was hardly assured, in fact the situation was closer to the opposite. New York City and Long Island had been captured. General George Washington and the continental army retreated across New Jersey to Pennsylvania, suffering tremendous casualties and a body blow to the cause of American Independence.

It was at this time, among these soldiers at this moment of defeat and despair, that Thomas Paine would write, "These are the times that try men's souls." Soon afterward, Washington led his soldiers across the Delaware River and onto victory in the Battle of Trenton. There he captured nearly 1000 foreign mercenaries and he faced a crucial choice.

How would General Washington treat these men? The British had already committed atrocities against Americans, including torture. As David Hackett Fischer describes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Washington's Crossing," thousands of American prisoners of war were "treated with extreme cruelty by British captors." There are accounts of injured soldiers who surrendered being murdered instead of quartered. Countless Americans dying in prison hulks in New York harbor. Starvation and other acts of inhumanity perpetrated against Americans confined to churches in New York City.

The light of our ideals shone dimly in those early dark days, years from an end to the conflict, years before our improbable triumph and the birth of our democracy. General Washington wasn't that far from where the Continental Congress had met and signed the Declaration of Independence. But it's easy to imagine how far that must have seemed. General Washington announced a decision unique in human history, sending the following order for handling prisoners: "Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren."

Therefore, George Washington, our commander-in-chief before he was our President, laid down the indelible marker of our nation's values even as we were struggling as a nation – and his courageous act reminds us that America was born out of faith in certain basic principles. In fact, it is these principles that made and still make our country exceptional and allow us to serve as an example. We are not bound together as a nation by bloodlines. We are not bound by ancient history; our nation is a new nation. Above all, we are bound by our values.

George Washington understood that how you treat enemy combatants could reverberate around the world. We must convict and punish the guilty in a way that reinforces their guilt before the world and does not undermine our constitutional values.

Sigh.