From George to George, Descent Into Torture

Only an illiterate simpleton or a shameless liar could deny that the nature of the American identity is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The Republican nationalists and the opposition liberals disagree about the nature of this transformation, but they generally agree that a transformation is taking place.

In times of great change like these, I find it helpful to go back to the early days of the United States of America, and find small touchstones for historical comparison.

This week, when President George W. Bush has finally been exposed as directly ordering the conditions for torture to be put in place, I thought it would be useful to see what another famous George W. would have done – George Washington. Would George Washington have ordered the torture of prisoners under his authority?

Of course, we’ll never know all the gory details of George Washington’s many military adventures, but I think that it is well worth considering Washington’s treatment of enemy soldiers he captured just after a series of particularly brutal battles. At the Battle of Long Island, Hessian mercenaries ran their bayonets through disarmed members of the Continental Army. At the Battle of Princeton, British soldiers killed wounded Continental Army soldiers that they found helpless on the battlefield. Nonetheless, when Washington prevailed in battle and captured hundreds of prisoners, he denied the American rebel soldiers’ appetite for vengeance.

The American soldiers asked for permission from Washington to beat the prisoners with sticks until they were bloody and broken, but Washington told them, “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.” David Hackett Fischer, author of Washington’s Crossing, writes that George Washington “often reminded his men that they were an army of liberty and freedom, and that the rights of humanity for which they were fighting should extend even to their enemies.”

Compare this honorable conduct to the conduct of George W. Bush, who has ordered that the legal definition of torture be stretched so that soldiers and other government agents can abuse prisoners without fear of punishment, and who has directly ordered for non-combatants captured on American soil to be transported out of the country so that they can be tortured in an evasion of clear American laws against the use of torture by any representative of the American government.

The lesson I take from the comparison is this: When George W. Bush talks about defending traditional American values, he does not know what he is talking about. America’s traditional values, dating back to our nation’s founding, are respect for liberty and human rights. George W. Bush has no respect for these traditional values, and the historical example he sets for future presidents will be only the shameful lesson that a national descent into depravity is easy to accomplish as long as one vigorously waves the battle flag.