Pelosi and Paraguay

The rush by the Cheneyites and his fellow torture-enthusiasts to justify themselves by showing how Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harmon and other top Democrats knew what was happening all along is going to backfire. Instead of neutralizing the issue by showing how broad was the consensus to torture defenseless prisoners, the revelations that many otherwise respectable leaders were involved, complicit or looking the other way just deepens the nausea. A sickened public opinion will insist all the more tenaciously on a full airing of this collective national crime.

I spent a week in Paraguay in 1984 to report on the Alfredo Stroessner regime, which at the time was in the 30th of its eventual 35 years’ duration, the longest-running Latin American dictator until Fidel Castro beat his record. Stroessner’s fiefdom was also a notoriously totalitarian system with a secret police apparatus, comparable to a Soviet bloc state, that knew everything about everybody and applied repression selectively and precisely to maintain absolute control. A prominent dissident whom I visited in his home (openly monitored by plainclothes goons) quoted the country’s summary phrase, attributed to Stroessner himself, about his approach:

‘For our friends, plata (money), for our adversaries, palos (beatings), for our enemies, plomo (lead)’.

But consolidating and preserving his power also required ruthlessness and brutality, and torture of dissidents considered a real threat to the regime was common. The opposition figure whom I visited told me that Stroessner used to take his top generals personally to witness the practice in the country’s political prisons as a way to guarantee their loyalty, to taint and corrupt them morally. It worked for three decades until he was overthrown by a long-time collaborator.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Bush conspirators brought along selected Democrats like Speaker Pelosi and Senators Jay Rockefeller and Bob Graham and fed them some information on prisoner torture on condition of absolute secrecy. Had they not lost their own moral compass, they would have left the session indignantly and somehow put their objection on record.

Instead, they played along, and now they have to scramble to explain why they didn’t say, Stop. No doubt it is quite uncomfortable, but if the torture-cabal thinks that getting a few Democrats to join them on the griddle will put out the fire, they’ve miscalculated. The more we learn about the seduction of our entire political class by the sirens of torture, the less the opportunists—or pragmatists, if you will—on the Obama team will be able to hold back the tidal wave of revulsion.