The Price of Loyalty – Newsweek National News – MSNBC.com

This has been the Bush pattern. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill presciently says a second tax cut is unaffordable if we want to fight in Iraq—he’s fired. Bush’s economic adviser Larry Lindsey presciently says the war will cost between $100 billion and $200 billion (an underestimate)—he’s fired. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki presciently says that winning in Iraq will require several hundred thousand troops—he’s sent into early retirement. By contrast, CIA Director George Tenet, who presided over two of the greatest intelligence lapses in American history (9/11 and WMD in Iraq) and apparently helped spread “oppo ammo” to discredit the husband of a woman who had devoted her life to his agency, receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The conventional Washington explanation is that this is just old-fashioned politics. As long as you don’t lie to a grand jury, there’s nothing illegal here. But the consequences of a bias for loyalty over debate—even internal debate—have been devastating. The same president who seeks democracy, transparency and dissent in Iraq is irritated by it at home. O’Neill tells his story in a book by Ron Suskind called “The Price of Loyalty,” and that title is the missing link in explaining the failure of the Bush presidency. The price of loyalty is incompetence. Issues don’t get aired; downside risks remain unassessed.

In the W White House, and by extension in the country I’m going to call the W-USA, dissent is disloyalty. Democracy is a warm, fuzzy ideal abroad, and an inconvenience at home. And torture is a tool that the administration is trying to get into its toolbox, where once the thought of torture was reserved for only the most evil regimes.

Over the weekend, I saw the last 40 minutes or so of an old movie called “Captain Newman, MD.” It was an Oscar winner in its year; it starred a bunch of Hollywood royalty like Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis. It’s about a compassionate Army psychiatrist who tries to put shattered men back together so they can return to the war and fight against enemies who think nothing of applying horrible torments to prisoners for their own entertainment (in the book, there’s a graphic description of torure by Japanese soldiers, but I don’t know if that part was in the movie).

Now I wonder what Captain Newman would think of the events in Abu Ghraib? I think he’d start by resigning his commission, because he had principles. That kind of treatment would be incomprehensibly un-American to him from his perspective, 50 years ago in WWII.

So why is the use of torture and other methods of coercion, that are not in compliance with the Geneva Convention, considered by this administration to be so essential in the anti-terror arsenal?

Because nobody dares to say “no,” either to this President or to those of his aides who hold the hardest of the hard lines. Nobody has the judgement, or the compassion, to realize that they have crossed lines that should never have been approached, let alone crossed.

At least, those who have dared to say “no” or to disagree or dissent find themselves ruthlessly purged. That they often have been vindicated by later developments is small compensation for the rest of us, stuck in this strange alternate – reality nation of the W-USA.