Reading the news these days has become an especially somber experience: the killing of unarmed civilians on the street, the invasion of privacy and freedom, a policy of torture, the denials of these atrocities tinged with Orwellian double speak. No, I’m not referring to the abuses of the ruling junta in Burma. These abuses are the result of a ruling regime much closer to home.

During the Senate nomination hearings this week, the attorney general nominee Mike Mukasey refused to call the practice of water boarding torture. “If water boarding is torture, torture is not constitutional,” Mukasey stated. When pressed to clarify if he thought it amounted to torture, Mukasey simply repeated himself. A similarly evasive approach was used by President Bush who, when confronted by high-school seniors from the Presidential Scholars program about the American use of torture, was sure to let the good-intentioned, yet ill-informed youngsters know that “America doesn’t torture.” Now, kids, go back to your homes and quit asking grown-up questions. And remember to keep shopping. You see, torture is bad, but America is good, so by definition, it is impossible for America to torture. Such is the logic of Bush and his apologists. One is reminded of Nixon claiming that he did not break the law because if the president does it, it’s not illegal.

There were hopes in some corners that Mukasey would point this country in a different path regarding the policy of torture when Mukasey stated previously in the week that U.S. troops who liberated Nazi concentration camps “didn’t do that so that we could then duplicate it ourselves.” “Torture,” he said, “is antithetical to everything this country stands for.” Brave words. Yet water boarding, a technique that the Khmer Rouge used in the 1970s, is obviously not torture, according to Mukasey, because we do it. We use something much less sinister called enhanced techniques, a phrase that, as Andrew Sullivan pointed out in The Sunday Times of London, comes from the Gestapo term Verschärfte Vernehmung, referring to the techniques of stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.

Of course, this legacy of torture also involves the previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, a man the Dedman School of Law saw fit to give an Honorary Alumnus Award this past February. Apparently, no moral standards need be reached to receive such a reward; simply attaining a position of power will do. Or maybe the law school simply wasn’t aware of his participation in the gutting of habeas corpus. This can’t be too surprising, seeing as the torturer-in-chief himself will mostly likely find a permanent home at this university, given the number of Bush pioneers who run and fund this school, not to mention the countless number of alumni, students and faculty who, when told of these abuses by the Bush administration, simply shrug and say “Well, whether you like Bush or hate him, this presidential library will be good for the school. Whatever’s good for the school must be a good thing.” Which is precisely the logic used by the administration to justify war, illegal rendition and torture: If the terrorists are evil, America must be good and all tactics used to defeat them must surely be a good thing. Yet even this flimsy justification has been refuted by American World War II vets who recently claimed that torture techniques are not even effective, much less moral.

Since the editorials started in this publication about the pros and cons of a Bush Presidential Library and partisan Bush Institute at SMU last year, scandal after scandal continues to pour out of this administration, the most egregious being the slaughter of civilians in the streets of Iraq by Blackwater mercenaries. How many more abuses will come to light before Bush’s term ends? I suppose if the atrocities committed by this administration on our Constitution and on our dignity and moral standing in the world don’t change the mind of these Bush Library and Institute supporters on campus now, then nothing will. I urge students to consider the abuses that are committed by our leaders in your name, and ask yourselves if SMU should be a part of such a tortured legacy as George W. Bush’s

About the writer:

Wes Jackson is a senior psychology major. He can be reached at [email protected].