Fighting for our honor
WHEN General Charles de Gaulle stood up to his morally flawed superiors, who thought that the only way to save their country was through collaboration with the Germans in 1940, and vowed to carry on the fight for freedom, Winston Churchill said that he carried with him the honor of France.
I couldn't help thinking of this when I read of how Senators John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham, and Susan Collins stood up to all the blandishments and pressures of the White House to say no to torture, to morally flawed trials, to the scrapping of the Geneva Conventions; pressures that threaten the very foundations of what the United States is and should be. In refusing to go along, they carry on their shoulders the honor of the United States.
They also carry the honor of the Grand Old Party, which deserves better than this degradation that is being thrust upon it.
George W. Bush likes to think of himself as another Winston Churchill. A bust of the great man adorns the Oval Office. But what Churchill wrote of his own country, when its leaders insisted on staying on a wrong and misbegotten course, could serve as a warning to the Bush administration as it seeks to throw aside justice and values to continue on a downward spiral under wrong and self-defeating policies.
``I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf," Churchill wrote. ``It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. . . A little further on still (the flagstones) break beneath your feet."
The descending staircase has already broken beneath our feet in Iraq, and the carpet of Afghanistan is wearing thin because of neglect. But a far worse danger would be the dark gulf of abandoning the high ground on the treatment of prisoners and giving in to moral decay at home.
Churchill also said the Cross of Lorraine (symbol of de Gaulle's Free French movement ) was one of the heaviest crosses he had to bear, and I am sure the White House feels the same about the ever-independent John McCain, who knows a thing or two about torture.
But even the good soldier Colin Powell, a former secretary of state and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, broke his silence and misplaced loyalty to the regime he served to weigh in on the side of the nay saying senators. He was right to say that re defining the Geneva Conventions would cause the world to ``doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."
Powell has come to bitterly regret his famous speech before the United Nations on the reasons for war against Iraq -- reasons he now knows were based on cooked evidence, manipulated intelligence, and outright falsehoods.
The moral basis of our fight against terrorism has already been undercut in the eyes of much of the world by the excesses of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram Airbase outside Kabul. If people continue to question the moral base of our war against terrorists, then the very intelligence we seek and desperately need will start to dry up.
The best intelligence comes not from inflicting pain or extreme discomfort, or bringing suspects close to drowning. ``No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices, " the army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, Lieutenant General John Kimmons, told Pentagon reporters recently. ``I think the empirical evidence of the last five years tells us that. And, moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and . . . it would do more harm than good . . . We can't afford to go there."
Virtually all of our successful interrogations in the war on terror, the general said, ``have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use. . ." The best intelligence comes from psychologically breaking down resistance and winning the prisoner over.
To be avoided is the method used on Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, who was seriously wounded during his capture. ``We got him in very good health so we could start to torture him," a CIA official told author Ron Suskind. But in the end most of what he told them was nonsense.
When all is said and done, as McCain told angry conservatives in New Hampshire this week: ``This issue is not about them (the terrorists). This issue is about us."
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
