A continuing education at Abu Ghraib University

[dArKeR]

By George Fletcher

Whenever governments lose moral authority, as when their police seize evidence in violation of the Constitution, their case for conviction suffers. As the late US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis said, government must remain the "omnipresent teacher" of our highest ideals.

In the Abu Ghraib scandal, the army and the Bush administration have hardly been good teachers, and the public and the media have also been complicit. How, then, can the collectively guilty bring charges and single out some suspects as individually guilty?

To be sure, the extent of collective liability for torture and other indecencies invites debate. Should the public's appropriate reaction be guilt or shame? Many have read and seen enough to feel acute shame about being part of a nation that could go to war with righteous rationales and end up replicating, if not aggravating, the abuses of the "rogue state" Americans called their enemy.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/05/26/2003157028