IN her criticism of the Bush administration’s stance on human rights, Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, opened with the second verse of "America the Beautiful," which runs:
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm they soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
The rule of law, Slaughter wrote, is not just a "value," nor is it a luxury confined to more peaceful times, but it is both the fundamental safeguard of American liberty and a "disciplined link" to the very soul of the American nation.
But there is Bush’s Office of the Legal Council saying that US federal law prohibiting torture does not apply to the president in wartime and Bush himself declaring that Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees in the war on terror. At the same time, two generals investigating the abusive treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib are saying that the US Army Field Manual "virtually" allows it.
This attitude demeaned US soldiers and America itself, prompting Senator John McCain, tortured while captive in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, to remind a bellicose vice president that he and his fellow prisoners "took strength from the belief that we were better than they (their torturers), that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them."
Slaughter observed that McCain’s remarks on the Senate floor echoed George Washington, who watched as British soldiers massacred Americans who surrendered in New York. Later, when British soldiers were captured, Washington told his officers to treat the captives "with humanity and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brothers."
That’s how American scholars regard their heritage of liberty under law, and it pains them to have a president, "who would describe himself as a deeply moral man, who indeed divides the world between good and evil," turn law into a prop for power.
