Harper’s On Torture

Harper’s is going from strength to strength recently, taking on the Iraq war with ferocity and honesty. Here are the last two paragraphs of an article about torture entitled “What We’ve Lost” by William Pfaff that appears in the November 2005 issue:

International illegality, the deliberate repudiation of international law, and torture, gratuitously employed in defiance of the moral intuitions of ordinary people, all show that the Bush Administration has chosen to place itself outside the moral community of modern Western democratic civilization. This is not an unwarranted or outrageous judgment; it logically follows from the evidence. It seems a strange choice to have been made by an American government that more than any other in history identifies itself with righteousness and with Christianity.

In that respect, if one is to invoke religious judgments, I would cite André Malraux’s remarks to the novelist Georges Bernanos, who had returned to France from wartime exile and asked what judgment Malraux made on Europe in 1945. Malraux replied, “With the camps, Satan has visibly reappeared over the world.”

Why aren’t the mainstream media talking this way?