1115.org

Sgt. Heather Cerveny is the legal aide who is at the center of the new allegations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo. She’s the one whose sworn affidavit constitutes the basis for the investigations that are now under way.

Here is her carefully considered explanation for why she did what she did:

“What it comes down to for me, morals and simple rights and wrongs. And I don’t think a uniform changes that.”

What a strange place we are in morally, as a country, when not only do people feel the need to stand up and say they don’t think a military uniform should affect your sense of morals, of right and wrong, but it’s also clear they think they’re expressing a minority opinion.

Sgt. Cerveny clearly thinks that most of her fellow soldiers packed up their personal sense of right and wrong when they put on the uniform, they subordinated their own values to those of the military. Whatever the military does is, by definition, right. Something’s wrong only if the military says it is wrong. To speak up against what the military does, to say that it’s wrong, is an act of betrayal.

Even when what the military is doing is encouraging or condoning institutionalized sadism and brutality towards military detainees to whom we owe humane treatment consistent with the Geneva conventions.

Our leaders stand up and declaim in public with practiced ease that we do not torture prisoners. When the truth seems to be that (in addition to practicing interrogation techniques that most unbiased observers regard as torture) we put them in the charge of hoodlums who beat them up just for fun. And we look the other way, whistling all the while cheerful songs of unconcern.

When the atrocities at Abu Ghraib surfaced, the military effectively said: “Goodness gracious, we had no idea!”

I am willing to bet a very large sum of money that we will now hear an identical response to the atrocities that are surfacing at Guantanamo.

No doubt someone will stand up at some point and claim to take responsibility too. That peculiar brand of responsibility without accountability that seems to be going around these days.

Isn’t the point that we should bloody well have had an idea? All along, but especially after all the questions that were raised once the Abu Ghraib photographs exploded into our consciousness?

Isn’t it gross dereliction of duty if the commander-in-chief allows those who should be held responsible to get away with “I had no idea”?

And if someone were to say that it’s practically treason for the commander-in-chief to exhibit gross dereliction of duty in wartime, wouldn’t that be a much better definition of treason than many we’ve heard from the mouth of the commander-in-chief himself (and of his mouthpieces, both official and unofficial) in recent times?

Who’s betraying the military? Sgt. Cerveny, or someone way at the other end of the chain of command?