John Whitehead's Commentary

Harry Lime (Orson Welles): In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we?

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten): You used to believe in God?

Harry: Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and mercy and all that. The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils.

This dialogue from the classic film The Third Man may be more pertinent now than when it was delivered in 1949. Welles, as the rogue war profiteer Harry Lime in war-torn Vienna, had come to view human carnage with a callous indifference.

The Third Man expresses the traps, ambiguities and harsh choices forced on people in war zones. In such circumstances, men play out their schemes in an array of disastrous situations. Lime, for example, tries to exploit war and shortages. He dilutes the life-giving penicillin until it brings death, even to children. In the end, however, Lime is caught. As anyone who has engaged an enemy on a battlefield knows, war and its aftermath eventually crush all individuals within its grasp, however clever or innocent they may be.

Sadly, it seems that many Americans have become, in some respects, much like Harry Lime. It's not that we are intentionally becoming anti-human. With the continual barrage of inane and mostly mindless television images and other entertainment distractions, it is surprising that Americans know anything at all about the sort of carnage our government is inflicting in places like Iraq. Add to this the Bush Administration's continual obfuscation of facts and political slight of hand, and it is a wonder that we know anything at all.

However, had we been paying attention, it would have been no surprise to learn that American service people and other government personnel have been humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners of war--thereby violating virtually every aspect of international and human rights law. Clearly, photographs of smiling, gleeful GIs standing over a group of naked Iraqi prisoners with hoods over their faces in sexually provocative positions should disturb everyone. Prisoners have told U.S. investigators that the military guards beat them with broom handles and chairs, threatened to rape male prisoners and sodomized them with chemical light sticks and broom handles.

Amnesty International claims it has uncovered a "pattern of torture" of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The pattern of abuse, however, goes beyond Iraq. A recent Human Rights Watch report describes similar treatment in U.S.-run detention centers in Afghanistan. The deaths of at least two prisoners in American custody in Afghanistan were officially declared homicides by U.S. military doctors who performed autopsies on the victims.

No longer is America, especially in the Middle East, seen as the liberator of oppressed people. Indeed, a former prisoner said he cheered the ouster of Saddam Hussein. But after his treatment at the hands of U.S. captors, he considered the Americans to be as bad as "10 Saddams."

However, no one sympathetic to the U.S. would liken American abuses to Saddam's techniques, which included the most sadistic forms of torture and murder. "But then," write Rod Nordland and John Barry for Newsweek, "being more humane than Saddam isn't much to brag about."

It is definitely way past time for Americans to re-examine their values. Do we really believe that human beings are of great value and that human life is sacred? Do we really believe in human rights? Do we really believe that all people--no matter their color or nationality--have dignity and worth and should be treated with great respect?

Even at home, a daily battle is being waged against rights and liberties. Our government doesn't really seem to respect our dignity and worth. In fact, in the name of expediency, government agencies are willing to run roughshod over basic freedoms for what they are selling as a sense of security. Increasingly, our freedoms have come under attack by such ominous laws as the nefarious USA Patriot Act. As a result, our very constitutional freedoms hang in the balance. And as our hedonistic and materialistic culture demands that we bow before its idols, the temptation is to look the other way when these atrocities occur.

One thing is certain. We cannot hide our heads in patriotic fervor and expect these things to simply get better. "There is a bigger issue here," Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) recently said, in reflecting on the situation in Iraq. "Was there an environment, a culture that not only condoned this, but encouraged this kind of behavior? We need to understand all the dynamics of this."

The problem here goes very, very deep. It finds its root problem in what our culture actually believes about people--whatever their nationality. As the civilian death toll in Iraq--now over 10,000--continues to mount, we must be concerned. We cannot continue to ignore the fact that we are killing people, as Gen. Tommy Franks seemed to suggest when he remarked, "We don't do body counts." And until we can face the fact that we as a people have been remiss in our outrage at even what our own nation does, then we are no better than the Harry Limes of the world who can proclaim, "The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils."

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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