Bush “lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that Americans are lying to themselves.

Few days ago The New York Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people”.

Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, Americans are practicing torture, and they have known they are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago.

As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschaerfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree’. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation”.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by American contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Myanmar, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

Americans can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, the post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi army.

But Americans must also examine their own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in their name in a war where they have now fought longer than they did in the one that put Verschaerfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fuelled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shell-shocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing the Americans for Iraq, the White House bought them off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilising the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, American contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home”. Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans”.

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in the self-interest of Americans to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on them to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasising cancer in American battle plan.

Humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in war. The longer Americans stand idly by while they do so, the more they resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

NYT