"The issue isn't whether we are the same as the Nazis. The issue is, we aren't different enough."
--Israeli historian Avi Shlaim
Yesterday the United States Congress passed a bill which allows the President to decide what is and is not torture. Since we have been interrogating prisoners for the last six years in secret prisons overseas, we already know what behavior this President considers acceptable, so in effect we just gave a stamp of approval to:
- Repeatedly submerging the person's head in water to the point of almost drowning, then reviving them to do it again, and again, and again.
- Electrical shocks
- Repeated beatings, to "a bloody pulp" in the case of five of Saddam's generals
- Long-term standing and sleep deprivation, 40 hours at least
- The cold room,risoners left naked in cells kept in the 50s and frequently doused with cold water.
Ask yourself -- if you read about an enemy doing this to American soldiers, would you be pissed? Would you consider it torture? I would. And we've been doing it for up to six years. When the Soviets did these exact same things in their gulags, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the North Vietnamese during the Viet Nam war, we condemned them for it. We have now taken their place, becoming a nation that tortures people, people who have never had a trial, people who have no way to defend themselves in a court of law, people who may be completely innocent.
That last is not rhetorical, sadly:
Four years ago this month, a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar was on his way back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia. The Syrian-born man had a stopover at JFK airport in New York. The date was September 26, 2002. He wouldn't see his family for another 374 days.
After being questioned at the airport, U.S. officials took him to an immigration facility in New York. Two weeks later he was secretly flown to Jordan aboard a Gulfstream Jet. Maher Arar ended up in Syria where he was held in a cell, the size of a grave. He was repeatedly tortured. For weeks his family didn't even know where he was.
On Monday, the Canadian government admitted for the first time that Arar was a completely innocent man.
Let's review that again. We whisked a completely innocent man off the streets of the United States and tortured him for a year in the Middle East. This was done not by the Soviet Union, not by China, and not by al Quaeda. By
us. And yesterday, our representatives put their stamp of approval on behavior like this and its utter imperviousness to redress in a court of law.
What's particularly galling is that the techniques in question (particularly waterboarding and cold rooms) were stolen primarily from the Khmer Rouge and were intended not to discover secret plots, but to force confessions. Confessions to what? Whatever the torturers wanted, because when you torture someone they'll say literally anything to make it stop. Other than reading tea leaves, it's about the stupidest and most useless way to gather intelligence there is.
But that's not all the bill passed yesterday did. It also eviscerated the right to habeus corpus. From Wikipedia:
A writ of habeas corpus is a court order addressed to a prison official (or other custodian) ordering that a detainee be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he or she should be released from custody. The writ of habeas corpus in common law countries is an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action.
It's so important for protecting liberty from arbitrary state action that it's written directly into the Constitution:
"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
(Article One, section nine).
We basically gutted it yesterday. In essence, the President can declare anyone he likes to be an enemy combatant. The language is so vague, referring to "providing support for terrorists", that almost anything would fit it. And once a person is so declared, they can be taken into military custody where they will not have the right to challenge their arrest or to see the evidence against them. Habeus corpus does not exist for these people.
The worst part of this bill is a truly malicious combination of (1) allowing the administration to be sole arbiter of what all these words "mean", and (2) stripping the courts of any power to intervene in those decisions or even hear about their abuse. We're basically saying "We completely trust the President, he does not need any check on his authority whatsoever." But if history has taught us nothing else, it is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Investing the Executive with this kind of broad, unchecked power is completely antithetical to everything the Constitution and our Founding Fathers stood for.
We're doing things which, during the Cold War, were the exclusive province and distinguishing characteristics of our enemies. We imprision the innocent, torture our prisoners, define words to mean anything we wish, and we do it all without any oversight or review by anyone except the man in charge.
Again, question is not "are we the same as our enemy", the question is, "are we different enough?"
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I found it interesting that they repeatedly replaced "fuck" with "damn". Apparently a natural human function is more repellent than blasphemy. And "shit" is much worse than, say, showing people shooting each other in the face.
