Adam Ash

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Thursday, September 28, 2006

The United States of Torture (yes, fellow Americans, it's come to this)



1. Rogue State
Lawbreaker and torturer -- that's America, loud and proud.
By Matthew Yglesias (from the American Prospect)


“The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture,” George W. Bush explained in a June 2003 speech , “and we are leading this fight by example.” Oh, the irony!

Intriguingly, at the time he seemed to have a good grasp of the relevant issues. “Freedom from torture,” he said, “is an inalienable human right.” True. “The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control.” Also true. And lastly, a straightforward recognition of who the torturers of the world are, and why they do it: “Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.”

Last week, we learned that among those spirit-crushing rogue regimes was the government of the United States of America, which is now “leading by example” in the field of hair-splitting and wink-nod authorizations of torture. Thanks to the recent “compromise” between the hard-core torturers in the Bush administration and “moderate” Republican torture opponents, we continue to live in a country that does not officially endorse the infliction of “severe pain.” That would be torture, you see. “Serious pain,” however, is fine. That's merely cruel and degrading treatment. (The president used to be against that, too, but, well, things change.)

The interesting thing, as David Luban points out , is that the compromise defines “serious pain” as “bodily injury that involves … extreme physical pain,” so the ultimate significance of this distinction between serious and severe might be called into question. More to the point, the law simply shreds the very concept of law, as Jack Balkin explained with this rundown of the components:
Eliminating the writ of habeas corpus, denying anyone the right to invoke rights guaranteed by Geneva in judicial actions, prohibiting the use of any foreign sources in construing the meaning of the Geneva Conventions, proclaiming that the president is the authoritative source of the meaning of Geneva with respect to the War Crimes statute, amending the War Crimes statute with language that allows the president to continue to engage in torture-lite (after all, he is now the authoritative source of its meaning), and finally, making all these amendments retroactive to November 26, 1997.

Other countries, of course, practice torture in violation of international law. As has now been clear for a while, we have been in their company for some years. The latest twist, however, is that we now won't show any shame about it. Rather than simply violating the laws to which we have agreed to adhere, we're repudiating them, simply denying that the standard by which civilized nations operate apply to us.

The problems here will be widespread. One of the strengths of democracies on the international scene is precisely that it's much harder for liberal states to violate agreements. Dictatorships can say one thing and do another with ease. Democracies feature free presses, free speech, the rule of law, independent judiciaries, legislative oversight, and other measures to ensure that laws and treaties are followed. This is, to the conservative mind, a weakness. In their view, cheating is a good thing, and America's historical difficulty in cheating constitutes a problem. They're dead wrong. Cooperation is a good thing -- the best ticket to prosperity, security, and international peace. Democracies can cooperate with other countries -- and especially with other democracies -- more credibly and effectively, and that's one of the reasons the world's democratic block is so much stronger and more prosperous than the rest of the world.

But the rule of law is now off the table as far as Bush is concerned. What's more, insofar as national-security policy is at issue, the United States increasingly doesn't look like much of a democracy. As the congressional Republicans march in lockstep behind the White House's torture agenda, they don't even know what that agenda's composed of. The Boston Globe reported Saturday that 90 percent of members of Congress don't know “which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act.” Which is just to say that, in practice, absolutely everything would be permitted, since the only people capable of overseeing the interrogation program haven't done it, won't do it, and have no intention of doing it in the future.

Consequently, the United States now presents itself as what amounts to the globe's largest and most powerful rogue state -- a nuclear-armed superpower capable of projecting military force to the furthest corners of the earth, acting utterly without legal or moral constraint whenever the president proclaims it necessary. The idea that striking such a posture on the world stage will serve our long-term interests is daft. American power has, for decades, rested crucially on the sense that the United States can be trusted and relied upon, on the belief that we use our power primarily to defend the community of liberal states and the liberal rules by which they conduct themselves rather than to undermine them.

An America prepared to casually toss out the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian diplomacy -- along with basic human decency and the rule of law as side helpings -- is not a country others are going to want to cooperate with. It will constitute a threat to their own interests and values. Nor will it be a country blessed with a lot of accurate intelligence. As Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has pointed out , an intelligence service shot-through with demands that it torture people "degenerates into a playground for sadists," the service itself "an army of butchers" skilled at terrorizing its victims but hardly capable of unraveling complicated investigations.

It's a grim future brought to us by grim and deranged men -- by people who seem to have developed an unhealthy level of admiration for America's enemies. (They want the country they run to transform itself into a facsimile of its evil adversaries.) It's a future in which it may become increasingly hard for decent citizens of this country to say truthfully that they're proud to be Americans.

(Matthew Yglesias is an American Prospect staff writer.)


2. The United States of Barbarism -- by James Bovard (from the Future of Freedom Foundation)

The U.S. Senate is cutting a deal with President Bush to make America a banana republic. Last week, three senators reached an agreement with the White House that will de facto permit the CIA to continue torturing people around the world. And the deal will prevent anyone — including Bush administration officials — from being held liable for the torture.

This is latest sign that our elected representatives in Washington believe that the federal government deserves absolute power over everyone in the world. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned recently that Bush’s efforts to gut the Geneva Conventions would cause the world to "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

But more important, the Senate-White House torture deal should cause Americans to doubt the moral basis of their entire government. After 9/11, many Bush administration officials seemed determined to use any and every means to bludgeon people suspected of terrorism or terrorist intent. The Justice Department delivered to the White House a memo in August 2002 explaining why Bush was not bound by the War Crimes Act or the Anti-Torture Act.

The memo began by largely redefining torture out of existence. It then explained why even if someone died during torture, the torturer might not be guilty if he felt the torture was necessary to prevent some worse evil. The memo concluded by revealing that the president has the right to order torture because he is above the law, at least during wartime (even if Congress has not declared war).

The Justice Department declared that the president may effectively exempt government officials from federal criminal law, noting that “Congress cannot compel the President to prosecute outcomes taken pursuant to the President’s own constitutional authority. If Congress could do so, it could control the President’s authority through the manipulation of federal criminal law.”

The memo’s absolutism would have brought a smile to despots everywhere: “As the Supreme Court has recognized ... the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces.... we will not read a criminal statute as infringing on the President’s ultimate authority in these areas.”

Thus, the “commander-in-chief” label automatically swallows up the rest of the Constitution. Yet, as Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh observed, “If the president has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

This is the doctrine that the Senate-White House deal largely codifies. It will be up to the president to declare which interrogation methods U.S. agents can use — almost regardless of the Geneva Conventions. It will be up to the president to decree who will face “rough” interrogation.

The details of the torture deal vivify how our politicians no longer give a darn about maintaining even a pretense of due process. The agreement will permit the use of coerced confessions in military tribunals — turning the judicial clock back to the 1600s. The Washington Post noted that the agreement permits “defense attorneys to challenge the use of hearsay information obtained through coercive interrogations in distant countries only if they can prove it is unreliable .” Thus, there is a presumption of correctness to whatever accusation is bludgeoned out of people in secret prisons around the world.

And it will be almost impossible to disprove an accusation when a defense lawyer is not allowed to question — or perhaps even know — who made the charge.

But that is fair enough for the U.S. Congress.

The New York Times noted that the agreement “would impose new legal standards that it forbids the courts to enforce.” Thus, it will be impossible for the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo to challenge their detention.

The unverified accusations of U.S. government officials will still be the highest law of the land. The habeas corpus rights that go back to the Magna Charta of 1215 will be null and void under the agreement for many, if not most, detainees.

The torture scandal shows what happens when politicians and political appointees are permitted to redefine barbarism out of existence. If the government can effectively claim a right to torture, then all other limits on government power are practically irrelevant. What would it take to make the public acquiesce to the torture of Americans? Would simply applying an “odious” label (such as “cult member” at Waco, or “Muslim” with John Walker Lindh) to the victims be sufficient?

[James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Email jbovard@his.com]

1 Comments:

At 9/28/2006 9:12 AM, Blogger beepbeepitsme said...

RE elmo
Proof that the USA is Evil
http://beepbeepitsme.blogspot.com/2006/09/proof-that-usa-is-evil.html

 

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