A sad, sad day

Today is a sad day in our country. Normally I write my blog and sit on it for a month or so before I post it so that I have time to think over what I've written. Not so today. Our country has turned a corner that should have never been turned and undoing that misstep, I'm afraid, will take many years and many lives. Today, September 29, 2006 we have become a nation that approves of torturing human beings. Don't get me wrong. I'm not naive enough to believe that Americans have never tortured other people. I'm sure in times of war and in times of peace the military and other security agency personnel have tortured individuals. As a country, however, the United States was above that. Bad things happen and bad people do bad things but overall torture was not an approved technique of gaining information or of treating people. Veteran military and security agency personnel will tell you that you can gain very little, if any, useful information with the use of physical torture. Psychological interrogation methods work much better. Ask John McCain or others who have been POW's. Prisoners will say anything to make the pain stop but they won't necessarily tell the truth. McCain gave the names of the Packers when tortured instead of the names his torturers were looking for.

America used to be above the use of torture. We were the land of the free and the land of rights for all human beings everywhere. Prosecutors during the Nuremburg trials went out of their way to be sure that the Nazi's had fair trials. Why? Because we were not them...We were above that. Not today. We have become what we have hated most. We have become what we were meant to be fighting. Today Osama bin Laden won. I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who said, "there is nothing to fear but fear itself." Today our country gave into fear (again) and let it change our values and our beliefs. We let fear change our laws and threaten our constitution. We let fear win today and by doing so we let the terrorists change us to a nation without freedom, without justice and without civil rights.

Of course it is not the first time in America this has happened. Civil rights and justice were stomped upon during the McCarthy era and in the World War II internment camps. Our country ignored the rights of blacks for decades before recognizing them as human beings. It is not the first time the United States has overlooked civil rights and justice for all. I liked to believe, however, that we wouldn't go backwards. That we had learned from communism and from past mistakes that holding people without due process was wrong. We constantly ridicule China for taking prisoners without charging them, without giving them rights such as rights to a lawyer or the right to know why they are being held. Now we are the same. Today our congress decided that we can take people off the street and imprison them for an undefined period of time without charging them, without providing them a lawyer and without telling them why they have been imprisoned. Our country has agreed that anyone who is "arrested" by our country can be tortured and treated in any manner that our president feels is proper without any oversight by the congress or judiciary. The president does not have to provide evidence as to why this person is believed to be dangerous or have dangerous information. Anyone could be subjected to this torture without cause.

Recently a Canadian citizen was subjected to this torture at the hands of the United States. He was held and tortured and later discovered to be completely innocent of all charges and let go. This could be you or this could be me. I've written lots of negative things about Bush and this government. They could come to my house tomorrow, call me a terrorist and torture me relentlessly for as long as they deem appropriate. There would be no oversight, no lawyer, no one to protect me. My family would not have to be told. This is not a bill that should exist under our constitution or in a democracy. This does not uphold justice or rights or freedom.

For those who think that we can trust the president to choose only those really really bad terrorists to torture...Think again. This president has been approving torture for the past 5 years. Knowing that torture was illegal and against the Geneva convention, this president has approved torture and has created secret prisons in other countries to get around the laws. This president has also lied about those secret prisons until they were discovered and he had to tell the truth. This president has ignored the FISA court and has authorized illegal wiretapping and surveillance of phone and financial records without remorse or apology. This president believes in torture and nominated a Attorney General who is willing to re-write our laws and constitution to support the president's desire to torture people. Isn't this the exact trait that we so abhorred in Saddam Hussein that we felt it necessary to remove him from power? Sean Hannity loves to talk about the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam as our reason for taking over Iraq. How can we then do the exact same thing and not be equally abhorrent? The logic escapes me.

There are those in our culture who honestly believe that the end justifies the means. That is no surprise although very sad and frightening. Even if we did get useful intelligence from torture, which has not yet happened and may not ever happen, the end can not justify the means. Torture should never be an approved form of interrogation in our country. The most obvious reason is that we are better than that. We do not approve of it in China or Russia or pre-war Iraq therefore we should not approve of it here. Second, by condoning torture we put ourselves and our own troops in more danger than ever before. Once we ignore the Geneva convention our own citizens could be taken off the streets by foreign governments and tortured without cause and there is nothing our government could do about it. The foreign government could simply say that we are suspected terrorists and that would have to be the end of the conversation. Finally, by torturing alleged terror suspects we are creating more enemies and more terrorists around the world. Al Queda has already admitted that the US has done more to boost their enrollment than anything they could have done themselves. What we did to the prisoners of Abu Garab prison helped to encourage the people of Iraq to join the insurgency and fight against Americans. Other countries such as Iran, Venezuela and North Korea have been emboldened by our behavior because they finally have popular support in their own country to fight us. This stems from our treatment of people and our loss of the moral high ground. No longer can people say that the US is really just trying to help and we should then support them. People see us as an evil force because our policies are suddenly supporting evil deeds and evil techniques. The administration thinks that since Americans have not noticed then other people around the world will not notice. This is not the case.

The Iranian President was on 360 with Anderson Cooper last week. Cooper cut clips of the interview with the Iranian President and clips of Bush's speech in the UN. It was chilling. Bush came across as a bully. He came across as a man who felt he could do whatever he wanted without justification and without cause. Bush came across as someone without boundaries and who could tell others what to do without limit. The Iranian President talked about wanting peace. He sounded like a man being unfairly picked on by the school yard bully and repeatedly talked about wanting to sit down with Bush and talk about the problem in a peaceful and congenial manner. Now, as an American and as someone who is not completely naive I tend to not believe the Iranian president when he says he does not want nuclear weapons. Whether the Iranian President was sincere or lying it does not really matter. He came across as the underdog. He came across as the victim. The Iranian president came across as the bigger man, the man who wants peace but is being denied peace. To anyone watching, the effect was chilling. The United States is digging itself into a hole where we will lose support of our allies and we will be the "bad guys" of the world. That is not a place we have ever been in our 200 year history and it will not be a good place to be once it happens.

Of all the people in this country I would guess that the lawyers would be the most appalled by today's vote. The lawyers are the ones who know the law, the constitution and the way that our justice system works. The lawyers know that the justice system is meaningless without the basic freedoms afforded our citizens and any human being who is tried under the parameters of our legal system. The entire judicial system is based on the basic idea of justice. Justice includes fairness. Each person has the opportunity to see the evidence against him in order to create a proper defense. Each person has the right to an attorney or someone who knows how the law works and what the evidence means. Every person has the right to a quick trial meaning that people can not be held indefinitely without charges. People must be charged with some type of crime and told what that crime is so that they know how to defend themselves. Everyone has the right to proper treatment. It is a proven fact, in research and in real events, people will incriminate themselves when tortured even if they are completely innocent. People will say anything to make torture stop even if it means saying that they did something they did not really do. That is why it is illegal in our country to torture a confession out of someone. It is not admissible because people lie in order to stop the pain. I have not been to law school but I'm guessing they cover this the first year. These laws were created in our country because they work. They make justice possible. That is why they are used throughout the world to this day. They were used in the Nuremburg trials, and they are being used in Saddam's trial. They are used because they are the moral way, they are the democratic way and they allow for justice. Congress forgot that today but Americans should never forget. Americans should not go on with their lives and allow this miscarriage of justice to go unrecognized. Americans need to speak up and say that torture is not the right way and torture is not the American way.

2-2-07
New information about the Canadian who was deported to Syria to be tortured can be found at:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/01/america/NA-GEN-US-Canada-Arar.php