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In the week and a half or so since the Republicans "compromised" with the White House on the legislation that permits torture, abrogates the Geneva Convention and eviscerates the 800-year-old legal tradition of habeas corpus I have been trying to think of a way to write about it here.
In the process, I have encountered a lot of well-written editorials, articles, and blog posts:
A blogger who calls himself "Wisco" wrote this post entitled "Remember When Everyone Thought Torture Was Evil?" He pays particular attention to the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen originally from Syria who was detained, imprisoned and tortured by the United States government covertly for almost a year with no access to any legal resources. A confession was beaten out of him despite the fact that he was completely innocent of any charges. Wisco writes about the apologists and advocates among the American Right who continue to try to smear this man and promote torture as a "necessary weapon".
The Russian author Vladimir Bukovsky wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in the spring of 2005 entitled "Torture's Long Shadow", in which he offers his own first-hand account of being held prisoner and tortured by the KGB in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison. The graphic details will make you shudder when you consider that his only "crime" was speaking out against the Soviet regime -- we used to think of ourselves better than the Soviets, but, as Bukovsky writes, we have consigned ourselves to this same path where any justification can and will be found to imprison and torture anyone who comes under the displeasure of the administration.
More recently in the Washington Post, the editorial board of that newspaper offered a harsh criticism of not just Bush but Senator John McCain, himself the victim of torture as a prisoner of war, but when political points needed to be scored was willing to betray his own past. It is disturbing in the extreme that a "compromise" which consists of little more than a political face-saving gesture for both Bush and McCain which, in the end, astonishingly turns a blind eye to this despicable behavior.
The historian Niall Ferguson, who had been at one point a darling among the Right because of his historical assessment of the United States' unclaimed status as an "empire", now reminds us that another hero of the Right, Winston Churchill, opposed torture for pragmatic reasons: abuse of prisoners will inevitably result in torture and abuse on the part of the other side and turn into a downward spiral of atrocities. This was the very point of the Geneva Conventions in the first place, and technicalities will hold little water with aggrieved enemies.
Speaking of water -- waterboarding has been much discussed through all of this, held up by the Right as a "lite" version of torture (if any such thing can be imagined), but this post by "The Nation" editor David Corn should dissuade anyone except the most willfully blind apologist that it is anything but. Bush, he says, has cast his lot in with the worst dictators and murderers of the 20th Century.
I could go on with the links, as there have been many people of conscience who have spoken out publicly in the last couple of weeks about this.
One time, several years ago, on this blog I stated one thing very clearly:
I continue to hold fast to that sentiment. It is heart-breaking to even begin to think that millions of people in this country continue to support the actions of a group of people who have demonstrated themselves to have nothing but contempt for the groundwork of civilization itself, who are willing to broach any separation between decency and brutality, who are ready to cast aside every principle upon which law and government have made manifest for nearly a millennium, who have determined to exert and extend their power with only the foulest of intentions.
Liberalism in theory and form promotes tolerance and provides a great deal of room for the co-existence of a multiplicity of opinions and world-views, but for me the threshhold of tolerance has been reached as a consequence of these recent actions. I can no longer find any room for accommodation for anyone who supports these actions or the people who have undertaken them. I am compelled to judge any and all supporters as being profoundly evil themselves and from this time forward will show not the slightest consideration for them. They are deserving of nothing but my uttermost contempt and will receive no more.
I cannot say what the best practical course is to begin the fight against this evil. It is clear that the mechanisms traditionally available to the American people have been undermined and devalued to the point of meaninglessness. It is less clear where other traditional forms of opposition might take us. Unfortunately, there may not be many alternatives as we are marched down this path.
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