You’ll have to pick up a hard copy of the June 2006 issue of Friends Journal to read “Contemplating Torture” by William Nichols – “The isolation and deprivation that is invading our prison system is proof of a growing acceptance of torture in the United States” – but it will be worth it.
Yes, this is a journal from the Quakers, who try to position themselves as “Friends of Truth.” They are. The essay, after all the excruciating detail of what we do in prisons, ends with this –
It is difficult to imagine a time when we will not be ashamed of talking about torture, let alone pursuing it as state and national policy. But the conversation has begun at the highest levels of our government, and perhaps it offers an opportunity to discuss something that has happened unwittingly to us in our polarized, fearful society. As our leaders have talked of confronting evil before it reaches our shores and we have been reminded daily of the power of suicidal violence, perhaps we have come to see ourselves as desperate victims in a world that hates us. How else are we to account for our tolerance of leaders whose belief in the need to abuse prisoners corrupts us all? The far more hopeful lesson to be drawn from September 11, 2001, has escaped us: that we are as vulnerable as other people despite our enormous economic and military power, and our shared vulnerability is a basis for authentic international community.
In our desperate fear we have let our leaders turn to torture, hoping to learn what others’ hatred holds in store for us. Our willingness to allow torture in our name may be eased by the cruelty we have accepted as policy within our own prison system, cruelty that surely fosters more hatred. If we are able to talk with each other about the moral quagmire we have made for ourselves abroad, perhaps we will be able to look within our own prisons. And doing that, we might come to agree that we should never torture, whether our motive is learning about our peril or punishing people we consider evil.
For those of you who do not know him, William W. Nichols is Professor Emeritus of English and Lorena Woodrow Burke Chair of English at Denison University (1966-1998) and a reader of these pages, where such issues have come up – but not in relation to the domestic penal system. He forwarded a copy. He’s onto something. And as someone who knew all of us back in the late sixties at that school, that required a reply –
I must admit I haven’t much thought about the domestic side of the torture issue, and you nailed it. Maybe I’m getting old and discouraged, but it seems to me we are now living in a not-so-nascent police state, one where most citizens revel in the public array of unfairness and meanness in the media, if they find themselves bothered to think at all about what we now have. Those who object aren’t “removed” or disappeared, luckily. They’re just patronized, at best. That’ll do.
I have a friend down in inland San Diego, a pleasant fellow, married with two kids, who would like to see anyone with an Hispanic name deported, and would love to sit at the border and shoot kids trying to cross in, shoot them dead - and he attends one of those “Contemporary Christian” churches we have all over here in Southern California, with the soft rock music and the sermons about “tough love” and “personal responsibility.” Jesus was a warrior, not a wimp! I attended when his youngest was christened - it was far beyond repellant. I’ll have none of it. Oh, and the soft rock music was crappy.
So I sit here in my bitter atheism, reading Camus now and then - thinking basic decency was uncoupled from the evangelicals long ago, when they “coupled” (the verb is carefully chosen) with the Republican Party in their bid for real, worldly power (only to advance their theological views, of course). Now those folks love prisons - tough love and all that.
But informed common decency floats free of those folks, doesn’t it? As does fairness and modesty and thoughtfulness. Those are all quite real, and exist in and of themselves, independent of the zealots. I suspect generation after generation of tired and discouraged people, not God, worked out those approaches as a way to live best in this brief life.
I’d be with the Friends, but I don’t care for any theology, no matter how limited. I do care for common decency, fairness and modesty. It’s probably best to stand by those things, as thoughtfully as one can, with one’s lower-case friends.
But are we really desperate victims in a world that hates us? That’s how we seem to be urged to think about ourselves, and that certainly precludes using “our shared vulnerability is a basis for authentic international community.” Consider where we stood at one particular point in time – Tuesday, October 16, 2007 – a day as representative as any other. We’ve tossed away any international community, as Kevin Drum summarizes in that particular day’s Around the World in Ninety Seconds –
Turkey has warned us that if Congress passes a resolution calling the 1915 Armenian genocide a genocide, “military ties with the U.S. will never be the same again.” Russia and the other states surrounding the Caspian Sea are cozying up to Iran and warning us not to even think about launching an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. China is “furious” because President Bush is meeting with the Dalai Lama. India is having “certain difficulties” approving its nuclear deal with the U.S. Britain is pulling out of Iraq, the Iraqis are pissed off at us over Blackwater, Afghan leaders are angry over our poppy spraying program, and Pakistan continues to provide a safe haven for the Taliban.
Other than that, though, how are things going for us?
Ah… not that well. And if you care for details, the links to the hotspots are provided – Turkey, Russia, China and India.
How did this happen? See Galal Nassar in the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly – we long ago adopted a strategy of creative chaos –
Following 9/11, US officials started promoting creative chaos as a tool in their war on terror, hinting at possible strikes against up to fifteen Arab and Muslim countries. Simultaneously, a strategic research institute affiliated with the Rand Corporation published a report, Major Strategy, which discussed in detail plans to divide the Arab world. The report viewed the occupation of Iraq as a step towards subjugating all Arab countries. It even mentioned the possibility of US strikes against Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Well, that’s no secret. There was Wesley Clark’s new memoir, which Joe Conason discussed here – it seems there really is a memo in which the Bush administration lays out a plan to topple seven countries in five years – starting with Iraq of course. A passage in the memoir suggests that another war, or two or three, is part of a long-planned Department of Defense strategy that anticipated “regime change” by force in no fewer than seven Mideast states. That was discussed previously in these pages here and you hear that term “creative chaos” tossed about as shorthand for what is our de facto foreign policy – shake things up and see what happens, as that gets you change. It gets you lots of things.
So if Nichols is right, we’re not only desperate victims in a world that hates us, we’re also so unhappy with things as they are that we’ll accept any change – create enough chaos and change just has to happen. After more than two centuries of foreign policy that sought marginal international stability at acceptable cost, stability has become just what we can no longer afford – you do recall Condoleezza Rice saying that in the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war we were seeing the “birth pangs” of a new Middle East – and of course it would be painful, but it was worth it – and the president using his Saturday morning radio address to say what was happening was really a great opportunity, if you looked at it the right way. We’re frightened and desperate victims, who must do torture to save ourselves, and we bring chaos as a useful alternative to festering and worthless stability. Cool.
Still, some can opt out –
A U.S. soldier who said his Christian beliefs compelled him to love his enemies, not kill them, has been granted conscientious objector status and honorably discharged, a civil liberties group said on Tuesday.
Capt. Peter Brown - who served in Iraq for more than a year and was a graduate of the elite U.S. military academy West Point - said in a statement issued by the New York Civil Liberties Union that he was relieved the Army had recognized his beliefs made it impossible for him to serve.
“In following Jesus’ example, I could not have fired my weapon at another human being, even if he were shooting at me,” said Brown, who plans to continue seminary classes he began by correspondence while in Iraq.
What current Christian seminary would have him? Most have become branch offices of the Republican Party, save for the Quakers of course.
And how did this happen? It seems he read and thought too much – “Brown said he had no conflict between his faith and military service until after he graduated from West Point in 2004 and began to study scripture and his belief.”
Bad move, and apparently unacceptable –
During his Iraq deployment he applied for discharge as a conscientious objector but the request was denied, the NYCLU said. In July 2007 the NYCLU and the American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal court in Washington, D.C., to order the honorable discharge.
“Before the court acted, the Army reconsidered the issue, this time granting Brown’s request,” said the NYCLU, adding it would now withdraw the lawsuit.
The U.S. Army was not immediately available for comment.
They need say nothing. Rush Limbaugh will call him a phony, and Ann Coulter will say she’d like to see him assassinated, after someone poisons Justice Stevens and someone else blows up the New York Times and whatever else she has called for – it’s hard to remember it all.
So what’s with this kill, torture and create chaos kick we’re on? To convince Americans that all three are wonderful and really quite useful tools for making the world a better place took some doing. Well, actually, it was fairly easy. You beat the drum – fear everything, fear everything, fear everything – and things do fall nicely in place. Not exactly new, not terribly innovative – but it works.
Ah, but are we now living in a not-so-nascent police state, one where most citizens revel in the public array of unfairness and meanness all around, when and if they find themselves bothered to think at all about what we now have? That must be an exaggeration, except it isn’t.
You might want to bop over to slate.com and read the Dahlia Lithwick item, The Dog Ate My Evidence. She asks what happens when the government can’t re-create its case against you. You’re screwed, and you won’t be alone –
Let me get this straight: The reason the Justice Department is contemplating redoing the “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” used in 2004-05 to label virtually everyone at Guantanamo Bay an “enemy combatant” is not that it concedes the original hearings were flawed, biased, or relied on evidence obtained by torture. The real reason the government might just be open to convening new CSRTs for the detainees is to get around a looming court-imposed deadline. If DoJ doesn’t do something quickly, it will be required to finally share with the prisoners’ attorneys the secret evidence it has used to hold these guys for all these years. Having told the courts it won’t turn over those records, the government is now telling the court it can’t.
She’s referring to this New York Times item – time for a redo at Gitmo, as you don’t want these guys or their attorneys to see the evidence against them. There’s a principle involved. The world is scary and if those charged were actually allowed to see the evidence against them then somehow someone might find out how we got the evidence, what the source was, and our sources would be compromised, and we’d get no more information, and WE’D ALL DIE! Really, that seems to be what it comes down to, but with a new twist –
Thus, in a petition filed last Friday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the DoJ argues that it cannot possibly comply with the federal appeals court’s order of last July to turn over this evidence. Reasoning: 1) Disclosure could “seriously disrupt the Nation’s intelligence-gathering programs” and cause “exceptionally grave damage to national security.” No surprise there. But it also argues that 2) the information used against the detainees at the CSRTs “is not readily available, nor can it be reasonably recompiled.”
Lithwick notes that the government is taking the position “that this evidence is both critically, vitally, and hugely important to national security, but also, um, lost?”
Now that is odd - the “record” relied upon to lock up men for years is somehow so scattered among various Department of Defense “components, and all relevant federal agencies” that it cannot be pulled together for a review. She says this is the legal version of “the dog ate our record” – which is “triply sickening in light of the fact that some of the detainees at Gitmo have reportedly undergone not one, not two, but three CSRTs, because the Pentagon kept demanding that they be retried over and over again until they were found guilty.”
That’s how things are now, and she has a bit of a problem with that –
My problem here is not just that everything we now know about the evidence used against many of the detainees at Guantanamo suggests that they tended to lay blame on one another after multiple rounds of torture. My worry is that secret evidence that is obtained illegally is not just a Gitmo phenomenon anymore. There is no doubt that the same kinds of flimsy claims that put away folks at Guantanamo have supported massive dragnets against American citizens as well. A regime of recklessly over-utilized administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, and widespread government eavesdropping, means that the same sorts of thin factual records that built these seemingly airtight cases against the “enemy combatants” are also building up the record against the rest of us.
I know, I know. You think that what happens at Gitmo stays at Gitmo. Maybe. But the only thing more terrifying than convictions based on secret evidence is the possibility that when it comes time to fight those convictions, the secret evidence might just disappear.
Did someone mention a police state? Lithwick does mention the news that same day –
This morning’s paper reveals, for instance, that noble Verizon, pitching in on the fight against terror, admitted to having turned over American citizens’ phone records to the government on hundreds of occasions, and that the FBI tried to use administrative subpoenas to gain information not just about specifics calls, but on everyone in everyone else’s calling circle. (The phone companies take the position that it’s not their job - or even their lawyers’ job -to second-guess the president if he says he needs our private information. Question: Whose job is it to second-guess the president?)
These are not just a handful of warrantless subpoenas.
And Lithwick suggests that Christy Hardin Smith has it right, as you can “multiply that across every telecommunications company in the United States and the number of years that the Bush Administration has been end-running the FISA court altogether.” So we suddenly have a massive amount of personal information, demanded in secret and turned over in secret, and, as Lithwick says, “socked away, shared with who knows which ‘component and relevant federal agency,’ with some of us swept into the mix because somebody once called to sell us a raffle ticket.”
Did someone mention a police state?
But wait! There’s more!
New revelations from the ACLU and EFF show that the same NSLs used at Verizon have been used by the Defense Department to spy on Americans as well. Following a massive FOIA dump, and having studied more than 455 NSLs, the DoD now “seems to have collaborated with the FBI to circumvent the law, may have overstepped its legal authority to obtain financial and credit records, provided misleading information to Congress, and silenced NSL recipients from speaking out about the records requests.” In yet one more example of Government Without Borders, it now appears the DoD was colluding with the FBI to violate its own internal surveillance rules. And who was the DoD investigating? “Potential terror threats posed by people directly connected to the Defense Department, including civilian employees, contractors, active duty troops, reservists and their families.”
In short, the military was gaining access to Americans’ private information using powers the government’s own auditors have acknowledged to be both abusive and illegal. The NSL provision of the Patriot Act was struck down by a federal judge last month. But as old spy programs die, new ones tend to rise up out of the ashes. And I suddenly find myself in the peculiar position of not knowing whether it’s better if the government holds on to all that secret information it’s been collecting, or if it gets lost.
If you click on the Lithwick item itself you’ll find links to all the background she mentions, but you really don’t care that much, do you? Just note that she is only pointing out that the same Justice Department that’s secretly and illegally collecting all these reams of personal information about us “now informs the federal appeals courts that it cannot possibly pull together all the voluminous secret files used to condemn the prisoners to a life spent in shackles at Guantanamo.”
And you know the obvious – “The biggest problem with illegally obtained secret evidence is that if and when you ever get a chance to see it and test it in a court of law, you may already be in jail, and the evidence used to put you there may be scattered to the winds.”
But why worry? Those who object aren’t “removed” or disappeared, luckily. They’re just patronized, at best – so far.
Ah, Denison University, Granville, Ohio, September 1965 to June 1969 – feeling good, we were going to change the world. What happened?
