Another socialist blog

The Bush administration line on torture is now “We want clarity.” They claim to fear that well-intentioned U.S. interrogators would run afoul of the “nebulous language” in the Geneva Conventions. The President called on Congress to pass a law giving “clear guidelines”.

This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. What does that mean, “outrages upon human dignity”? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation. And what I’m proposing is that there be clarity in the law so that our professionals will have no doubt that that which they are doing is legal.

Well, if you can’t figure out what an outrage upon human dignity is, perhaps you would recognize one when you saw it? Perhaps you would agree that throwing a prisoner’s Koran in the shit bucket would be an example. Maybe we could all agree that summarily executing bound prisoners would be covered. Maybe, just maybe, decent civilized people could agree that keeping a prisoner suspended by the arms until he died, or suffocating him with a plastic bag, would be an outrage against human dignity. How much debate could there be?

Yeah, right.

The problem is not that they don’t understand the rules. The problem is that everybody in the world understands the rules. The problem is that they want to ignore the rules and torture prisoners, but they know they might go to prison if they do. Their solution is to get rid of the Geneva Conventions by “clarifying” them.

When they’re done, the word “torture” will be like the word “terrorism”—it won’t mean what it did before, rather, it will refer only to what our enemies do, never to what we do. And the word “clarify” will be entirely meaningless.

Having admitted to running secret prisons outside the reach of U.S. law and public scrutiny, the Bush administration has chosen to brazen it out. Yes, as a matter of fact we ARE running secret prisons, and now that it’s politically expedient we’ll brag about it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the obvious point in her low-key way:

“The existence of such prisons is incompatible with my idea of the rule of law. Even in the fight against terrorism… the ends do not justify the means.”

Ouch. The U.S. claims at all times to uphold the rule of law, and here’s a foreigner pointing out that we do the opposite. And then she reviews an elementary moral principle for a head of state who claims not only to be a moral leader but claims to be on a mission from God. I guess she’s not his girlfriend any more.

Of course they haven’t bothered to explain why the secret prisons were secret in the first place. They like secrets, and they don’t like explaining. I’ve said it before, official secrets are to protect official liars. If they are keeping their European and Asian prisons secret, it’s because there’s something going on there that they don’t want American voters to know about. Even if I didn’t cynically assume that means the prisoners are tortured we have the accounts of some of the victims of “extraordinary rendition,” such as Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen grabbed in New York:

After three consecutive days of beating and interrogation, he said, “I could not take the pain any more and I falsely confessed of having been to Afghanistan.” After the Canadian government intervened, Syrian authorities released him in October 2003 — more than one year after his ill-fated attempt to change planes in New York City — with an acknowledgment that there was no evidence that he was ever involved in terrorism.

Do you feel safer yet?

September 11th shames me back to work on my blog. I can’t remain silent while the Republicans celebrate September 11th, the best thing that ever happened to them, for the fifth time. At the time of the attacks I was Co-Chair of the Socialist Party USA. My comments at the time, on behalf of the Party, were brief. Let’s see whether they still hold up.

The facts of what happened at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon are not yet clear. Of course there is continuous media coverage of the disaster, repetition of rumors as fact, and wild speculation as to who might be responsible.

We should spend the coming days mourning the dead. Instead, it’s safe to cynically predict that there will be swift, “decisive” military action by the Bush administration against some perceived enemy, any enemy, without regard for the evidence. As in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 disaster, there will be a flurry of “anti-terrorist” legislation that will restrict individual rights and punish foreigners. There will be a sudden bipartisan consensus on huge increases in military spending. None of these thoughtless reactions can work.

National security is not something that can be won by intimidation. Only peace with justice can be a secure peace. We will renew our own efforts to transform the United States into a country that has no enemies—not because our enemies have been vanquished, but because we are capable of getting along with our neighbors.

Well, it didn’t take Nostradamus to predict the war against Afghanistan and the Patriot Act. I’m bitterly satisfied to see the correctness of that “any enemy, without regard for the evidence” idea. I don’t know, maybe stretching that to cover the war in Iraq is overdoing it.

Today we will be treated to uncounted media events designed to make us remember the Republican version of history: that we have done nothing to provoke terrorist attack, that opposition to the war is pro-terrorist, and that our enemy is like Hitler, and that we should somehow feel simultaneously safer, and scared to death. These are the lies that have worked before. On the evidence they will work again in November.