The USA Mengele Act

by tristero

I’ve spent a good chunk of the morning reading and re-reading Adam Liptak’s news analysis of the so-called compromise deal regarding the use of torture and unconstitutional trial procedures.* And for the life of me, I can’t make head or tail out of it. Maybe if I spent a week slogging throught the “94-page measure” it would start to reveal its meaning but that’s not the point. The point is that it is deliberately obtuse. And in real-life, ie, when interrogating suspects, it is bound to lead to more, not less, extreme torture and murder paid for by you and I. Y’think any Bush administration lawyer is gonna sift the nuances when asked to interpret the law for commanders in the field?

While the “compromise” is incoherent, what’s quite clear are the moral and legal issues involved. Whether you argue from within a faith or from a purely naturalistic standpoint without recourse to any higher deity or cause, torture is wrong. Always. It’s wrong not because it doesn’t work and leads to false and often dangerously misleading confessions. It’s wrong because it violates the essence of what it means to be a human being, whether you define that essence as a gift from God or derive it from purely naturalistic principles.

It is that simple. And it is beyond mind-blowing that such a basic goes-without-saying moral principle as a ban on torture needs to be asserted in 21st Century America. But it has to be, because the people who have taken over this country are in the process of tossing out every single law and moral principle adhered to by human society since what seems like the code of Hammurabi.

What especially stuck in my mind were these two things from the article. First, a moment of the kind of dark humor my friends in communist Prague used to indulge in about their leaders:

“The McCain, Graham, Warner trio really fought back and prevented the administration from winning its effort to reinterpret Common Article 3,” said Jennifer Daskal, the United States advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The proposed law, at least if it is interpreted honestly, Ms. Daskal said, would prohibit interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation, forced standing for long periods and extreme temperatures.

“The proposed law, at least if it it is interpreted honestly…” Now, that’s funny. The other thing that caught my attention isn’t:

But some voiced concern that using statements obtained through coercion, even coercion forbidden by the McCain Amendment to Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, would still be allowed in many circumstances. So would be hearsay evidence, as well as a combination of the two.

“You create a situation,” Ms. Daskal said, “in which someone could be convicted based on a second- or third-hand statement from a detainee during an abusive interrogation.”

That sure sounds as if, in many cases, even if information is obtained via torture, even if that torture results in the death of the tortured, that information is admissible against a defendant.

And that’s why I”m calling this law, if it is passed, the USA Mengele Act, because it empowers modern-day American psychopaths to do their worst and pass it off as just trying to do their best for their homeland. Republican Ted Bundy would have loved this law, including the sheer cynicism of it. Torment and maim whomever you want just as long as you get something that can be used against a Bush-fingered terrorist. And yes, it’s true, you can get into biiiiiiiig trouble if you do the nasty a little too much, but let’s get real here. Someone tortures a prisoner to fink on Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and that “information” is used to convict KSM – that person’s a friggin’ hero, for crissakes. Okay, he got a little too enthusiastic, but his only crime was being too eager to protect his country!

The USA Mengele Act permits legal evidence to be gathered for an American legal procedure by committing atrocities against prisoners. Exactly the way Josef Mengele went about gathering his “scientific” evidence during the Nazi era.

And let’s not kid ourselves that this will stop with terrorist suspects. After all, Tom DeLay used the Department of Homeland Security to try to round-up Democrats to pass his gerrymandering efforts. Of course, I’m not saying that Bush intends to torture to death his American political opponents. But it opens up the possibility down the line of using torture to produce legal evidence for American courts in, say, drug cases, and sex crimes. And when that happens, then yes, it will be pretty easy to re-evaluate the defintion of “terrorist.” Let’s say a modern-day Elllsberg – we should be so lucky – leaks a new set of Pentagon Papers. With this law, there’s no reason to have Plumbers to burglarize his psychiatrist’s office – you just grab the doctor and let him find out what a real headshrinking feels like.

I don’t think in his wildest dreams Osama bin Laden could have anticipated such a tremendous and rapid victory over America and its values as Bushn delivered. Yes, the destruction of Iraq and any day now, the fall of Iran and the consequent radicalization of millions of Muslims, the ruination of American prestige and influence, not to mention the vampirical drain on our economy: all that bin Laden joyfully anticipated. But for America to abandon all pretense of adherence to western law and morality, that was a pure gift from God to his obedient servant, Osama.

*Full disclosure: NY Times reporter Adam Liptak is a friend of mine. I know him to be an enormously dedicatd reporter (I believe he also is, or was, a lawyer), scrupulously honest and unbiased. That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with everything he says, or his analyes. I simply respect him.