Death In Life

Yesterday I had the questionable pleasure of listening to Lynn Cheney on Fresh Air very reasonably describing the United States as the best country in the world, a country whose history should be taught as living up to the highest ideals of human achievement. She sees this nation as being on an ever upward trajectory toward perfection and is mighty displeased that schoolchildren are not being taught this patriotic view.

This is especially interesting in light of the fact that she and her husband and the rest of the Bush administration have the dubious distinction of committing some of the first war crimes of the 21st Century.

I don’t know what happened to certain people in the United States after 9/11, but they seemed to have entered some sort of hallucinatory fugue state in which they lost all reason. We find out today that the tales of sexual depravity at Gitmo that everyone dismissed earlier are true.I wrote about this last summer when the Center For Constitutional Rights issued its (pdf) report. We have known for some time that General Geoffrey Miller, artillery officer, was the one who introduced this fatuous, Sipowitzian interrogation style to Guantanamo. From the report, issued last July:

“We had the impression that at the beginning things were not carefully planned but a point came at which you could notice things changing. That appeared to be after General Miller around the end of 2002. That is when short-shackling started, loud music playing in interrogation, shaving beards and hair, putting people in cells naked, taking away people’s “comfort” items, the introduction of levels, moving some people every two hours depriving them of sleep, the use of A/C air. Isolation was always there. “Intel” blocks came in with General Miller. Before when people were put into isolation they would seem to stay for not more than a month. After he came, people would be kept there for months and months and months. We didn’t hear anybody talking about being sexually humiliated or subjected to sexual provocation before General Miller came. After that we did. Although sexual provocation, molestation did not happen to us, we are sure that it happened to others. It did not come about at first that people came back and told about it. They didn’t. What happened was that one detainee came back from interrogation crying and confided in another what had happened. That detainee in turn thought that it was so shocking he told others and then other detainees revealed that it had happened to them but they had been too ashamed to admit to it. It therefore came to the knowledge of everyone in the camp that this was happening to some people. It was clear to us that this was happening to the people who’d been brought up most strictly as Muslims. It seemed to happen most to people in Camps 2 and 3, the “intel” people, ie the people of most interest to the interrogators. In addition, military police also told us about some of the things that were going on. They would tell us just rather like news or something to talk about. This was something that was happening in the camp. It seemed to us that a lot of the MPs couldn’t themselves believe it was happening.

And it was after Miller was sent to evaluate Abu Ghraib that the bad apples began their nocturnal hijinks. Coincidence, I’m sure. (It’s almost impossible to believe that they sent Miller to “clean up” Abu Ghraib after the pictures came out, but they did. Has there ever been a more arrogant bunch of assholes?)

One thing that has not yet been put together in all this is the fact that Gitmo became a training school for interrogations (which may explain why they got into all this thongs and menstrual blood smearing business.) They knew very early that the prisoners there were useless for intelligence purposes. Most of them, if they were Taliban or al Qaeda at all, were so low level that they simply had nothing to share. But why waste all those lawyerless losers. Use them as guinea pigs for a new generation of TV addled interrogators trained by those who know nothing about it. (Once again, keep in mind that the entire neocon faction is enamored of a comic book called “The Arab Mind.”)

As more and more is revealed every day it becomes clear that these incompetents who ignored the warning signs before 9/11, (more proof of which was also revealed today) are going to get a lot more of us killed. I guess that is the price we shall have to pay for allowing ourselves to wallow in political trivia and tabloid sensation during the Clinton years and creating a taste for showbiz politics that encouraged the puerile cartoon reaction to the attacks from our leaders. Our leaders, the people with whom we trusted our very lives, behaved as we wanted them to, as we would expect the man who we’d like to have a beer with to behave — with simple-minded bloodlust instead of reason.

I keep thinking I’m going to wake from this awful dream in which law professors (and former deputy attorneys general) of the highest reputation do not make arguments like this (from the important article by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker called “Outsourcing Torture”):

In a recent phone interview, Yoo was soft-spoken and resolute. “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?”

What would that category of behavior be? Mass Murder? Torture? Genocide? Medical experimentation? Eviscerating babies with a bobby pin? No, those are all covered by criminal statutes and international law. So, it must be something worse than that, musn’t it? It must be worse than Hitler. It must be something so bad that Satan could only conceive of it. We call it “terrorism.”

I wonder when those in this country whose children were killed by a child molester like John Wayne Gacy or who were the victims of a brutal home invasion robbery or even a drunk driver might begin to wonder why the criminals who committed those crimes should should be allowed this “luxury” of due process when we can simply pluck terrorists off the street, inflict torture upon them and throw them in prison forever. That awful day on 9/11 was shocking, to be sure. But is it more shocking than Tim McVeigh or that woman who killed the pregnant woman and carved her baby out of her womb? An average person can be forgiven for wondering just why we must deal with warrants and grand juries and trials with our homegrown vicious killers when we don’t have to deal with such niceties with terrorists. Just what is the principle that guides this decision?

I’m truly wondering when someone will ask that question. Because when someone finally does we will begin to answer Professor Yoo’s startling question about whether there aren’t some things that fall outside the legal system.

The answer is, of course there aren’t. The reason, professor, is that the rules of due process were designed to ensure that the government cannot arbitrarily imprison innocent people. That principle is so basic and so clear cut that you wouldn’t think that a law professor would have to even think about it.

Even that ole puritan Increase Mather (Cotton’s daddy) spoke out on this after the Salem Witch trials saying, “It were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned.” Please don’t try to tell me that the Puritans in Massachusetts were any less assured that the Devil presented an existential threat than terrorism does today. These people lived in a stew of supernatural fear and they were able to work themselves out of hysteria enough to see that condemning innocent people was the worst evil of all.

As for torture, we can go all the way back to the English Bill of Rights in 1689 to find that civilization had evolved enough to outlaw cruel and unusual punishment. Certainly, if punishment that was cruel and unusual has been outlawed for more than 400 years, then cruel and unusual treatment of those who haven’t even been found guilty of a crime cannot be considered legal in the 21st century. How does one become a first tier legal scholar and not see the implications of what we are doing?

In the “war on terrorism” we are operating under a system in which Joe Bob Bumpkin from the Arkansas National Guard and Rambo McClean of Blackwater Consulting are serving as detective, prosecutor and judge when they “capture” a so-called terrorist. They then render the “convict” to a facility outside of American jurisdiction where they “interrogate” this convict for information about his fellow criminals — for years at a time. Then the convict might get a trial in a kangaroo court. We know, however, that even if found “innocent” they will likely not be released. Everyone agrees that these men are just too dangerous to be freed no matter what.

Unless, of course, an allied government like Britain puts the heat on and demands that their citizens be released, after which they are allowed to go home and are free to go back into society and live normally as before. Odd how that works isn’t it? It would seem that we are making some mistakes, since these men have all been released — but we only know about it if a powerful ally demands it. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen to the Afghans or any of the other citizens of middle eastern countries who, like us, don’t really give a damn if innocent people are tortured and imprisoned forever.

And, some believe that we Americans have now sanctioned this entire immoral regime:

Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation’s defense—a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”

It is the very core of the Commander In Chief function to be above the law. And Americans are assumed to have approved this by electing George W. Bush to a second term. That’s what the president meant when he said, “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections.”

So, tell me all you decent Republicans out there, the good conservative Christians and patriots and those who believe as Lynn Cheney does that this country is close to achieving perfection — tell me what you have to say about this:

Nadja Dizdarevic is a thirty-year-old mother of four who lives in Sarajevo. On October 21, 2001, her husband, Hadj Boudella, a Muslim of Algerian descent, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia were arrested after U.S. authorities tipped off the Bosnian government to an alleged plot by the group to blow up the American and British Embassies in Sarajevo. One of the suspects reportedly placed some seventy phone calls to the Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in the days after September 11th. Boudella and his wife, however, maintain that neither he nor several of the other defendants knew the man who had allegedly contacted Zubaydah. And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men’s American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey.

At the request of the U.S., the Bosnian government held all six men for three months, but was unable to substantiate any criminal charges against them. On January 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released. Instead, as the men left prison, they were handcuffed, forced to put on surgical masks with nose clips, covered in hoods, and herded into waiting unmarked cars by masked figures, some of whom appeared to be members of the Bosnian special forces. Boudella’s wife had come to the prison to meet her husband, and she recalled that she recognized him, despite the hood, because he was wearing a new suit that she had brought him the day before. “I will never forget that night,” she said. “It was snowing. I was screaming for someone to help.” A crowd gathered, and tried to block the convoy, but it sped off. The suspects were taken to a military airbase and kept in a freezing hangar for hours; one member of the group later claimed that he saw one of the abductors remove his Bosnian uniform, revealing that he was in fact American. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the operation.

Six days after the abduction, Boudella’s wife received word that her husband and the other men had been sent to Guantánamo. One man in the group has alleged that two of his fingers were broken by U.S. soldiers. Little is publicly known about the welfare of the others.

Boudella’s wife said that she was astounded that her husband could be seized without charge or trial, at home during peacetime and after his own government had exonerated him. The term “enemy combatant” perplexed her. “He is an enemy of whom?” she asked. “In combat where?” She said that her view of America had changed. “I have not changed my opinion about its people, but unfortunately I have changed my opinion about its respect for human rights,” she said. “It is no longer the leader in the world. It has become the leader in the violation of human rights.”

In October, Boudella attempted to plead his innocence before the Pentagon’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The C.S.R.T. is the Pentagon’s answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, over the Bush Administration’s objections, that detainees in Guantánamo had a right to challenge their imprisonment. Boudella was not allowed to bring a lawyer to the proceeding. And the tribunal said that it was “unable to locate” a copy of the Bosnian Supreme Court’s verdict freeing him, which he had requested that it read. Transcripts show that Boudella stated, “I am against any terrorist acts,” and asked, “How could I be part of an organization that I strongly believe has harmed my people?” The tribunal rejected his plea, as it has rejected three hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred and ninety-three pleas it has heard. Upon learning this, Boudella’s wife sent the following letter to her husband’s American lawyers:

Dear Friends, I am so shocked by this information that it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can’t breathe and I wish I was dead. I can’t believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your husband away, overnight and without reason, destroy your family, ruin your dreams after three years of fight. . . . Please, tell me, what can I still do for him? . . . Is this decision final, what are the legal remedies? Help me to understand because, as far as I know the law, this is insane, contrary to all possible laws and human rights. Please help me, I don’t want to lose him.

I do not know if this woman’s husband is a terrorist. There certainly seems to be some question about it, however, and this man has been given no opportunity to defend himself. He was held for three months, freed by the Bosnian government due to lack of evidence and as he emerged from the court we kidnapped him like a scene in a cheap spy novel and made him legally invisible. There is every reason to believe that he will never be free again.

We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren’t afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It’s already happening. And when they decide, as Professor Yoo has already decided, that an election is a sanctioning of anything the President chooses to do in the War on Terror, it is only a matter of time before internal political enemies become a threat.

And then it will be us.

I will not plead
If I deny, I am condemned already,
In courts where ghosts appear as witnesses
And swear men’s lives away. If I confess,
Then I confess a lie, to buy a life,
Which is not life, but only death in life.

–William Wadsworth Longfellow

Corrected for clarity