Published on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Dear Homeland Security, We have Found the Enemy, He is Us
by Ed Bice
The finest legal minds in Washington presumably found reason to advise President Bush in March of 2003 that the President need not concern himself with international or federal laws anti-torture laws when the security of the nation was at stake. If we were to torture a detainee for a parking ticket it would be wrong, but because our nation is threatened we need not concern ourselves with laws that were clearly written for matters less significant than matters of national security. What nation? It is not clear to me that, at the point we decide our nation is above the laws the codify decency and humanity, we remain a nation worthy of our history. There is much in America that is worth dying for—this weasel opinion and the related abhorrent actions that are starting to seem more pervasive than exceptional are not.
I think it is time to dust off the word ‘un-American.’
In fact, I can’t think of anything less in keeping with the moral and political idealism that this country purports to stand for. The premise of our constitution is that the means are the ends. The constitution was created no toward but from the idea of certain inalienable rights. The argument forwarded to our President in this memo is the same argument that has been whispered into the ears of torturers and dictators throughout history. The hope for a civilized world rests in our ability to reject this argument, to reject that we can achieve anything noble through such ignoble means.
Hello. Is anybody listening to this, our government believes, or at least has been advised, that it is OK to torture the bad guys. Why? Because we are the good guys. And how do we know this? We know this because our God told us so—and it seems that he forgot to cc your God on this. Losing my composure? Yes. Is it pretty? No.
Yes, a lot of stupid things are written by lawyers in Washington. And, yes, this is only a memo. But its release comes amid a swirling and growing storm of allegations of torture and abuse. It comes against the backdrop of our shameless and baseless semantic arguments we invoke to justify holding men who have been neither charged nor convicted captive indefinitely at Guantanamo.
The shame of Guantanamo may begin to resemble Abu Ghraib. Today’s unbelievably bizarre (NPR radio link) story of an American soldier, a veteran of the first Gulf War, who, posing as an uncooperative detainee for a training, sustained brain damage at the hands of overeager Guantanamo prison guards. The only other stories we have from Guantanamo come from the five British Citizens released in April. The UK’s Observer reported on May 16 the testimony of Tarek Dergoul, the last of the five British citizens freed from Guantanamo in March to speak to the press. He had earlier refused to speak out saying he had been too traumatized.
'They pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.'
It takes neither Perry Mason nor an extraordinary jury to reach the conclusion that something is not right with our war on terror. Taking the sum total of the revelations over the past weeks we can conclude that the ‘extraordinary’ circumstances of this ‘different’ war have caused a top down national vigilantism, the victims of which include both our standing in the world of nations and our national character. The surreal conclusion must be that cost of this war on terror is, exactly what we purport to be dying for, namely the ideals of this great nation.
It is time for President Bush to make a course correction not only in Iraq, but in the larger war on terror. We have cheapened the terms freedom and liberty, and it is time for us to give sincere consideration to what it is to promote freedom, what it should mean to stand as a beacon of liberty and tolerance and compassion. As we lay to rest President Reagan as we come to one thousand days of this war on terror, we might embrace a vision, Reaganesque in its breadth, to put our energy against the great threat to the inalienable rights that must underpin any meaningful sense of freedom and liberty, namely, any government treating any citizen of the world, anywhere in the world, in a manner that compromises their human dignity.
Ed Bice (bice@thepop.org) is the Executive Director of The People's Opinion Project
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Dear Homeland Security, We have Found the Enemy, He is Us
by Ed Bice
The finest legal minds in Washington presumably found reason to advise President Bush in March of 2003 that the President need not concern himself with international or federal laws anti-torture laws when the security of the nation was at stake. If we were to torture a detainee for a parking ticket it would be wrong, but because our nation is threatened we need not concern ourselves with laws that were clearly written for matters less significant than matters of national security. What nation? It is not clear to me that, at the point we decide our nation is above the laws the codify decency and humanity, we remain a nation worthy of our history. There is much in America that is worth dying for—this weasel opinion and the related abhorrent actions that are starting to seem more pervasive than exceptional are not.
I think it is time to dust off the word ‘un-American.’
In fact, I can’t think of anything less in keeping with the moral and political idealism that this country purports to stand for. The premise of our constitution is that the means are the ends. The constitution was created no toward but from the idea of certain inalienable rights. The argument forwarded to our President in this memo is the same argument that has been whispered into the ears of torturers and dictators throughout history. The hope for a civilized world rests in our ability to reject this argument, to reject that we can achieve anything noble through such ignoble means.
Hello. Is anybody listening to this, our government believes, or at least has been advised, that it is OK to torture the bad guys. Why? Because we are the good guys. And how do we know this? We know this because our God told us so—and it seems that he forgot to cc your God on this. Losing my composure? Yes. Is it pretty? No.
Yes, a lot of stupid things are written by lawyers in Washington. And, yes, this is only a memo. But its release comes amid a swirling and growing storm of allegations of torture and abuse. It comes against the backdrop of our shameless and baseless semantic arguments we invoke to justify holding men who have been neither charged nor convicted captive indefinitely at Guantanamo.
The shame of Guantanamo may begin to resemble Abu Ghraib. Today’s unbelievably bizarre (NPR radio link) story of an American soldier, a veteran of the first Gulf War, who, posing as an uncooperative detainee for a training, sustained brain damage at the hands of overeager Guantanamo prison guards. The only other stories we have from Guantanamo come from the five British Citizens released in April. The UK’s Observer reported on May 16 the testimony of Tarek Dergoul, the last of the five British citizens freed from Guantanamo in March to speak to the press. He had earlier refused to speak out saying he had been too traumatized.
'They pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.'
It takes neither Perry Mason nor an extraordinary jury to reach the conclusion that something is not right with our war on terror. Taking the sum total of the revelations over the past weeks we can conclude that the ‘extraordinary’ circumstances of this ‘different’ war have caused a top down national vigilantism, the victims of which include both our standing in the world of nations and our national character. The surreal conclusion must be that cost of this war on terror is, exactly what we purport to be dying for, namely the ideals of this great nation.
It is time for President Bush to make a course correction not only in Iraq, but in the larger war on terror. We have cheapened the terms freedom and liberty, and it is time for us to give sincere consideration to what it is to promote freedom, what it should mean to stand as a beacon of liberty and tolerance and compassion. As we lay to rest President Reagan as we come to one thousand days of this war on terror, we might embrace a vision, Reaganesque in its breadth, to put our energy against the great threat to the inalienable rights that must underpin any meaningful sense of freedom and liberty, namely, any government treating any citizen of the world, anywhere in the world, in a manner that compromises their human dignity.
Ed Bice (bice@thepop.org) is the Executive Director of The People's Opinion Project
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