Torture accounts damage democracy
The Misanthrope by ETHAN CHATAGNIER
The Bush administration’s war on terror has often seemed synonymous
with a war on civil liberties. The latest culprit to surface in this war
is the CIA.
Under extended authority granted by the White House, the agency has been
transferring suspected terrorists to other nations for the purpose of
detention and interrogation. This process, called rendition, has landed
suspected terrorists in Syria, Egypt, Jordan and other nations known for
using torture in their prisons.
Despite this, the anonymous official in the New York Times report insists
that his reason for talking to the press is to combat rumors that rendition
is done for the sake of torture. Assurances that prisoners will not be
tortured, he said, are double-checked before a suspect is placed in a
foreign prison.
Former detainees, though, have reported being treated brutally in these
foreign prisons. These instances have been cast by the agency as isolated
and unavoidable, rather than a purposeful pattern.
Hopefully, you aren’t fooled by this story. We are not shipping
terror suspects to known torture centers for a change of scenery. The
CIA isn’t sending them to Jordan for a pleasure cruise. Torture
exists in the modern day, in the first world, and is perpetrated by the
United States.
Roughly 100 inmates detained in Guantanamo Bay have complained of religious
abuses. Reports have included, in general, cursing Allah and stomping
on the Quran.
More specifically, incidents have come to light of prisoners having their
pants taken away, which prevented them from praying, of a cross being
shaved into a prisoners hair and of fake menstrual blood being smeared
on prisoners, who were not allowed to wash afterward. Other reports detailed
captives being teased sexually by female interrogators, who taunted them
for being aroused, or being shown pictures doctored to show their wives
naked with Osama bin Laden.
I once heard someone suggest a method of getting information out of Muslims.
Torture, imprisonment and fear of death, he said, would not work because
these Muslims believed they would be rewarded by Allah in the afterlife.
His idea was to smear bullets with pigs’ blood and threaten to shoot
the prisoners with them. The fear of death by unclean bullets, which would
prevent them from entering heaven, would be enough to make them talk.
And where is the uproar, in response to this kind of ideology? Where is
the uproar when we see it enacted in our prisons? The closest thing to
an outcry was in the bottom corner of page 17 of the Fresno Bee Sunday,
and not uproar, even — just a 100-word article on reported allegations.
Imagine the difference in response if it were Christians subjected to
religious torture. The American people would not stand for the purposeful
breaking of a man’s covenant with God. Unless, of course, that God
is Allah.
In “Farenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore showed a congressman admitting
on video that he (and many of his colleagues) had not read the USA Patriot
Act before passing it. The act has been a focal point for civil libertarians
since as long as it’s been on the books.
Some of these criticisms are for infringing on privacy rights by allowing
the government to monitor library, medical and financial records. Others
center around the removal of obstacles to searches and surveillance without
probable cause.
Nestled in among these objections were cries against provisions which
allow the government to hold terror suspects without notifying anyone
and without allowing the suspect to communicate with the outside world.
The act passed overwhelmingly in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
Russell Feingold, who cast the only dissenting vote in the Senate, said,
“reserving our freedom is one of the main reasons that we are now
engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without firing
a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people.”
Secret police have been an old favorite of dictators and oppressive regimes
because they’re so effective. There’s no question —
warrants, probable cause, due process — these things limit the power
of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They slow the justice system
down. They protect criminals and terrorists.
They protect you, too. Because I’m white and non-Muslim, I’m
not at risk, or even inconvenienced, by these infringements on civil liberties.
But for Muslims everywhere, there exists the possibility of disappearance.
Traveling, working, they could be arrested, shipped from nation to nation
and have confessions tortured out of them.
The CIA and FBI are no German SS, but they do get more frightening each
time their power is expanded. The more they can search, monitor and manipulate
us, the more freedom we lose.
The administration claims freedom and democracy as their agenda, but here
at home, more and more government activity is done in the dark. This activity
includes, according to ever-increasing allegations, torture. All this
in the name of security. We call our opponents terrorists because they
use fear, rather than democratic action, to manipulate opinion.
By cutting back on our rights and freedoms, we actively lose the war on
terror. By trying to break a person’s faith, we lose the war on
terror. By torturing suspects, and holding suspects without trial, we
throw away the very ideals which we claim to uphold.
We try to claim to spread democracy in the Middle East, but here at home
we fail to admit that secrecy is the enemy of democracy. The crux of our
democracy is our Bill of Rights. The measure of our democracy is how well
we uphold standards of human rights, even under extreme duress.
We can wipe out the last terrorist, but it’s no victory if we have
to oppress and torture to get there.
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