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.