'The torturers among us'
By Carol Towarnicky
03/15/05
"Philadelphia Daily News" -
"Somebody tell me frankly, what times are these, what kind of world, what country?"
THESE words come from a poem about torture that Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman composed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
But they resonate through the seemingly daily revelations from government and military reports of the abuse of prisoners by Americans in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. They fit all too well the testimony of those whom the CIA allegedly delivered to countries where they were tortured.
Yet, in response, a disturbing number of Americans just shrug - or even applaud.
What times are these?
In the past, torture was inimical to the image of America. In the movies, it was the Japanese or the Nazis or the North Koreans who stooped so low, while Americans maintained their humanity. Yet this season, the "good guys" in the Counter Terrorism Unit on the TV series "24" have used methods approaching torture on at least three suspects so far. Even the show's main character, Jack Bauer, personally delivered electric shocks to a man's chest in a search for information.
Systematic abuse was the dirty secret of the Soviet gulag and the Argentine generals' "Dirty War." (They called their reign of mayhem in the 1970s "The War Against Terrorism and Subversion.")
In the months after Sept. 11, we now know, torture became our secret as well.
The attacks "changed everything," some said - including, it appears, our fidelity to the Constitution. The Founding Fathers abhorred torture and cruel treatment, even for those convicted of the most heinous crimes, says Seth Kreimer, a Penn law professor and Constitutional expert.
But lawyers in the White House suggested several ways to get around that fact: Stateless terrorists fall outside the "quaint" rules of the Geneva Convention Against Torture, they argued, and besides, the president as commander in chief simply could order torture on his own. They made a distinction between narrowly-defined "torture" (which causes "severe" pain), and mere "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
And when the Abu Ghraib abuses came to light, the current head of our Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales, was quick with denials that President Bush had ordered "torture," based on these narrow definitions.
As Kreimer says, they parsed words in just the same way as Bill Clinton when he claimed, in a much less serious matter, that he "did not have sex with that woman." (As for discussions of whether torture might be acceptable to get information to stop a "ticking [nuclear] bomb," most suspects in these cases didn't come close to qualifying as the kind of people who actually have information that could be beaten out of them.)
"... .what country?" In an introduction to "Torture: A Collection," a book of essays, Ariel Dorfman writes that torture "presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness...
"Some Americans, it appears, already are well along the way to that "distancing" - if the last half hour of Friday's "Radio Times" on WHYY-FM is an indication. The guest was Jane Mayer, whose article in the New Yorker detailed the policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which suspects kidnapped by the U. S. government are sent to countries known to use torture.
The host, Marty Moss-Coane reported that half the callers favored torture being done in their name - even though some of those tortured are innocent. (Note: This was not the Rush Limbaugh show; this was public radio.)
John C. Yoo, a former assistant attorney general who paved the way to this moment, likely would not be surprised. He told Jane Mayer that the election was "proof that the debate is over... the issue is dying out." Is it?
A generation from now, will Americans be ashamed of how quickly the fear of brutal enemies led us to imitate them? Will they see American abuse of terror suspects as an aberration, like the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II?
Or will the soul of the next generation be so damaged by willful blindness that it will have lost the capacity to be ashamed - or to return America to the vision of the Founding Fathers?
"Somebody tell me frankly, what times are these, what kind of world, what country?"
Carol Towarnicky is the chief editorial writer of the Daily News. E-mail towarnc@phillynews.com.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8266.htm
---This is becoming a creepy place indeed.---
03/15/05
"Philadelphia Daily News" -
"Somebody tell me frankly, what times are these, what kind of world, what country?"
THESE words come from a poem about torture that Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman composed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
But they resonate through the seemingly daily revelations from government and military reports of the abuse of prisoners by Americans in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. They fit all too well the testimony of those whom the CIA allegedly delivered to countries where they were tortured.
Yet, in response, a disturbing number of Americans just shrug - or even applaud.
What times are these?
In the past, torture was inimical to the image of America. In the movies, it was the Japanese or the Nazis or the North Koreans who stooped so low, while Americans maintained their humanity. Yet this season, the "good guys" in the Counter Terrorism Unit on the TV series "24" have used methods approaching torture on at least three suspects so far. Even the show's main character, Jack Bauer, personally delivered electric shocks to a man's chest in a search for information.
Systematic abuse was the dirty secret of the Soviet gulag and the Argentine generals' "Dirty War." (They called their reign of mayhem in the 1970s "The War Against Terrorism and Subversion.")
In the months after Sept. 11, we now know, torture became our secret as well.
The attacks "changed everything," some said - including, it appears, our fidelity to the Constitution. The Founding Fathers abhorred torture and cruel treatment, even for those convicted of the most heinous crimes, says Seth Kreimer, a Penn law professor and Constitutional expert.
But lawyers in the White House suggested several ways to get around that fact: Stateless terrorists fall outside the "quaint" rules of the Geneva Convention Against Torture, they argued, and besides, the president as commander in chief simply could order torture on his own. They made a distinction between narrowly-defined "torture" (which causes "severe" pain), and mere "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
And when the Abu Ghraib abuses came to light, the current head of our Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales, was quick with denials that President Bush had ordered "torture," based on these narrow definitions.
As Kreimer says, they parsed words in just the same way as Bill Clinton when he claimed, in a much less serious matter, that he "did not have sex with that woman." (As for discussions of whether torture might be acceptable to get information to stop a "ticking [nuclear] bomb," most suspects in these cases didn't come close to qualifying as the kind of people who actually have information that could be beaten out of them.)
"... .what country?" In an introduction to "Torture: A Collection," a book of essays, Ariel Dorfman writes that torture "presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness...
"Some Americans, it appears, already are well along the way to that "distancing" - if the last half hour of Friday's "Radio Times" on WHYY-FM is an indication. The guest was Jane Mayer, whose article in the New Yorker detailed the policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which suspects kidnapped by the U. S. government are sent to countries known to use torture.
The host, Marty Moss-Coane reported that half the callers favored torture being done in their name - even though some of those tortured are innocent. (Note: This was not the Rush Limbaugh show; this was public radio.)
John C. Yoo, a former assistant attorney general who paved the way to this moment, likely would not be surprised. He told Jane Mayer that the election was "proof that the debate is over... the issue is dying out." Is it?
A generation from now, will Americans be ashamed of how quickly the fear of brutal enemies led us to imitate them? Will they see American abuse of terror suspects as an aberration, like the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II?
Or will the soul of the next generation be so damaged by willful blindness that it will have lost the capacity to be ashamed - or to return America to the vision of the Founding Fathers?
"Somebody tell me frankly, what times are these, what kind of world, what country?"
Carol Towarnicky is the chief editorial writer of the Daily News. E-mail towarnc@phillynews.com.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8266.htm
---This is becoming a creepy place indeed.---
posted by Christy at 9:05 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home