AMERICA'S POLICY ON TORTURE DEFINES WHO WE ARE

Austrialian David Hicks, who will be free by the end of 2007, out of hundreds held for years, is the only person tried and convicted at Guantanamo

(for outside Albany op-ed):

President Bush, while continuing to deny that America tortures human beings in our custody - “this government does not torture people”- has spoken out in defense of torture, saying “[t]he American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence, so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”

It’s amazing to anyone familiar with the history of our nation to believe that we are having a debate on the use of torture against persons in custody- none of whom has ever been convicted of a crime. The hypothetical scenario posed by newspaper columnists and asked of Presidential aspirants at debates is straight out of a fictional television show- “24.” A suspect has knowledge of a ticking bomb about to go off and destroy an American city with loved ones in it. Our hero must torture the suspect to find the bomb and save the day.

I have an answer to the President, the political pundits, and those seeking the highest offices in the land: never. Never is when we should legalize torture of suspects in our custody or control. We don’t permit the police in our country to legally torture suspects, even if there is a kidnap victim being held who will die without the information. We don’t permit police to hold suspects for years in secret prisons, deny them access to counsel and the courts, never tell them what they are charged with, and never give them an opportunity to confront their accusers. We have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that prohibit this misconduct. Our laws, the bedrock of America, provide for a presumption of innocence, speedy and public trials, the assistance of counsel, the right to confront one’s accusers face to face, and a trial in front of a fair and impartial jury.

Yet America’s military and the CIA, using secret memos from the Bush Administration to justify ignoring and discarding 220 years of legal precedent dating back to the 1787 enactment of our Constitution, have violated every one of our fundamental freedoms. As a result, we have arrested, brutally tortured, and imprisoned for years without any trial, human beings whom the U.S. Defense Department later admitted were completely innocent. Some were arrested by mistake by our military or CIA. Many were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan in exchange for $5,000 bounties paid to local tribesmen who wanted to settle old scores or who just didn’t care who they grabbed.

Out of the hundreds of detainees held for years in Guantanamo, we have never managed to try and convict a single one for committing or planning a terrorist attack against the United States. Only one “successful” trial was held. An Australian- David Hicks- admitted guilt to a minor offense, was returned to Australia in May of 2007 after being held for over four years without a hearing, and he will be set free in two months. Hundreds of detainees were eventually set free and quietly returned to their home countries without ever being charged. The United States has admitted continuing to hold several detainees who were completely innocent because we could find no country to take them. What are the odds, one must wonder, that we have now sufficiently angered and radicalized them and their families by locking them up for years, torturing them when they had no information to give, and keeping them incommunicado from lawyers and their families? They weren’t terrorists before we abused and tortured them; would it be any wonder if they aren’t willing to do us harm now? Could we blame them? Here is what one innocent detainee, Afghan writer Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, wrote in a recent book he published after his release:

"Life in Guantanamo jail is close to life in a grave. That is because the prisoners in Cuba are neither dead nor alive. They are not dead because they have souls ... (but) they have been deprived of all the rights of living people."

In America we don’t permit the police to launch air strikes or blow up houses in neighborhoods where criminals are committing crimes. And we don’t permit our police or military to kill innocent civilians in efforts to target gang leaders. But that is what our military has done in Afghanistan and Iraq, where we have launched air strikes to kill “insurgents” or “high value targets.” We may have killed some insurgents. But it is undisputed that American bombs have also killed and mutilated scores of innocent bystanders, including infants and small children. When Zell Miller took to the Senate floor after the 9-11 attacks, he said that we should “bomb Kabul (Afghanistan’s capital) back to the Stone Age.” Imagine the reaction if a U.S. Senator had said that we should “bomb Buffalo back to the Stone Age” after Buffalo native Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

The sad truth is that the Bush Administration does not torture to extract information to save American lives. If they truly cared about making America safer, they would have made it a priority to inspect air cargo and cargo containers coming into the U.S. ports, and they would not have attempted to turn over management of our ports to a company from an Arab nation with close links to Al Qaida. The Bush Administration has used torture because it wants to erase the boundaries that used to set apart America and our laws from the rest of the world. Americans used to believe in human rights- in Due Process of Law, in the presumption of innocence, in a Constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” (from the Eighth Amendment). Those values defined who we were as a people, as a nation. The television show “24” is just that- a television show. It’s fiction. The United States Constitution and the freedoms protected by it are fact. If we allow legalized torture in our name, then we may as well put the Constitution into the shredder and admit that our enemies have won. They will have managed to convert us- through our unreasoning fear and panic- into being just like them.

(to Albany Herald)

President Bush, while continuing to deny that America tortures human beings in our custody - “this government does not torture people”- has spoken out in defense of torture, saying “[t]he American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence, so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”

In response, the Albany Herald’s Editorial Board (Saturday, October 6, 2007), has trouble distinguishing when it would be appropriate to torture suspects in American custody. The hypothetical scenario from its editorial is straight out of a fictional television show- “24.” A suspect has knowledge of a ticking bomb about to go off and destroy an American city- Savannah is the example used- with loved ones in it. Our hero must torture the suspect to find the bomb and save the day.

I have an answer to the Herald: never. Never is when we should legalize torture of suspects in our custody or control. We don’t permit the police in our country to legally torture suspects, even if there is a kidnap victim being held who will die without the information. We don’t permit police to hold suspects for years in secret prisons, deny them access to counsel and the courts, never tell them what they are charged with, and never give them an opportunity to confront their accusers. We have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that prohibit this misconduct. Our laws, the bedrock of America, provide for a presumption of innocence, speedy and public trials, the assistance of counsel, the right to confront one’s accusers face to face, and a trial in front of a fair and impartial jury.

Yet America’s military and the CIA, using secret memos from the Bush Administration to justify ignoring and discarding 220 years of legal precedent dating back to the 1787 enactment of our Constitution, have violated every one of our fundamental freedoms. As a result, we have arrested, brutally tortured, and imprisoned for years without any trial, human beings whom the U.S. Defense Department later admitted were completely innocent. Some were arrested by mistake by our military or CIA. Many were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan in exchange for $5,000 bounties paid to local tribesmen who wanted to settle old scores or who just didn’t care who they grabbed.

Out of the hundreds of detainees held for years in Guantanamo, we have never managed to try and convict a single one for committing or planning a terrorist attack against the United States. Only one “successful” trial was held. An Australian- David Hicks- admitted guilt to a minor offense, was returned to Australia in May of 2007 after being held for over four years without a hearing, and he will be set free in two months. Hundreds of detainees were eventually set free and quietly returned to their home countries without ever being charged. The United States has admitted continuing to hold several detainees who were completely innocent because we could find no country to take them. What are the odds, one must wonder, that we have now sufficiently angered and radicalized them and their families by locking them up for years, torturing them when they had no information to give, and keeping them incommunicado from lawyers and their families? They weren’t terrorists before we abused and tortured them; would it be any wonder if they aren’t willing to do us harm now? Could we blame them? Here is what one innocent detainee, Afghan writer Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, wrote in a recent book he published after his release:

"Life in Guantanamo jail is close to life in a grave. That is because the prisoners in Cuba are neither dead nor alive. They are not dead because they have souls ... (but) they have been deprived of all the rights of living people."

In America we don’t permit the police to launch air strikes or blow up houses in neighborhoods where criminals are committing crimes. And we don’t permit our police or military to kill innocent civilians in efforts to target gang leaders. But that is what our military has done in Afghanistan and Iraq, where we have launched air strikes to kill “insurgents” or “high value targets.” We may have killed some insurgents- but it is undisputed that American bombs have also killed and mutilated scores of innocent bystanders, including infants and small children. When Zell Miller took to the Senate floor after the 9-11 attacks, he said that we should “bomb Kabul (Afghanistan’s capital) back to the Stone Age.” Imagine the reaction if a U.S. Senator had said that we should “bomb Buffalo back to the Stone Age” after Buffalo native Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

The sad truth is that the Bush Administration does not torture to extract information to save American lives. If they truly cared about making America safer, they would have made it a priority to inspect air cargo and cargo containers coming into the U.S. ports, and they would not have attempted to turn over management of our ports to a company from an Arab nation with close links to Al Qaida. The Bush Administration has used torture because it wants to erase the boundaries that used to set apart America and our laws from the rest of the world. Americans used to believe in human rights- in Due Process of Law, in the presumption of innocence, in a Constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” (from the Eighth Amendment). Those values defined who we were as a people, as a nation. The television show “24” is just that- a television show. It’s fiction. The United States Constitution and the freedoms protected by it are fact. If we allow legalized torture in our name, then we may as well put the Constitution into the shredder and admit that our enemies have won. They will have managed to convert us- through our unreasoning fear and panic- into being just like them.