To Beat or Not To Beat......
.....Or waterboard, electroshock, submit to extreme temperature; in fact, to torture or not: That is the question being asked by Congress and the President. The rest of the world watches in amazement as the land of the free and the home of the brave, Homeland to the largest system of prisons and incarceration for profit in the world, argues within its government whether or not to make torture legal. The recent compromise, announced between renegade senate Republicans and Bush, draws certain red lines but leaves the president with the sizeable authority to decide on his own if this or that action is....well.....actionable. It has not fooled anyone, except maybe the administration and certain members of congress. The day it was announced the opening page of Libération (1) on-line carried a headline: The United States in The Process of Legalizing Torture. Subsequent articles followed up on it. No less than six about torture from 9/21 to 9/23 appeared on the front page. An editorial in Le Monde, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article, calculating that the administration is likely to win in the final vote, adds, “At the moment where a report of the ‘intelligence community’, divulged by the New York Times, considers that the Iraq occupation has not weakened the terrorist threat, but on the contrary, has aggravated it, Mr. Bush plays his habitual card: advances the fear of terrorism prior to any reflection on the means to combat it.”
For those who are tempted to believe that these are the ravings of U.S.-bashing Frenchmen consider this: The staid Economist has an article about Bush’s fear-mongering entitled The Uses of Scare-Talk http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7946091 where it notes, “Republican strategists think the best way to minimize their losses on November 7th is to talk non-stop about terrorism.” In another article entitled Five Years On the magazine takes the Bush people to task for the way they responded to 9/11/01, recognizing that the number of Jihadist has multiplied and “multiplied, moreover, partly as a result of the way America responded.” The immediately following section of the article is headed. Half success in Afghanistan, Total Failure in Iraq. One cannot accuse The Economist of harbouring habitual America bashers or crazed liberals.
The United States’s abandonment of universal principles of human rights has earned it the scorn of the entire world. Sarkozy and Blaire may be in Bush’s corner, but the French and English people are not. We have been hoodwinked into believing that in order to endure we must bury values enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and subsequently given legal weight in the Geneva Convention. Bush’s assault, though, reaches much further back into the history of law. The habeas corpus he wants to rip away from “enemy combatants”, thus maintaining the judicial never-never land he’s been operating since 9.11.01, dates from the 13th century, with precedents as early as the twelfth, and has been repeatedly considered by the courts of this country as the cornerstone preventing state abuse of power. The ninth circuit, in Brown vs Vasquez in 1991, wrote that the Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that`[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.'
Clearly, it is “arbitrary and lawless state action” that Bush and his cronies most want to safeguard. Their assault on well established legal rights could not be plainer. They demand the power to throw into a dungeon anyone that they have arbitrarily determined to be a terrorist, to keep him there as long as they see fit without bringing charges against him, and to deny him the rights of habeas corpus that would allow –simply -- judicial review of whether his incarceration is legally justified. Dungeon is not too strong a word, for the consequences of Bush’s magisterial disregard for human rights enshrined in age-old legal procedures could well help jurisprudence to “evolve” backwards. His sense of the powers of the executive branch is monarchical, but of a monarchy prior to the Magna Carta. In short, he is power mad and views any challenge to the power he has assumed as an affront to his person and the absolute authority he repeatedly claims.
It is a short step from such madness to asserting that bad is good, black is white, torture is interrogation, and that my will, and my will alone, is the law. And, yes, as in Orwell's 1984 that war is peace.
1.http://www.liberation.fr/php/pages/pageSearch.php?recherche=torture&select=http%3A%2F%2Fwww
For those who are tempted to believe that these are the ravings of U.S.-bashing Frenchmen consider this: The staid Economist has an article about Bush’s fear-mongering entitled The Uses of Scare-Talk http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7946091 where it notes, “Republican strategists think the best way to minimize their losses on November 7th is to talk non-stop about terrorism.” In another article entitled Five Years On the magazine takes the Bush people to task for the way they responded to 9/11/01, recognizing that the number of Jihadist has multiplied and “multiplied, moreover, partly as a result of the way America responded.” The immediately following section of the article is headed. Half success in Afghanistan, Total Failure in Iraq. One cannot accuse The Economist of harbouring habitual America bashers or crazed liberals.
The United States’s abandonment of universal principles of human rights has earned it the scorn of the entire world. Sarkozy and Blaire may be in Bush’s corner, but the French and English people are not. We have been hoodwinked into believing that in order to endure we must bury values enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and subsequently given legal weight in the Geneva Convention. Bush’s assault, though, reaches much further back into the history of law. The habeas corpus he wants to rip away from “enemy combatants”, thus maintaining the judicial never-never land he’s been operating since 9.11.01, dates from the 13th century, with precedents as early as the twelfth, and has been repeatedly considered by the courts of this country as the cornerstone preventing state abuse of power. The ninth circuit, in Brown vs Vasquez in 1991, wrote that the Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that`[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.'
Clearly, it is “arbitrary and lawless state action” that Bush and his cronies most want to safeguard. Their assault on well established legal rights could not be plainer. They demand the power to throw into a dungeon anyone that they have arbitrarily determined to be a terrorist, to keep him there as long as they see fit without bringing charges against him, and to deny him the rights of habeas corpus that would allow –simply -- judicial review of whether his incarceration is legally justified. Dungeon is not too strong a word, for the consequences of Bush’s magisterial disregard for human rights enshrined in age-old legal procedures could well help jurisprudence to “evolve” backwards. His sense of the powers of the executive branch is monarchical, but of a monarchy prior to the Magna Carta. In short, he is power mad and views any challenge to the power he has assumed as an affront to his person and the absolute authority he repeatedly claims.
It is a short step from such madness to asserting that bad is good, black is white, torture is interrogation, and that my will, and my will alone, is the law. And, yes, as in Orwell's 1984 that war is peace.
1.http://www.liberation.fr/php/pages/pageSearch.php?recherche=torture&select=http%3A%2F%2Fwww
posted by Lawrence Austin at 6:37 PM
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