3/18/2002
One of the other unsavories that our military is happily at home with is the violation of due process, from arrests made without warrant or cause to incarceration of undisclosed citizens in undisclosed places with no outside contact, to the careless repudiation of the Geneva Convention, and--this just in--the use of torture with the help of third-party contractors.
Even a well-known conservative like William Safire has nothing but abuse for our use of military courts, pointing out that our open disrespect for human rights is like a red carpet for other nations who might like to abduct, torture and kill our citizens with impunity. Mary McGrory thinks no better, and neither do the leaders of Europe. We have effectively declared ourselves answerable to no one, even calling for the decommissioning of the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, now of all times. We will no law, no pact, we say--and we respect no human dignity either.
Apart from kangaroo courts there is the notorious matter of our treatment of captives from Afghanistan, hooded and manacled under 24-hour fluorescent light and armed guard in Guatanamo Bay in Cuba. This is forbidden by the Geneva Convention, but we barrel on under cover of shoddily thin claims that it doesn't apply in this case for this or that reason--none of which holds water. In a nasty little orgasm of hypocrisy, really an open mockery, a journalist was prevented from documenting the prison conditions in Cuba--by a soldier who said photos would violate the prisoners' right to dignity.
Less has been heard so far about our new policy of shipping prisoners to countries who practice torture so we can practice torture too and presumably somehow convey the impression that it wasn't really us. So torture is against American law--but only depending where the torturer is standing? In this case, as in that of our cynical excuses for discarding Geneva, the adminstration has made a bid to substitute technicality--not even technicality but the careless aping of technicality--for humane concerns. All they do is cast about for an excuse, however moronic, to do intolerably dishonorable things, and we let them get away with it.
It's hard to take in. It's hard to take. Folks, evil simply does not get more evil than our own current policies. Why don't we do anything? Because we don't know what to do. We know what's going on but even our painstakingly safeguarded governmental structure lacks any provision for a direct, unbureaucratic intervention by the populace in the event of an outright despot taking power in America.
Complicating this, there is the matter of John Ashcroft, apprentice despot, who has been turned loose on the domestic population. Between petty enforcements of his fundamentalist Christian notions on his own department, Ashcroft has assumed the flatly unconstitutional powers of arrest without warrant or cause (or a cause suddenly made elastic), indefinite imprisonment without arraignment or counsel, search and seizure without warrant, snooping without notification of all communication, and the indefinite incarceration, at his discretion, of foreign nationals. Even a law-abiding French tourist on a weekend vacation in New York, as one writer points out. For life. For nothing.
Half the amendments of the Bill of Rights seem to have been summarily repealed in a month or two of national panic. It wouldn't have much hope to stand before a high court--but who's going to appeal when there's no trial in the first place?
Alternately, a non-citizen, notwithstanding any other details, is apt to be incarcerated or deported right now--just as we have been steadily deporting a bunch of our long-held Pakistani prisoners to Pakistan--note that this article, dressing deportation as a good thing, tries to soften this by replacing the verb "deport" with "repatriate," doublespeak to which I will not descend--and as we have consigned a number of Somalian-born resident aliens to an unassisted life in Somalia, where many of them, having left as infants, don't speak the language, and know in fact no more about life in Somalia than I do, being for all practical purposes just as American as I. In case that doesn't seem draconian enough, remember that Somalis generally hate Americans--they cheered for the helicopter crash in Black Hawk Down--and they can see, even if Ashcroft can't, that these hapless deportees are just a bunch of Yankees.
Sound like there's a whiff of institutional racism going on? Don't doubt it--it doesn't even seem to have occurred to Ashcroft that he might want to try and hide his racism. Racial profiling is in style this year. It has an official mandate. (Despite evidence that white people have a long history of rioting violently when denied beer.)
Mind you, these measures are all much more useful for monitoring citizens than for spotting terrorists. Who is the target here? How is this justifiable in the name of security?
What else? Right, the muzzling of dissent. Any repeat readers (all two of them) who might remember my earlier warning about dissent being bottled up under cover of war and patriotism will be adequately prepared to recognize the pestilence of stifled opposition that's been going on in the last six months--from the ivory towers to the television to the White House itself. I keep hearing about these events in particular (these happened months ago now, in October I think), visits by FBI and Secret Service agents to an art museum, a college student with a poster, and a sixty-year-old man who talks politics at the gym--investigating charges of "anti-American activities." Remember that phrase? (The government has even had others hop on the bandwagon, eager to work the new patriotic furor.) It's giving way, at last, but not because certain government figures aren't trying hard enough to shush it. The executive branch has taken up a habit of list-making that would make John Birch blush. That last link is a big one, it's worth a look.
First amendment--freedom of speech and of the press are under a broad-based assault, and in subtle ways freedom of religion is being harried--the abortion debate has always been about Christianity, and so are Ashcroft's publicly enforced personal mores. The fourth--search and seizure--meaningless now that the FBI is empowered to search in secret. The fifth through the eighth--due process--smashed.
All this is being done under cover of a flag, in the name of patriotism. But this is the bitterest sort of irony. The central magic of the United States, the heart of the Constitution, the only thing that makes the idea of America special, is the Bill of Rights. Without it, this country doesn't particularly deserve any patriots.