Tuli Can't Stop Talking

These are just my thoughts on contemporary issues and an attempt to open up a dialogue.

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Location: New York City

A citizen who cares deeply about the United States Constitution and the Rule of Law.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

The Wretched of the Earth

As I have said on many occasions, I am constantly dumbfounded by how many virulent Anti-Communists from back in the day have found their Inner-Stalin. Currently there are Republicans who have accused me of being a “Communist” because I am opposed to Torture, Rendition and the Unitary Executive. Okay, so it is obvious that there is a true disconnect with History in this attempted “smear” (full disclosure: I have never been a Communist though I have been and remain a Dirty Fucking Hippy.) But I know and have much anecdotal evidence that many Americans here in the States are relatively free of Historical and Civic knowledge.

To wit: I can’t tell you how crazy it makes me when “Folks” accuse me of not honoring our/my “Commander-in-Chief.” Well, the Muppet News Flash is that GW isn’t my “Commander-in-Chief.” I am not a member of the Armed Forces of which he is the “Commander-in-Chief.” I am a citizen of the U.S.A. GW works for me and he should be honoring me, not the other way around. Now, how simple and ignorant is it that “citizens” who actually vote think that GWB is the “Commander-in-Chief” of the United States of America? Have these folks never read the U.S. Constitution, etc.?

This brings me to the substance of the “smear” which is that I oppose domestic and international law breaking. That said, here is another Bob Herbert column which brings into question “What is America and what does it stand for?”

June 28, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

All Too Human

By BOB HERBERT

Thursday was the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

It was also the same day that two Bush administration lawyers appeared before a House subcommittee to answer questions about their roles in providing the legal framework for harsh interrogation techniques that inevitably rose to the level of torture and shamed the U.S. before the rest of the world.

The lawyers, both former Justice Department officials, were David Addington, who is now Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no danger of either being enshrined as heroes in the history books of the future.

For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary — when the bomb is ticking, for example, or when interrogators are trying to get information from terrorists willing to kill Americans in huge numbers.

Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.

The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released — their lives ruined — without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All of the prisoners were men, and all were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick, the report said, and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him.

He fainted, the report said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals.”

Officials at Physicians for Human Rights said extensive medical and psychological examinations were conducted — and in two cases prior medical records were consulted — to help corroborate the testimony of the detainees. The organization has a long and credible history of documenting such abuses.

Leonard Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights, said: “In doing the evaluations, we used international standards, medical assessments of torture and ill treatment, and meticulously assessed physical and psychological evidence of torture and ill treatment, and the long-term physical and mental health consequences.”

The most effective element of the report is the way in which it takes torture out of the realm of the abstract to show not just the horror and cruelty of the torture itself, but the way in which it absolutely devastates the body, soul and psyche of its victims.

The detainees profiled in the report were abused at facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Three said they had been subjected to electric shocks. One said he was stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver and hit in the head and in the jaw with a rifle.

In an example of how medical evidence was used to back up a detainee’s account, the report said scarring on one of the prisoner's thumbs “was highly consistent with the scarring caused by electric shock.”

In addition to the physical mistreatment, the detainees reported that various gruesome forms of humiliation, including sexual humiliation, were pervasive. They said men were paraded nude in front of female soldiers, forced to watch pornography, and forced to disrobe before female interrogators.

The sheer number of different ways in which detainees were reported to have been abused was mind-boggling. They were deprived of sleep, forced to endure extremes of heat and cold, chained in crouching positions for 18 to 20 hours at a time, told that their female relatives would be raped, that they themselves would be killed, and on and on. All to no good end.

The ostensible purpose of mistreating prisoners is to inflict pain and induce disorientation and despair, creating so much agony that the prisoners give up valuable intelligence in order to end the suffering. But torture is not an interrogation technique; it’s a criminal attack on a human being.

What the report makes clear is that once the green light is given to torture, the guaranteed result is an ever-widening landscape of broken bodies, ruined lives and profound shame to all involved.

Nearly all of the detainees profiled in the report have experienced excruciating psychological difficulties since being released. Several said that they had contemplated suicide. As one put it: “No sorrow can be compared to my torture experience in jail. That is the reason for my sadness.”

Congress and the public do not know nearly enough about the nation’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation practices. When something as foul as torture is on the table, there is a tendency to avert one’s eyes from the most painful truths.

It’s a tendency we should resist.

As Fanon and Lifton have pointed out ad nauseam the torturers become the Wretched of the Earth as well as the Tortured.

The Soul of the United States is no longer hanging in the balance. Our Collective Soul has been flushed down the drain of lost humanity. We have become the Wretched of the Earth.

Averting our eyes will not change that fact.

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