AS I BECAME quietly furious while reading Jane Mayer’s recently released book “The Dark Side,” which chronicles our republic’s abandonment of its two-hundred-year tradition of honorable treatment of war prisoners, I pondered a speech from Shakespeare which seared itself into my imagination thanks to its white-hot anger.
Coriolanus, a Roman general whose shocking victories were matched only by his immature stubbornness had just been banished from Rome due to the machinations of the tribunes, the representatives of the common people. In his wrath, Coriolanus harangues the people, “Let ... your ignorance, which finds not till it feels, making not reservation of yourselves, still your own foes, deliver you as most abated captives to some nation that won you without blows!”
The people of the American republic, like those of the Roman, have allowed themselves to be led by the nose for the past seven years into conduct which can only be described as abhorrent. We have allowed our Constitution to be subverted, domestic and international laws ignored, hallowed treaties made possible by earlier and wiser American diplomacy torn to shreds, all “without blows” and barely with protest. The Bush administration’s sweeping assertions of executive power in relation to the detention, treatment and process afforded to terror suspects threaten to leave us all “abated captives” in our own land.
While Americans have rarely noticed it, and politicians have rarely debated it, America set up prison camps in secret sites across the world where the Central Intelligence Agency routinely tortured prisoners. We occupied Saddam Hussein’s former torture chambers and, incredibly, put them to work for the same purpose.
The government has held detainees, in many cases without charges or legal representation, for months and years, and many died due to torture and other severe maltreatment. The word “detainee” is appropriate, since in many cases people in American custody are completely innocent.
The case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was detained after being targeted accidentally due to the resemblance of his name to that of a wanted suspect, is instructive. El-Masri was captured and flown to Afghanistan from Eastern Europe at the end of 2003 where he was held for over five months and was allegedly beaten, tortured and sodomized by his captors.
What’s shocking is that American authorities knew by March of 2004 that they had made a mistake, that el-Masri was not the Egyptian terrorist they had taken him for, but continued to hold him for two more months because they did not know what to do with him. Eventually el-Masri was flown to Albania and released on an abandoned road where he was left without money or a way back to Germany and with the thought he would be executed by his tormentors as he walked away from them. He has been denied standing to sue the CIA in U.S. courts on the grounds that a hearing might imperil “state secrets.”
While the choice to illegally detain, transport and torture detainees was made by the Bush Administration and its officials, they were enabled by not only American politicians but by the American people. Few have acquitted themselves well. Republicans have embarrassed themselves by cheering Bush on from the sidelines. Democrats have not loudly raised the issue of torture, presumably because they fear it will open them to charges of being “soft on terror” or anti-military. The American people have demanded no better of its leaders.
John McCain, the so-called “maverick” Republican with the greatest moral authority to denounce torture made the politically expedient decision not to support a bill that would extend restrictions on prisoner treatment embodied in the Army Field Manual to the CIA. This was in the middle of the Republican primary and the Republican electoral base is too enamored of Bush’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” to harbor such contrarianism.
The most galling thing of all is that McCain continues to use his own experience as a victim of torture in Vietnam as a political crutch on an almost daily basis, even while he opposes legislation that would stop the CIA from using many of the same techniques that once were used to torture him. We are deep in the rabbit hole.
In a republic such as ours we get the government we are worthy of. If, as a people, we choose to ignore the evidence of government wrongdoing presented to us, or worse, punish the leaders who bring us the news, we aren’t worthy of the political system that has been bequeathed to us. Our leaders will rightly hold the people in contempt, a dangerous state for any democracy.
Andrew Winerman’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.winerman@cavalierdaily.com
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