My concept of America formed early and was gathered largely from old black-and-white movies, Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, and, yes, Star Trek, which despite all the lip service about a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-species crew projected a largely American (specifically JFK’s “New Frontier” America) sense of identity. And while I never subscribed to the jingoistic “we’re number one” mantra that so many of my classmates seemed to reflexively utter whenever news of some international dispute managed to filter down to our grade-school consciousnesses, I always understood that Americans were the good guys. I may not have quite believed in the concept of American exceptionalism, but I did believe that our country was respected in the world and, more importantly, worthy of respect, not because we were superior human beings who were inherently better than everyone else, but because we chose not to do the kinds of nasty shit that other nations did. Like Captain Kirk choosing to spare the helpless Gorn, who would surely have killed him, the Americans of my understanding struggled to rise above our brutal natures, to find a better, more humane way of doing things.
That meant we didn’t send our own people to Siberia for speaking their minds. We didn’t persecute people because of their religion or lack thereof. We didn’t invade and take over other countries in order to expand our own territory or influence. We tried to help the rest of the world, not just ourselves. We cared if innocent blood was unavoidably shed. And we most certainly did not, under any circumstances, torture people.
Naive, wasn’t I? But then I was a child, and children are supposed to be naive. In time, I learned the truth: Americans weren’t always automatically the good guys, justice wasn’t always served, racism and other prejudices were still alive and well in this country, American “help” was often perceived as meddling, and blind nationalism was the default setting for a whole lot of my fellow citizens, possibly the majority of them. As for torture, well, my inner cynic long ago acknowledged that Americans probably did do it, and that it may even be occasionally necessary, but I took a miniscule amount of comfort from the idea that it was only ever justifiable under the most extreme of circumstances, that it was a rarity that took place in the shadows without official sanction, and that, if it ever came to light, the average Joe in the street would be appalled. Perhaps it was only further naivete, but I honestly thought — or at least hoped — that our character as a nation looked a lot more like Hawkeye Pierce than Colonel Flagg.
Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill that, among other loathsome things like authorizing the holding of someone indefinitely without trial and suspending habeas corpus, essentially condones torture as an official policy of the United States of America. Oh, it includes some language that prohibits “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, but it also grants the president the power to interpret “the meaning and application” of those Conventions. Considering that our current president used to enjoy making fun of death-row inmates who were about to meet Ol’ Sparky, that his administration established America’s first gulag at Guantanamo, and that someone on his cabinet (my money’s on the Dark Lord Cheney) thought it was a good idea to reopen Saddam’s old chamber of horrors at Abu Ghraib for our own uses, I suspect that his interpretations on this subject will be, if you’ll forgive the irony, liberal.
The disgust I feel over this turn of events really has nothing to do with the president, though. This isn’t an anti-Bush thing, even though I freely admit that I feel nothing but contempt for the man and everyone who works for him. It isn’t a Democrat/Republican thing either, although I’m reservedly proud of the Democrats who voted no on this bill, ashamed of the small handful who voted yes, and positively revolted by the Republicans, who created the bill and all approved of it. It isn’t about “coddling” terrorists or the fear that our own troops will be poorly treated if they are captured. And despite all the overheated strawmen arguments, it isn’t about pulp-fiction scenarios in which Jack Bauer only has 20 minutes to find an atomic bomb and removing a few fingers with a cigar-cutter is his quickest option.
What this is about is a fundamental revision of what America stands for. I have no doubt President Bush will sign this bill into law in very short order, and once he has, we will have codified torture, not merely turning a blind eye toward exceptional occurences of it as we have in the past but actually making it legal and even expected. And by so doing, we’re turning our backs on the very core ideal of this nation: that there is a better way to do things than the way they’ve always been done before. Torture has always been the technique of bullies, thugs, warlords, and medieval monarchs, the very people whose rule our Founding Fathers rejected when they declared independence 200 years ago, and the same people The Greatest Generation fought to defeat 60 years ago.
There are those who would say that the only people who need be concerned about this are terrorists and their supporters (not necessarily true, by the way, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is), and that they’re getting exactly the treatment they deserve, the same treatment they’d happily give to us. But that’s just it, isn’t it? We’re lowering ourselves to their level instead of taking the higher road.
I don’t believe we ought to extend full civil rights to the folks at Gitmo, or that we should hang pretty little curtains in their cells like Andy and Barney did in the Mayberry Jail. But neither should we treat them as anything less than human beings who have an inherent value simply because they are human beings. That’s what made us noble in our victory in World War II: we treated the worst monsters of humanity with a modicum of dignity and decency. And I imagine they were surprised to receive such treatment. They didn’t expect it, and many of them probably knew they didn’t deserve it. But they got it anyway, and that said something to them, to the nations of the world, and to ourselves about who we Americans really were. And we were admired for it.
This new law says something too. Something ugly. Something which shames me as an American, and as a human being. Who are we, really? And what does this country truly stand for? I used to think I knew. I’m afraid I don’t any longer.
Measure for Measure V.i.45-46
What pisses me off the most, and I believe we have talked about this, is that these are very moral Christian people bringing these up.
My Christian God got mad once in the New Testament, that I can think of right now, and never, I mean never, hurt or killed anyone.
How these “Christians” can get away with saying it’s all right to torture these people ’cause they would the same to us ignore the very teachings of Jesus that make Christians what they are supposed to be. Filled with the love of Christ. For everybody. But I guess it’s all right because they aren’t really people are they. They only want what’s best for themselves and hang those that think differently from us because they’re religion is wrong.
Much anger and disappointment on my end also. For what I said above and the fact that it was purely a political move. Army Generals have said on more than one occasion that these tactics don’t work, don’t reveal reliable information and they won’t use them, because when we do we prove to the terrorists that we are exactly the way they think we are.
Ugh…I just got myself into another shouting match with Scalzi on this subject, so forgive me as I try to convey what I’ve learned over there while simultaneously trying to lower my own blood pressure.
Many people agree with you about this bill. I, personally, believe that you’ve swallowed a lot of what you’ve read about it, most of which is designed to make you feel exactly as you do. The bottom line is this:
Before this bill, the President of the United States (not just Bush, but any President) had the right to interpret the Geneva Conventions any way he damn well pleased (Torture? Who us? Nah, that’s not torture). The bill has the effect of declaring certain things off limits by clearly defining them as torture, and leaving everything else to the discretion of the President (as it was before). More importantly (but almost ignored by the media in favor of the headline-grabbing torture angle), it established a permissable model for trying detainees for their crimes. This was the original purpose of the bill, which was in response to the Supreme Court’s June rebuke of Bush’s planned military tribunals, in which they basically said, “the Constitution doesn’t give you the power to do this. You need an Act of Congress.”
It’s a very sticky subject, and just about every Monday morning quarterback leaves holes in the argument large enough to drive trucks through. For instance, you say you don’t believe we should extend full civil rights to the folks at Gitmo. Fine. Which ones should we revoke? Who should make that decision? The President? And what if someone else feels that revoking a particular civil right is akin to torture? You can see how quickly we fall down that rathole.
One last point: Like you, I wasn’t around for World War II, but I’m thinking you probably have a fairly romantic view of how things were handled back then. At the very least, we know that President Roosevelt ordered all Japanese Americans put into detention camps until the war was over, in case any of them decided to switch sides. Not exactly the Kirk-like country we were all taught to be proud of, huh?
Brian, I’ve had connectivity issues all weekend so I haven’t been able to see or reply to any comments, which is probably just as well because it’s (hopefully) allowed everyone to cool off a bit.
I have no wish to argue with you — I’ve enjoyed and valued our banter, I think you’re basically a good egg even though we obviously disagree on certain political issues, and anyway I’m not as good at arguing on the fly as Scalzi is. (It took me an embarassingly long time just to compose the initial entry.) So I will simply say that I agree with you about this being a sticky subject with lots of room for misunderstanding, but that I personally remain uncomfortable about the symbolism of the bill regardless of its actual details. I would’ve liked to see an outright repudiation of torture and a straightforward declaration that those being held at Gitmo are prisoners of war, not “enemy combatants” whatever the hell that means. That’s getting into whole other ball o’ wax, but briefly, it seems to me that if, as the president keeps asserting, this War on Terror is a for-real war, why not call the detainees POWs and treat them as such? The only logical conclusion I’ve ever been able to come to is that declaring them POWs would give them some status or privelege that the administration doesn’t wish them to have. Namely those pesky civil rights you mentioned above. (Incidentally, my reason for saying that I wouldn’t grant them full civil rights is that most of the people we’re discussing are not American citizens, something I now realize I should’ve been more clear about.) As far as which rights I’d grant and which I’d deny, I don’t have a laundry list prepared; off the top of my head, I would say that they ought to processed in some fashion within a reasonable amount of time, rather than being held in limbo indefinitely, and that we should somehow make it up to those who are falsely imprisoned, whether it’s through financial reparations, formal apologies, or whatever seems suitable.
I won’t even get into the bill’s language about declaring American citizens enemy combatants and revoking their Constitutional protections. That’s genuinely scary shit.
As for the circumstances of World War II, I admit to being something of a romantic, but I’m not as naive about the period as you may imagine. I know all about the Japanese-American internment camps — one of the largest was right here in Utah, and I’ve visited what’s left of the place myself. It was wrong that such places were built; I never said that Americans always won the struggle to find better ways, only that we did struggle. I was thinking more of the post-war Marshall Plan and the overall quality of how we treated our POWs vs. how our troops were treated by the Nazis and Japanese. As wrong as the internment of Japanese-Americans was, we didn’t do anything that compares to Bataan.
But that’s neither here nor there. That was 60 years ago, after all, and what matters is what we’re doing today. I believe that public relations are as vital to winning the War on Terror as military power, probably even moreso, and American prestige is in the toilet these days. We’ve lost the moral high ground we commanded immediately after 9/11, and throughout the Cold War before it, due to our sudden indifference to the human rights we used to constantly hector other nations about. And our seeming inability to clearly repudiate torture and grant swift trials to our captured enemies isn’t helping us to regain it.
I wasn’t around in World War II but I don’t think I’ve got a very romantic notion at all. I’ve actually been down to Topaz and I think I know kind of how it was. I remember talking to my mother’s uncle about what was going on in WWII and how disappointed I was when I learned about the detention centers for the Japenese Americans. His reply to me was “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like. You couldn’t trust any of the Japs.”
No, I wasn’t there. No, I don’t know how it was. I like to think that I would have felt as angry about that as I do about the detention center in Gitmo and the secret CIA prisons. But being in the middle of a “war” is not, I don’t feel, a good reason to apparantly take away rights that at least the founders of our nation in the Declaration of Independence believed were given to all people. And, my original point, if you are as God Fearing Christian as this President says he is, you shouldn’t be doing something like this.
I know the bill was there to clarify. The President said he could do this without any body else, the Supreme Court said he couldn’t and needed Congress to back him up. So he went and got Congress to give him a bill. I also know that likely a lot of the things that are now acceptable will not be used because they are not effective. There are a lot of things that I don’t know about the bill and I may be naive but if we are going to tell everybody in the world that we are the best, then we should act like it. No political motives. Just what’s right.
You can take this or leave it Jason. After reading the comment again I realize it was not directed at me. But being the self-involved, egomaniacal person that I am I just assumed it was.
Did you know that during the time of the internment of the Japanese-Americans that the Supreme Court issued a decision that the detention centers were constitutional?
Jason, I totally agree with you that as a public relations move, the bill was a total nightmare. Not even the pushback from McCain, et. al and eventual endorsement by that group seems to have prevented that. My concern, sadly, is that the bill could have been seen as a outright repudiation of (at least some kinds of) torture, but that election-year politics made that a bad scenario for the President’s political opponents. Don’t get me wrong, Bush has done a lot of stupid things (most especially in the realm of PR), but my belief is that the vast majority of the political capital we’ve lost since 9/11 has been due to the Republicans over-hyping our accomplishments and the Democrats over-hyping our failures.
The problem with making your opponents’ failures the centerpiece of your campaign strategy is that you often wind up rooting against the country as a whole, since failure for America reinforces your mantra of “throw da bums out.” This is nothing new, but it seems to be worse today than ever before, and we seem to have crossed some lines that we don’t normally cross (e.g., leaking classified information, criticizing the armed forces during foreign conflict, etc.)
As to the bill’s applicability to American citizens, the Scalzi thread I linked to above has some interesting information (kindly ignore all the Brian-bashing, if you please…). Clearly, the bill does not explicitly exclude citizens which, as you say, is some scary shit. On the other hand, it does have language about requiring the jurisdiction of a military commission, which suggests that at least some military rationale needs to be employed before they can just show up & throw you in a jail cell for the rest of your life. Small comfort, I know, but it also makes me realize that the safest way to cause damage to the U.S. is to become a legal resident first, and then claim (read: abuse) all the rights & privledges our citizens enjoy after the fact.
Something I once heard Bill Clinton say has always stuck with me: the President has to worry about all of our problems, not just the ones on the front page.