Barbarian Nation: The Torturers Win:
We’re in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S.authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.
The underground cell was tiny, about the size of a grave. …
Mr. Arar’s captors beat him savagely with an electrical cable. He was allowed to bathe in cold water once a week. He lost 40 pounds while in captivity.
art of torture. In terms of vile behavior, rendition stands shoulder to shoulder with contract killing.
If the United States is going to torture people, we might as well do it ourselves. Outsourcing torture does not make it any more acceptable.[*]
I forget where I saw this idea, so I won’t claim it as my own. But when I hear about things — acts that, to be judged as torture, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” — done in the name of the Global War On Whatever Loud Noise Frightened Someone This Week, I think, “sure, you can order that to be done, but if the end result is nothing, if you exert every possible effort and it yields nothing, then someone does it to you.” So when we take some guy and make him live in what may well be his own grave for 10 months, with the cold water baths and the whippings, and he says nothing — not out of stubbornness but because he has nothing to say — whoever ordered it gets the same treatment.
There is no punishment on the books — beside capital punishment — that is considered inhumane or unconstitutional, nothing that leaves lasting physical or mental damage. So anyone who commits a crime and winds up as a guest of the state can expect to leave prison with the same body parts he went in with, with the loss of nothing but time. Mr Arar lost more than time served: 40 pounds of lost weight doesn’t begin to sum it up.
What has the US lost? What has this done to the country’s standing in the world, in it’s ability to lead? Rhetorical questions, perhaps, but I’m not sure I know the answers. I’m not sure I want to know. Perhaps after 2008 we can begin to wipe the mud and blood off our escutcheon.
*http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/opinion/20herbert.html
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