Author: Ed Weathers

NO JUSTIFICATION

“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture….

“No State Party [i.e., agent of a country] shall expel, return or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”–From articles 2 and 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, signed by the United States in 1994.

They say that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the recently captured Al Qaeda operative, is being “debriefed.” They say he is undergoing “intensive interrogation” in an “undisclosed location.”

But let’s put it plain: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is being tortured. He’s being tortured by Americans, or their hired mercenaries, where nobody can watch.

And so is Muhammad Abdel Rahman, who was captured last month, and who apparently spilled the beans on Shaikh Mohammed. And so is Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was captured last fall, and who apparently led the CIA to Abdel Rahman.

And so are hundreds, if not thousands, of marginal suspects in Afghanistan and Guantamo. Just last week one of these died at an American airbase in Afghanistan. His name was Dilawar, and he was not the first to die in American hands. He was 22. He was a farmer. The Americans caught him wandering near an American army base, imprisoned him, and within a couple of weeks he was dead. An American military pathologist listed the death as “homicide,” due at least in part to “blunt force injuries to lower extremities.” Prisoners–innocents–who have been released in Afghanistan describe being forced by Americans to stand, naked, sleepless, in chains, for so long that their legs swelled up, leaving them no feeling in their shackled feet. (See the March 4 issue of The New York Times for details.)

In response to Dilawar’s death, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said, “Our interrogation techniques are adapted. They are in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques.” My god, what a man will say so as not to say anything.

George Bush would like us to believe that the terrorists, men who (Bush claims) would happily martyr themselves for Islam and for hatred of America, are, under mild persuasion, revealing everything they know about Al Qaeda. Or he would like us to look away. Or he would like us to congratulate him for getting these bad guys to talk and turn each other in. He would like us to do anything but ask why they’re talking.

But we already know why they’re talking: They’re being tortured, and the torture is being carried out on George Bush’s orders by Americans or their chosen proxies in foreign countries whose laws are a little more, shall we say, lax than those inside our own borders.

Under the pretext of fighting terrorism and saving human lives, America is forfeiting its very humanity. And most of us, comfortably watching Fox News in our warm living rooms, are happy to pretend we don’t know anything about it at all.

It’s one of the oldest hypotheticals in modern philosophy: If you were certain that a terrorist knew the whereabouts of an atomic bomb hidden in New York, and if it was scheduled to explode tomorrow, would you be justified in torturing him to get him to reveal the bomb’s location so you could prevent a nuclear catastrophe and the loss of millions of lives? Would you rip out his fingernails? Would you attach electrodes to his genitals? Would you chop off his fingers one at a time? Gouge out his eyes? Torture his children in front of him? For most people, the answer even to such an extreme, clearcut question is painful. Yes, they might say, but we hate the idea–torture makes us sick.

The spawn of John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld don’t hate the idea. Torture doesn’t even make them queasy–it simply makes life easy. Of course, in the case of Mohammed and his cohorts, there is no nuclear bomb, no clearcut threat of any kind, anymore–only an acute White House paranoia born of one holy-hellish day of terrorist success back on September 11, 2001. But that won’t stop the torturers. They are desperate to bring America the prize of Osama’s head. They think it will assure them the next election.

Ask them (would that someone in the White House press corps would dare), and Bush’s representatives will tell you they are not torturing anybody. Fine. Then let a neutral third party–someone from the Red Cross, say, or from Doctors Without Borders–visit the prisoners daily. In 1994, the United States, under Bill Clinton, signed the international anti-torture convention cited at the top of this column. In December, 2002, the United Nations created a protocol to the convention calling for “independent international and national experts” to visit prisoners in order to assess their treatment. Only four countries refused to sign the 2002 protocol: Nigeria, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and George Bush’s United States. Whose nation is “rogue” now, Mr. Bush? How “relevant” do you feel in the company of Palau?

But the administration says they can’t allow witnesses to the “interrogations.” It’s important, they say, that the suspects feel isolated, afraid, friendless, and dehumanized, so they’ll talk. Dehumanization comes easy to this administration. The suspects, say the Bushites, could even somehow send out hidden signals, through the observers, to other terrorists, resulting in more terrorist attacks. Oh, please. As if the worldwide terrorist cells need the wink of Osama’s eye or the nod of Mohammed’s head to carry out their plans.

For all we know, the man the CIA is torturing isn’t even Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He could, right now, be pleading mistaken identity. But we will never know. Whatever pain the Americans can manufacture will break him, and he will tell them anything they want to hear, even if it’s lies. The recent revelations about forced confessions by police in the U.S. make it clear that bullying, sleep deprivation and coercive lies have forced many suspects to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. We can be sure that the CIA’s bully-minions are willing to go much further than sleep deprivation.

And although the confessions of the tortured have limited credibility among reasonable people, we can fully expect the Bush administration to use the statements of the tortured to justify their future power grabs in the name of fighting terrorism. For this White House, torture serves many ends.

But there is in torture no innocence. And there is in torment no righteousness. If Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is in fact the “mastermind” behind the September 11 terrorist attacks, he has no right to ask for our sympathy. But if, Mr. Bush, you are torturing him, or if, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Ashcroft, you have cravenly arranged for someone else to torture him, then you have surely earned the world’s pity, for you have lost your souls forever.

NO JUSTIFICATION

ÒNo exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture….

ÒNo State Party [i.e., agent of a country] shall expel, return or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.Ó–From articles 2 and 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, signed by the United States in 1994.

They say that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the recently captured Al Qaeda operative, is being Òdebriefed.Ó They say he is undergoing Òintensive interrogationÓ in an Òundisclosed location.Ó

But letÕs put it plain: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is being tortured. HeÕs being tortured by Americans, or their hired mercenaries, where nobody can watch.

And so is Muhammad Abdel Rahman, who was captured last month, and who apparently spilled the beans on Shaikh Mohammed. And so is Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was captured last fall, and who apparently led the CIA to Abdel Rahman.

And so are hundreds, if not thousands, of marginal suspects in Afghanistan and Guantamo. Just last week one of these died at an American airbase in Afghanistan. His name was Dilawar, and he was not the first to die in American hands. He was 22. He was a farmer. The Americans caught him wandering near an American army base, imprisoned him, and within a couple of weeks he was dead. An American military pathologist listed the death as Òhomicide,Ó due at least in part to Òblunt force injuries to lower extremities.Ó Prisoners–innocents–who have been released in Afghanistan describe being forced by Americans to stand, naked, sleepless, in chains, for so long that their legs swelled up, leaving them no feeling in their shackled feet. (See the March 4 issue of The New York Times for details.)

In response to DilawarÕs death, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said, ÒOur interrogation techniques are adapted. They are in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques.Ó My god, what a man will say so as not to say anything.

George Bush would like us to believe that the terrorists, men who (Bush claims) would happily martyr themselves for Islam and for hatred of America, are, under mild persuasion, revealing everything they know about Al Qaeda. Or he would like us to look away. Or he would like us to congratulate him for getting these bad guys to talk and turn each other in. He would like us to do anything but ask why theyÕre talking.

But we already know why theyÕre talking: TheyÕre being tortured, and the torture is being carried out on George BushÕs orders by Americans or their chosen proxies in foreign countries whose laws are a little more, shall we say, lax than those inside our own borders.

Under the pretext of fighting terrorism and saving human lives, America is forfeiting its very humanity. And most of us, comfortably watching Fox News in our warm living rooms, are happy to pretend we donÕt know anything about it at all.

ItÕs one of the oldest hypotheticals in modern philosophy: If you were certain that a terrorist knew the whereabouts of an atomic bomb hidden in New York, and if it was scheduled to explode tomorrow, would you be justified in torturing him to get him to reveal the bombÕs location so you could prevent a nuclear catastrophe and the loss of millions of lives? Would you rip out his fingernails? Would you attach electrodes to his genitals? Would you chop off his fingers one at a time? Gouge out his eyes? Torture his children in front of him? For most people, the answer even to such an extreme, clearcut question is painful. Yes, they might say, but we hate the idea–torture makes us sick.

The spawn of John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld donÕt hate the idea. Torture doesnÕt even make them queasy–it simply makes life easy. Of course, in the case of Mohammed and his cohorts, there is no nuclear bomb, no clearcut threat of any kind, anymore–only an acute White House paranoia born of one holy-hellish day of terrorist success back on September 11, 2001. But that wonÕt stop the torturers. They are desperate to bring America the prize of OsamaÕs head. They think it will assure them the next election.

Ask them (would that someone in the White House press corps would dare), and BushÕs representatives will tell you they are not torturing anybody. Fine. Then let a neutral third party–someone from the Red Cross, say, or from Doctors Without Borders–visit the prisoners daily. In 1994, the United States, under Bill Clinton, signed the international anti-torture convention cited at the top of this column. In December, 2002, the United Nations created a protocol to the convention calling for Òindependent international and national expertsÓ to visit prisoners in order to assess their treatment. Only four countries refused to sign the 2002 protocol: Nigeria, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and George BushÕs United States. Whose nation is ÒrogueÓ now, Mr. Bush? How ÒrelevantÓ do you feel in the company of Palau?

But the administration says they canÕt allow witnesses to the Òinterrogations.Ó ItÕs important, they say, that the suspects feel isolated, afraid, friendless, and dehumanized, so theyÕll talk. Dehumanization comes easy to this administration. The suspects, say the Bushites, could even somehow send out hidden signals, through the observers, to other terrorists, resulting in more terrorist attacks. Oh, please. As if the worldwide terrorist cells need the wink of OsamaÕs eye or the nod of MohammedÕs head to carry out their plans.

For all we know, the man the CIA is torturing isnÕt even Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He could, right now, be pleading mistaken identity. But we will never know. Whatever pain the Americans can manufacture will break him, and he will tell them anything they want to hear, even if itÕs lies. The recent revelations about forced confessions by police in the U.S. make it clear that bullying, sleep deprivation and coercive lies have forced many suspects to confess to crimes they didnÕt commit. We can be sure that the CIAÕs bully-minions are willing to go much further than sleep deprivation.

And although the confessions of the tortured have limited credibility among reasonable people, we can fully expect the Bush administration to use the statements of the tortured to justify their future power grabs in the name of fighting terrorism. For this White House, torture serves many ends.

But there is in torture no innocence. And there is in torment no righteousness. If Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is in fact the ÒmastermindÓ behind the September 11 terrorist attacks, he has no right to ask for our sympathy. But if, Mr. Bush, you are torturing him, or if, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Ashcroft, you have cravenly arranged for someone else to torture him, then you have surely earned the worldÕs pity, for you have lost your souls forever.

The author of this article, a technical writer in Booneville, Mississippi, is the brother of Alex McPeak, the University of Memphis student whose letter opposing war with Iraq ran in On the Fly this week under the title “I Write This in Protest.” Shorn of some passages that seemed to us arguably more ad hominem than directly relevant to the essentials of the issue, this is his response. The division of the McPeak clan on the issue of Iraq may be a synecdoche of sorts for a general divisiveness caused by the controversy in the nation at large.

[W]ere it not for the United States government the very societies that now take pride in themselves, who now protest against us, would not exist at all as free nations. They would be pounded under the regime of one similar to the aforementioned dictator of Iraq who flaunts his image as a warmonger most readily. What surprise that the world, now coming of age, should turn on the most beneficent entity of the twentieth century; the one who made attempts to stay out of wars and urged the powers of the world to simply let it be in the mix of their own war-time affairs; the one that was attacked in spite of its peaceful desires; the one who came into the aftermath to HELP REBUILD the very nations that stood against it and the very precepts it stood for.

Protest against authority is a way of life. In many circles I have heard George W. Bush called everything from a moron to a warmonger for his attitudes towards the government — NOT the PEOPLE — of Iraq. [W]e now have a “to each his own” society where apparently everything goes except justice against egomaniacal dictators, where we now have a world who will, in light of a Saddam Hussein, call into question, not the underhanded tactics of a proven “liar-liar (pants on fire)”, but the actions of a nation to rid the world of such a ruler.

The efforts of the United States government to oust the Iraqi ruler [are] justified by his hesitant attitude to provide proof of the elimination of weapons KNOWN TO EXIST from our previous encounter in 1991. Now there is even more of what is widely known as PROOF that Saddam is indeed playing the innocence card despite the evidence to the contrary. .

Keith McPeak

Booneville, Mississippi

OSAMA COUNTS HIS BLESSINGS: HERE’S 8 OF ‘EM!

Osama bin Laden must be a happy man today. The United States is playing right into his hands. Since September 11, 2001, we have freely given him every item on his wish list. Consider what Osama wants:

1) To make America tremble. Encouraged by politicians of both parties, Americans have reacted to the events of 9/11 with the kind of paranoia one expects of children. The run on Cipro, smallpox vaccine, potassium iodide, portable radios, batteries, preserved food, bottled water and gas masks is the response of a people who have no sense of proportion. Compared to threats like drunk driving, guns, cigarettes, drugs, overeating and AIDS–each of which kill tens of thousands of Americans every year–the terrorists are trivial. Yet a simple videotape from Osama, and we issue a national Code Orange and rush for the duct tape.

2) To undermine American democracy. Osama knows that American democratic principles are the envy of the world. But the Bush administration, using terrorism as a pretext to create a superempowered presidency, has suspended our system of checks and balances, sidestepping judicial and Congressional oversight of its actions whenever possible. It has declared war without Congressional approval, jailed citizens without explanation, denied the accused the right to an attorney, held trials in secret, detained unnamed suspects indefinitely in hidden locations and without charge, applied “psychological pressure” (read torture) to suspects we never see, and encouraged the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA to spy on U.S. citizens in ways Big Brother never dreamed of. As for the Democrats–well, the common response of announced Democratic presidential candidates is that Bush isn’t doing enough to prevent future terrorist attacks! For their own reasons, the politicians are doing their best to magnify our fears. The theory: Fear generates votes. All a candidate has to do is scare us to death, then explain why he’s the best man to keep the monsters under the bed.

3) To shake the American economy. Wall Street acts even more frightened than the rest of us and hides its money under the mattress. Travel and trade are slowed as we create more and more obstacles at our airports, harbors and border crossings. (This is the equivalent of putting one’s head in a plastic bag for fear of poison gas.) Meanwhile, the cost of military buildups, giant Pentagon computers and tax cuts designed to comfort the trembling rich sucks the rest of the air out of the economy.

4) To create more terrorists. If the U.S. kills thousands of Iraqi citizens, it will certainly accomplish this goal for Osama. Beyond that, September 11 gave the Bush administration a perfect excuse to ignore the difficult task of working toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians. As a result, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict burns on, creating more suicidal “martyrs” and generating sympathy for the Palestinian cause daily–sympathy that Osama and the mullahs turns to hatred. The few American troops in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East were already an irritation that Osama used to exacerbate anti-American feeling in the region. Now, with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers there, Osama’s task is even easier.

5) To divide the United States from its allies and isolate it from the rest of the world. The Bush administration’s willingness to insult France, Germany and Belgium, to denigrate Russia and China, and condescendingly to dismiss the temperate suggestions of the great majority of the world’s nations plays right into Osama’s hands.

6) To damage the United States’ reputation. The rest of the world’s people already suspected that the United States had a simplistic, go-it-alone, shoot-’em-up attitude toward foreign affairs. The Bush administration has confirmed that suspicion. We are now officially the town bully. Everyone else (including, horribly, Osama) is now the bullied.

7) To get rid of Sadaam Hussein. Osama has always hated Saddam Hussein. Saddam is a socialist Sunni oppressing a religious Shi’ite majority. Saddam is an “infidel” (in Osama’s terms) who runs a secular state without sufficient reverence for Islam. Nothing would make Osama happier than for the United States to kill Saddam for him, along the way generating more anti-American feeling in the region and creating a new generation of orphaned potential-terrorists. In his latest videotape, while ostensibly opposing war in Iraq, Osama intentionally gave George Bush an excuse to connect Saddam to Al Qaeda, even though no connection has ever before existed. Osama knew what he was doing. George Bush dances to Osama’s tune.

8) To be the great martyr of modern Islam. Okay, so this hasn’t happened yet. But someday Osama will be killed, probably by Americans. At that point, George Bush will have handed Osama bin Laden the final item on Osama’s wish list.

Currently a resident of Norwalk, CT, Ed Weathers, a two-time former editor of Memphis Magazine, is a freelance writer and editor. He teaches a course in First Amendment issues at Southern Connecticut State University. His email address is ed@edweathers.com