Senator McCain has proposed legislation that would ban any cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment by any U.S. persons of any U.S. prisoners anywhere around the globe at any time. But inside the Beltway has been abuzz with rumors of a "compromise" with the Cheney-Bush position that torture is sometimes ok, at least if it's done by the CIA.
Our view is clear--there can be no compromise here. If we participate in, arrange for, or make possible treatment of prisoners that involves "waterboarding", naked pyramid schemes, dog baiting, shackling from the ceiling in untenable positions for hours on end, starving or other treatment that degrades humans, we have not only violated international and U.S. law but we have betrayed the very essence of the values we stand for.
Surely John McCain knows this, after his time as a torture victim. Surely he will not yield to the demands of the likes of Dick Cheney, who said he had "more important things to do" than go to war in Vietnam, or George Bush, who managed to convert a cushy job in the national guard into an even cushier political job and legacy appointment.
The military and intelligence forces' abusive practices under the Bush Administration are something we will be ashamed of as a nation for decades to come. Think of the way we've used the power of the state against individuals since 9/11. Thousands of immigrants were held in New York prisons for months without process and then deported, without process. Thousands of people were (and are) detained in Iraq and Afghanistan, in much the same way that Saddam's forces had detained people in the past, by entering their homes and taking them in the middle of the night to prisons where their relatives might eventually locate them, or not, months later. Thousands of those declared by one prone-to-error person, George W. Bush, to be "enemy combatants" were shipped to wire enclosures on the island of Cuba and held there for years without due process. Korans were desecrated. Deaths took place in suspicious circumstances; beatings, shacklings, waterboarding and other techniques were approved. The practices developed at Guantanamo were shipped to Iraq, and Abu Ghraib was one result. The military has acknowledged at least 29 murders of detainees, and of course we have no way to know how many more there may have been. We know that at least two U.S. citizens were held in military brigs as "enemy combatants" without any of the rights to which citizens are entitled under the Constitution. Do we know for sure that no other citizens are being held incognito, without access to counsel, in a military brig or "black site" somewhere around the globe? Can we trust anything this administration tells us about the treatment it provides to any detainee anywhere, given this administration's awful track record on forthrightness? Two years after Abu Ghraib, we continue to practice "extraordinary rendering" of suspected terrorists--they are merely suspects, and at least some of them have proven to be entirely innocent. We maintain secret "black sites" around the globe where U.S. personnel may well be committing war crimes of the most grievous nature against suspected terrorists (also not proven guilty through any legitimate process).
Meanwhile, the Iraqis have picked up where Uncle Sam and Dictator Saddam left off. In mid-November, a secret prison was discovered in the Interior Ministry building in Baghdad with 169 badly treated "inmates" victims of the "new" "democratic" "Iraqi" regime. Now we learn about another secret torture center in Iraq with more than six hundred poorly treated detainees. Read the Knight Ridder story here. A sampling of the information from the report follows.
Former Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi: "People are doing the same thing as Saddam's time and worse." Allawi has indicated that these are primarily Shiite death squads who have taken up the activities formerly handled by Saddam's Sunni henchmen.
An unnamed interrogator who "punched several people in front of the reporter": "Don't talk to me about human rights. When security settles down, we'll talk about human rights. Right now, I need confessions."
Gen. Al-Samaraaee, formerly of the Interior Ministry, "said torture and extrajudicial killings were rampant while he was at the ministry" and "secret prisons ... are run by militia groups."
Abu Saad, a prisoner, showed a fingernail that had been torn off and said he had been hung upside down, blindfolded for 40 days, allowed to use a toilet only once every three days, and saw seven other detainees die.
Is this the legacy of freedom and democracy that thousands of young Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis are dying for?
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