The Inquisitor

Like Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post, I "just can't get past this torture issue -- the fact that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a "high-value" terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture. This just can't be happening."

In Torture Is Torture, Robinson writes:

It's past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of "alternative" questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is "the program." Of course, he won't fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons -- and who knows where else? -- but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous "waterboarding," which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.

It is not possible for our elected representatives to hold any sort of honorable "debate" over torture. Bush says he is waging a "struggle for civilization," but civilized nations do not debate slavery or genocide, and they don't debate torture, either. This spectacle insults and dishonors every American. (Emphasis added).

And as if proof of this needed, it is provided by the example of Maher Arar, a computer engineer and Muslim Canadian citizen, who was wrongly believed to be a terrorist by U.S. authorities who then secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured. The Washington Post reports, in Canadian Was Falsely Accused, Panel Says:

Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released.

As the Post noted, a Canadian government commission investigated the case and issued a report that:

[F]ound that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda "watchlist," without justification, the report said. Arar was also listed as "an Islamic extremist individual" who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that day . . . .

Glenn Greewald, in Here is the "moral authority" of the U.S. under the Bush administration, further adds that "when he sued for damages as a result of being wrongfully kidnapped and tortured by the U.S. Government, the Bush administration argued that "state secrets" compelled the court to dismiss the case, and the federal judge deferred to the President's wishes."

Greenwald inquires:

Do Americans want to be a country that kidnaps people without charges, tortures them, lies to its allies about it, and then, when it turns out they were completely innocent, blocks the Government officials who are responsible from being held accountable? That's the country we've become under this administration and its blindly loyal servants in Congress.

See also, Mr. Torture.

Tags: Commentary, Civil Liberties, Politics, Law