In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a warship blasts away endlessly with its guns at an uninhabited coastline. There’s no apparent reason for the wanton destruction of the jungle. Yet someone assures Marlow, the narrator, that there was a camp of natives, "enemies, hidden out of sight somewhere."
Could this serve as a metaphor for the way Bush and Cheney have proceeded for the last six years? It’s been well documented how the administration has blasted away at our constitutional and moral values, particularly in the name of the supposed war on terror. But what will happen if the rest of the world follows suit and creates a new landscape cleared of all moral and legal protections for people everywhere?
Will it become too dangerous for Americans to travel abroad, not because of terrorism, but because countries around the world will also start to turn themselves into police states in the guise of fighting hidden enemies? Will we one day soon risk years of detention and torture because we’ve been arrested on a traffic violation while on vacation in France?
The U.S. was once a beacon of democratic values, human rights and due process; but no longer. How can we even advocate for due process now for our own citizens who get in trouble abroad if we no longer provide it to foreign citizens and even American citizens we arrest?
Bush and Cheney did not actually start this extra-legal journey down the river, though they may have taken us past the point of no return. Our efforts to turn ourselves into a police state could actually be said to date back to the 1950s. University of Wisconsin professor Alfred W. McCoy has documented the evolution since then of torture techniques by the CIA and pointed out the culmination of that whole process in Bush and Cheney’s Military Commissions Act of 2006. That piece of legislation is now widely viewed as legitimizing the use of torture and ignoring rights of detainees guaranteed by the Third Geneva Convention.
We like to think of ourselves as morally superior to those primitive countries where they attach electrodes to prisoners’ genitals and beat the soles of their feet. But the impact of the CIA’s innovations is essentially the same, McCoy points out.
During the 1950s, McCoy states, neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the CIA found that the cruelest forms of torture used by the KGB:
didn’t involve crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to stand for days at time, resulting in swollen legs, kidney failure, and hallucinations. The CIA spent the next thirty years spreading these techniques within the US intelligence community and among anti-communist allies across Asia and Latin America.
In 1994, the Clinton administration may have set the stage for Bush and Cheney, according to McCoy, by agreeing to ratify the UN Convention Against Torture only after redefining torture as excluding sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. This selective definition was then incorporated into our own domestic legislation, including the War Crimes Act of 1996 and later the Military Commissions Act.
Under the Military Commissions Act, the U.S. can hold people without charge for years, use these refined methods to torture them at will and then use the "evidence" gained through that torture in trials against them. Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney have submitted new rules of evidence for the military commissions that would restrict the rights of detainees even more than the Military Commission’s Act specifies, Jeffrey Rosen writes in The New Republic.
Let’s look at the situation currently facing Americans abroad. Every month some 300 U.S. citizens are arrested on criminal charges in foreign countries, according to the International Legal Defense Counsel. In his 1993 book, Nightmare Abroad, Peter Laufer stated:
Too often, Americans believe the privileges and rights of U.S. citizenship follow us wherever we go, that the cavalry will come charging to our rescue if we’re bothered by foreign authorities or violate foreign laws. It’s just not so, as the thousands of Americans enduring a rugged life in foreign jails show. Average, law-abiding Americans are susceptible to unexpected encounters with other nations’ judicial systems, encounters that too often result in sudden and miserable jail time. Innocent travelers find themselves locked up for months and years, their friends and families unable to pry them loose from unsympathetic foreign jailers.
Laufer notes the cases: a tourist from Maryland who was imprisoned in Greece after he overdrew is credit card limit; a Texas oil worker who was thrown into prison in Saudi Arabia on a "laughably false" charge of importing pornographic videotapes; a college student from Illinois who was imprisoned in Czechoslovakia for distributing Bibles; a New Jersey businesswoman who faced the death penalty in Nigeria for breaking a retroactive trade law; and a man who was put in prison after a car accident while driving from California into Mexico.
The fact is that our consular cavalry can no longer even consider charging to the rescue of Americans such as these because the cavalry has lost the moral authority to do so.
I’ve written here before about Lori Berenson, an American, who has spent more than 11 years of a 20-year prison sentence in Peru on charges of conspiring with a terrorist group in that country. Few in this country would argue that Berenson received due process in either of the two trials she underwent there. Yet, the U.S. has done little to help her. The State Department didn’t even send an observer to the only public hearing in her appeal to the Peruvian Supreme Court. So much for the cavalry.
On the U.S. State Department website, there is a long and seemingly impressive list of services provided by American consular officers to U.S. citizens who are arrested in other countries. The summary notes that the consuls monitor conditions in foreign prisons and "immediately protest allegations of abuse against American prisoners." In addition, they work to ensure treatment that is consistent with "internationally recognized standards of human rights" and to ensure that "Americans are afforded due process under local laws."
All very well and good, until you consider that we no longer abide by internationally recognized standards of human rights or due process in our own treatment of foreign prisoners. And of course, it isn’t just foreign prisoners whom we mistreat. The dehumanization of Brooklyn-born Jose Padilla is a rather glaring example of the depths to which we have sunk in our Conradian battle against international terrorism. In the brig in the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C., Padilla was denied access to counsel for nearly two years, and was, as is now known, kept in a state of virtually complete sensory deprivation during that time. The CIA had laid the groundwork decades before for our treatment of this American citizen.
It seems somewhat ironic in this light to read the U.S. State Department’s criticism of the military courts in Peru in the wake of Berenson’s detention. The State Department’s annual country human rights report noted in 1999, for example, that "Proceedings in the [Peruvian] military courts—and those for terrorism in civilian courts—do not meet internationally accepted standards for openness, fairness, and due process."
As McCoy points out, the Bush administration has done yeoman’s work to get around those international standards. Shortly after 9/11, the administration "began building a global gulag for torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, and a half-dozen additional sites worldwide," McCoy states. In February 2002, he adds:
the White House assured the CIA that the administration's public pledge to abide by spirit of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to its operatives; and, significantly, it allowed the Agency ten ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods designed by Agency psychologists that included ‘water boarding.’
Bush and Cheney have launched a promotional effort to portray Guantanamo as a humane place, Rosen states in The New Republic. They’ve been ferrying journalists and law professors in luxurious comfort to the prison, plying them with excellent food, and giving them sanitized "tours." "'They’ll show you the accused in a La-Z-Boy sharing fries with the investigator,’" Rosen quotes Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the chief defense counsel at the Office of Military Commissions, as warning. Sullivan has been a vocal critic of the military tribunals created under the Military Commissions Act.
In fact, the Guantanamo interrogators have wide latitude for their interrogations. And that is, of course, only one of the elements of the American gulag. Physicians Scott Allen and Stephen Xenakis have pointed out that at least 112 detainees have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2005. They note that America's military medical corps was once regarded as the most professional and ethical military medical service in the world. But after Sept. 11, the Pentagon lowered the standard of detainee medical care.
In her latest message from prison to her supporters in December 2006, Lori Berenson states that Alan Garcia, the new Peruvian president, has "launched a major offensive against the human rights community" there. The crackdown has filtered into the prisons in Peru where benefits are being restricted to prisoners such as herself, who have been accused of terrorism.
Once again, it appears, the United States has proved itself to be a leader of nations. The question is exactly where are we leading the rest of the world?