[Mb-civic] regarding torture

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-rutten5nov05,0,7549651.column?coll=la-story-footer&track=morenews

Los Angeles Times, Saturday, November 5, 2005
Tim Rutten:

Regarding Media

Pervasive silence about torture issue

OF all the ways in which the American news media have
failed since
Sept. 11, none may be more consequential than the mild
and deferential eye
it has cast on the Bush administration's adoption of
torture as state
policy.

Who can forget the giddy months through the fall of
2001 when U.S. cable
networks and newspaper op-ed pages actually staged
debates - in some cases
in front of live audiences -over how far we should go
to "extract
information" from any Al Qaeda members who fell into
our hands?

Ostensibly responsible Americans - officials and
commentators alike -
unashamedly sat and publicly discussed not only
whether torture was licit,
but also how and when it should be applied.

The whole sorry spectacle reached its nadir when a
purported civil
libertarian, Harvard Law professor Allen Dershowitz,
proposed procedures
for obtaining "torture warrants." (The relevance of
due process to a moral
universe that sanctions the torment of other human
beings is apparently an
irony against which a Harvard professorship armors the
mind.)

All of this was abetted by a news media that somehow
found it natural to
adopt the verbal evasions of our budding Torquemadas.
Phrases such as
"coercive interrogation" and "harsh measures" began to
turn up with
regularity. Nobody even bothered to wink.

One of the best is "rendition," which occurs when U.S.
forces or
intelligence agencies capture suspected terrorists and
secretly turn them
over to another country - Egypt, Jordan and Morocco
apparently are
favorites - where people aren't squeamish about a
little coercion.

We remain an ingenious people. Who but Americans would
think of
outsourcing torture?

None of this is surprising. If recent history has
taught us anything, it's
that the road that brings hell to Earth is paved with
euphemism.

This week we passed another milestone on that path,
when the
Washington  Post's Dana Priest reported that "the CIA
has been
hiding and interrogating some of its most important al
Qaeda captives at a
Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to
U.S. and foreign
officials familiar with the arrangement."

In her front page account, Priest wrote, "The secret
facility is part of a
covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four
years ago that at
various times has included sites in eight
countries....The existence and
locations of the facilities - referred to as 'black
sites' in classified
White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional
documents are known
to only a handful of officials in the United States
and, usually, only to
the president and a few top intelligence officials in
each host country."

According to the Post's story, "The CIA and the White
House ... have
dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency
answer questions in open
testimony about the conditions under which captives
are held. Virtually
nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities,
what interrogation
methods are employed with them, or how decisions are
made about whether
they should be detained or for how long."

Now, why do we suppose our government wants to hold
people secretly in
foreign countries? Maybe it's because they want to do
things to them that
would be illegal inside the United States ... like,
say, torture them?
That would explain why Vice President Dick Cheney and
CIA Director

Porter J. Goss have so stubbornly resisted language
written into the
defense spending bill by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a
one-time Vietnam
POW, that would prohibit the cruel or inhumane
treatment of any prisoner
in U.S. custody, including those held by the CIA.
Cheney and Goss aren't
concerned, as their surrogates have argued, about
tying the intelligence
agencies' hands in some future, theoretical moment of
national emergency.
They're worried that they'll have to close down the
clandestine torture
chambers that are in operation now.

And the American press continues to abet their
sinister evasions with an
indifference to consequence and diffidence to power
that only can be
called what it is: moral cowardice.

Even the Post, which deserves full credit for exposing
the existence of
the White House's petite gulag, stepped back from the
full disclosure it
owed the American people. "The Washington Post is not
publishing the names
of the Eastern European countries involved in the
covert program, at the
request of senior U.S. officials," Priest wrote. "They
argued disclosure
might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those
countries and elsewhere
and could make them targets of possible terrorist
retaliation."

You can bet those officials argue that - and you can
bet just as strongly
that acceding to their demands shields the Post from
being called
unpatriotic, one of the favorite epithets this
administration uses to
bludgeon the press.

But at least the Post was willing to take the risk of
exposing most of
this story. What should have been a torrent of
follow-up reporting and
commentary by other news organizations was barely a
trickle by week's end.

In fact, when a Washington-based human rights
organization came forward to
say it believes the CIA's secret prisons are in Poland
and Romania, the
only newspaper willing to print the allegations was
Britain's Financial
Times.

The grotesqueries presented by this sordid story are
almost too
numerous to list. But one likely to be overlooked
deserves to be noted.
There is something particularly perverse about the
United States inducing
the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe to become
its accomplices in
all this.

For decades, the iron curtain, captive nations and
Soviet tyranny were
staples of American political rhetoric - and of the
U.S. news media's
editorial pages. Seas of reportorial ink were spilled
charting the murky
reaches of the Gulag and the interlocking network of
secret police
agencies that maintained the cold grip of an ossified
communism throughout
the Eastern Bloc year after gray, numbing year.

To make these points in this connection is not to
mock. We were right, and
the Soviet Union and its client governments were
wrong.

Now, we have to wonder whether the Bush administration
fixed on Poland and
Romania - or some other Eastern European democracy -
precisely because it
suspected that the long night of Soviet oppression had
conditioned them to
accept our "black sites" on their soil?

Or did we think that societies desperate for a slice
of the West's
prosperity wouldn't mind selling just one more little
piece of their
collective souls to obtain Washington recommendation
to the European
Union?

There was a time when American officials could stand
up in public and -
without blushing - describe the United States as "the
leader of the free
world."

Could any of them do that now that this administration
has adopted
torture as an instrument of state policy?

Sadly, the answer probably is yes. They lost the
ability to blush when
shame became a casualty of the war on terror.




		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com