For Bush a Hot Line to Churchill Fawaz Turki

For Bush, a Hot Line to Churchill

Fawaz Turki

Arab News

In the Oval Office, President Bush is said to have a bust of Winston Churchill, a gift from his friend Tony Blair.

Among the many thoughts articulated about civil society, by the man whose image the American president faces every day, is this: “The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

Is the Bush administration mindful of this dictum, cited by W. Brian Simpson in his book, “Human Rights and the End of Empire” (2001)? Not by a long shot, judging by the news reports in the national media last week.

Memorandums obtained Dec. 20 by the American Civil Liberties Union, under the Freedom of Information Act, are truly ominous in what they reveal about the horrendous abuse of detainees at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, that sliver of Cuban land still under American occupation, where the US is holding about 550 prisoners.

The documents, in the form of redacted memos written by the FBI over a two-year period that ended in August, reveal that agency officials witnessed extremely aggressive interrogation techniques (more widespread than had been acknowledged before), where prisoners were shackled to the floor for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food or water, and allowed to defecate on themselves.

At times, according to an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse and reported it in a memo to his superiors, growling dogs were used to intimidate detainees — contrary to previous statements by senior Defense Department officials — wrap them in Israeli flags, and bombard them with loud music in an apparent attempt to soften their resistance to interrogation. At other times, prisoners were beaten and choked and had lit cigarettes placed in their ears.

The documents were released to the ACLU in connection with an ongoing lawsuit the organization has filed accusing the government of being complicit in torture. They include memos claiming that some military interrogators had posed as FBI agents while torturing prisoners. In one memo, an agent, whose name was blanked out, expressed concern about military interrogators posing as FBI agents.

In this memo, marked “Urgent Report,” meaning it should be regarded as a priority, the agent wrote: “If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD (Department of Defense) interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done by ‘FBI agents.’ The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public.”

The documents, the latest batch to be released to the ACLU in response to the organization’s lawsuit, show clearly that such activities were known to a wide circle of government officials, and contradict the military’s repeated claims that harsh treatment of prisoners happened only in “limited, isolated cases.”

These egregious practices are a predictable end result of the environment created in the US by the Bush team after Sept. 11, where the government asserted for itself the right to declare people, including US citizens, “enemy combatants” or “terrorist suspects.”

The assault — for assault it is — on Americans’ civil liberties expanded state power, and undermined constitutional rights, to a point where the government effectively granted itself the right to rescind the citizenship of a naturalized American on the charge of providing “material support” to an organization placed on the attorney general’s blacklist — even if that American donor was unaware of the status accorded the organization by the justice Department.

As Jack Balkin, a Yale University law professor, wrote in the Los Angeles Times recently: “Give a few dollars to a Muslim charity that (John) Ashcroft thinks is a terrorist organization, and you could be on the next plane out of this country ... There is no civil right, not even the precious right of citizenship, that this administration will not abuse to secure ever greater control over American life.”

These days — days that some civil libertarians have identified as darker than the darkest days of McCarthyism — the US government has deemed it normal, proper and necessary to imprison “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay without charge, and without access to lawyers, the Red Cross and family, as they are tortured and debased, until the White House determines that its “war on terror” is over, and do it in a manner questionable under international law and the Geneva Conventions.

The primacy of the notion of fairness in the eyes of the law, in how you treat a suspect, regardless of how heinous the crime that this suspect is accused of, is a major thread in American jurisprudence. That’s not, however, how John Ashcroft sees it. “It is fundamental that if you hold someone as an enemy combatant,” he has said, “obviously you hold them without access to family members and without access to counsel.”

From their Declaration of Independence to their Constitution, from Thomas Jefferson to Patrick Henry, Americans have carved out an undeniably humanist tradition in their definition of individual rights, and understanding of what constitutes the social contract between ruler and ruled.

Yet, can the noblest that has been said and thought in that humanist tradition fail to humanize? Can the study and delight that an American finds in that tradition (as this columnist found in teaching it on campus at one time in his academic career) make him any less capable of violating the sanctity of human dignity and human rights at, say, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

Ideas about the humane are organic to the functioning of the fragile plurality of our human nature and our claims to human purpose. They engage us at every corner of our being, never becoming neutral in our lives. A great discovery in physics or astronomy or biochemistry, say, can be neutral. But a neutral or detached humanism is either an artifice or a prologue to the inhuman.

Remarkably, Churchill’s dictum was issued in 1943, when Britain was vulnerable at its very core, facing what appeared then to be certain defeat at the hands of an enemy armed with the most venomous ideology in modern history, yet it was observed scrupulously.

Perhaps George W. Bush, along with his cohorts at the Justice Department and the Department of Defense, needs to ponder the profoundly relevant thoughts of the man he faces everyday in his office.

disinherited@yahoo.com

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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