This week, the Senate debated whether or not to sanction President Bush’s policy of torturing detainees. Let’s not trifle with words — torture is what we’re talking about here, not some antiseptic “alternative methods of interrogation” cooked up in the laptops of Dubya’s spin-meisters. 
We’re talking about grabbing people in the middle of the night and dragging them off to some “dark site” (perhaps the basement of a suburban home, who knows?) with no legal recourse. We’re talking about lashing people to boards and holding them under water. We’re talking about beating them senseless and fucking with their minds until they don’t know their own mother’s name. And we’re also talking about shipping them off to third countries where they’ll get even worse — the full spectrum of coercive technologies, modern and medieval. Some of the Republican leadership in the Senate framed this as a battle for American “values,” though they appear to have caved as of this writing. They had also raised a more practical question of leaving our military people at risk of ill-treatment and our leaders and commanders at risk of prosecution for violations of international law.
Personally, I think Bush had the advantage on this one. I think he appeals on a very visceral level to the impulses of revenge and retribution that are fairly common currency in the American body politic. Plenty of Americans — and I have known more than a few — are of the opinion that people in custody are most likely guilty, that foreigners are doubly guilty, and that the guilty deserve whatever they get. 
In fact, the worse their treatment the better, and if Bush can convince them that ill-treatment somehow makes them more safe, that’s better still. These base instincts are the same ones that inspire snickers at stories of prison rape, a staple of late-night television comedy monologues. Prisoner abuse constitutes the ultimate dehumanization, placing someone in a position of utter powerlessness, then systematically depriving them of dignity, basic physical security, and in some cases, life itself. Ugly as it is, prisoner abuse reflects a strand of our culture that’s as American as apple pie. Think about Abner Louima, the Haitian fellow who was beaten and sodomized with a nightstick by Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD. America’s mayor, wielding America’s nightstick. It’s in the blood, my friends.
On the other side of that same coin are the atrocities we’ve seen committed by some of our troops overseas. Once again, dehumanizing the “other” to the point where life is cheap, disposable, expendable. Back to Giuliani’s New York, remember Amadou Diallo, the unarmed black guy shot 19 times by the NYPD for attempting to pull out his wallet and identify himself; or Patrick Dorismond, another person of color shot by undercover cops when they tried to harass him into buying drugs off of them (he was resisting entrapment, apparently). This is part of the culture we bring with us to Baghdad, playing it out in the streets just as we do at home. Like the brutality of Saddam’s era, this has become part of their social burden. And now, with the Senate compromise legislation, our government will have expanded ability to circumvent common article three of the Geneva Conventions, ignore our own War Crimes Act, and gut what’s left of habeas corpus (which shysters like McCain didn’t even affect to defend). They are also protecting themselves from prosecution at some presumably more civilized point in the future. Saddam must be green with envy.
The tradition continues.
luv u,
jp
