June 26 was an important date, the 18th anniversary of the UN
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment. But in this country, it was a day like any other. Our president was
still paying little attention to international laws governing how we treat
people captured in his War on Terror.
Some
Republicans have joined Democrats calling for an independent investigation of
our treatment of prisoners. The Bush administration’s response: Investigations
should be handled, and are being handled, by Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of
Defense. They’ve found no problems.
This is the
same Department of Defense that first ignored reports of torture at Abu Ghraib,
and then insisted that the practice of torture was limited to a few
out-of-control soldiers, and it was limited to Abu Ghraib.
Neither, we
know now, was true.
The Bush
administration says we’ve cleaned up our act. Prisoners are being treated
humanely.
That is not
true either.
Even FBI
agents have said that they observed mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba.
We are
holding 540 prisoners at Guantanamo.
Many have been there for more than two and a half years, with no charges, no
trial, no access to lawyers or family members, no hope for any kind of judicial
process and protection. The International Red Cross says it believes “that the
uncertainty about their fate” has created serious mental and emotional health
problems.
Some
prisoners are being held at secret locations. Others have been shipped off to
countries well known for their use of torture.
The New York Times and the New England Journal of Medicine reported
last week that military doctors at Guantanamo
have been advising interrogators about how to increase prisoners’ psychological
stress, and that prisoners medical records are not kept confidential.
There have
been repeated allegations of torture and other inhumane treatment at Guantanamo
and other facilities: beatings; sleep, food, and water deprivation; chaining
prisoners to the floor; threatening them with dogs and, in some cases
permitting dogs to attack them; suspending them by the wrists; sexually
assaulting them; threatening them with death; desecrating religious objects.
A Guantanamo
prisoner told Amnesty International that US guards “forced petrol and benzene
up the anuses of prisoners.” He himself had been put in solitary confinement
for eight months, he told AI; high-pressure water had been forced up his nose,
and a guard blinded him in one eye by pushing his finger into the eye.
Some Guantanamo
prisoners have been selected to be tried by “military commissions”: “executive
bodies, not independent or impartial courts,” says Amnesty, “with the power to
hand down death sentences.”
Under the
military commissions, says Amnesty, “there is no right of appeal against their
decisions to any court.”
Vice
President Dick Cheney’s flippant, insulting assurance to CNN about our
prisoners at Guantanamo: “They’re
very well treated down there. They’re living in the tropic. They’re well fed.
They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”
All of this
— torture, humiliation, detention without proper judicial process — is a
blatant violation of international law. “The prohibition contained in
international law is absolute,” says the International Red Cross, “and allows
for no exceptions of any kind.”
Are we so
far from the horrors of the Soviet Union that the Bush
administration’s behavior doesn’t disturb us?
Flagged
Congress is up to its old game, trying to amend
the constitution and ban the desecration of the flag. The House easily passed a
pro-amendment resolution last week. The Senate, which is expected to start
considering the issue right after July 4, has previously stopped the freight
train. But the Senate is more conservative now. And Democrats are more timid.
The flag is
a symbol, not a sacred object, and the United
States is a democracy, not a theocracy.
Here we
are, trying to spread freedom around the world. But what kind of freedom, if
not the freedom to criticize the government?
The
amendment will restrict a form of speech, a form of criticism. And it will
restrict one of the most important forms of critical speech: political speech.
Ah, but
there are other ways to criticize the government and to express political
speech.
Sure there
are. But what is it that is so
upsetting about desecrating a flag? And what do we consider “desecration”?
Do we fly
into a rage when we see Olympic athletes draping the flag around their
shoulders and taking a victory run around the track? Do flags as bedspreads or
ties or T-shirts upset us?
Would we
prosecute the folks flying those faded, tattered flags on their pick-up trucks?
Nope. It’s
the oh-so-rare use of the flag to criticize government and government policies
that triggers the rage.
It’s easy,
and politically expedient, to vote for the flag-desecration amendment. And I’d
bet that many — maybe most — of the legislators embracing it don’t really
care much about it.
It’s much,
much tougher, gutsier, to do the right thing and stand up for one of the most
important freedoms that the flag represents: the freedom to criticize
government and its policies.
You can’t
have it both ways, folks. You’re for free speech, or you’re not.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2005.
