At long last, the US military is releasing the former driver for Osama bin Laden, whose trial was one of the watershed moments for the Bush administration’s treatment of accused terrorists. Salim Ahmed Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. On July 14, 2004, he was charged with conspiracy, for trial by military commission under the President’s Order of November 13, 2001. Yes, that was three years later. Four months later, on November 8th, the commission was halted because the DC courts decided that there had been no determination by “competent tribunal” that he was a POW (which is required per the Geneva Convention) and either way, it violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Things went on from there, with the commission being ganked and then reapplied because the Geneva convention doesn’t apply to al-Quida and finally the Supreme Court said NERTS and declared the commission indeed in violation of the law.
It’s interesting, to me, to read about this today. Yesterday I finally got to listen to my cousin Dan’s report on interrogation. None of it was news to me, Dan’s talked about this more than once in my presence. I have a vivid memory of us sitting down for a Morrocan dinner in the old ‘hood, on his wife’s birthday, and he announced with fervor that this was something he felt he had to do. Seeing Dan fired up about radio is nothing new. Seeing him fired up about justice? Also something I expect from him. But watching him marry the two was fascinating.
The two topics have one thing in common, Hamdan’s trial and Dan’s radio piece. They both address the dehumanization of prisoners, and how it’s wrong.
Dan stresses that, when he was in the Army, he was taught to follow the law. The Geneva Convention said don’t torture, he wouldn’t. And even if torturing meant getting information that would save lives, he wasn’t to do it because he was an American. And yet. Here we have the outgoing Bush Administration saying it’s okay to escalate interrogation techniques in order to fight the War on Terror. They are, in effect, saying it’s okay to break the law and the rules to save us.
If that didn’t chill your blood, you need to think about how it applies to you. This means that if the government decides your a terrorist, they can do whatever the hell they want to, and you have no rights. You may not get a lawyer, you may not see your family. You are a non-entity, and as such, not a person. Once you stop being a person, people no longer apply things like ethics and morals to you. They will apply this ‘new’ method called ‘Enhanced Interrogation’, where by torture is used as an interrogation method.
Let’s get this right, torture is torture is torture. Period. Dress it up however you want. The Bush Administration tries to use euphemisms to make you feel better about it, like ‘rough’ interrogation, or just calling it the CIAs methods. But the Red Cross, the UN, the Commissioner for Human Rights, the UK’s House of Commons for Foreign Affairs, Human Rights First, Physicials for Human Rights, Amnesty International and Jimmy fucking Carter all call it torture. Canada has gone ahead and added to US to their list of countries that employ interrogation methods that amount to torture because of this.
Okay? Are you getting this? George W. Bush and his folk are okay with torturing people. They are okay with interrogation techniques that the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor both likened to Nazi methods. Goodwin’s Law aside, they went on to point out that the Nazis used more effective and less abusive techniques than the US did.
Thankfully, as Dan notes in his interview, there are still Army interrogators out there with a soul. My fervent hope is that with the changing of the guard, we change our attitudes. By acting inhumanly we lose our humanity and the right to claim any sort of superiority. This loss of respect to our character as a nation will be years in the healing.