In one of the more nauseating passages, [of the recently released torture memos] Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.
These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.
Jay Bybee is now a federal circuit court judge. This is as high as you get as a judge short of the supreme court or a fistful of ludes. The phrases above come from a recent piece in the New York Times.
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Hear! Hear!
Tune in talk radio and you’ll learn that it’s alright to torture them, because they’re terrorists, and because they get over the torture.
Well. Maybe they are terrorists, maybe they aren’t. Some are, I’m sure. The problem is, it’s the government who says so, and they are holding all the cards to their chest. We don’t get to see the government’s evidence because of “security.” So the openness that is critical to keeping government power in check isn’t there.
That the closure of open government hasn’t been scaring the Hell out of everyone has been, to put it mildly, just a little irritating.
It’s also frightening to see just how easy it is to get people to agree that anything at all can be done to a group of people as long as they are “dirty rotten so-and-sos.” Whether those so-and-so’s are “terrorists,” or “enemy combatants,” or “not citizens,” being able to treat them that way hinges upon defining them as “not us.”
Any time you have to define a group of people as “not us” in order to treat them differently, you have set up the conditions that make it very easy to do frightening things to people. There is no other reason to redefine people that way.
I’m not saying that our detainment camps are full of boy scouts, or that we should be naive Dudley Do-Rights. I’m saying that anyone who is willing to take the government’s word alone about who’s in the camps or what is or ought to be done with them has a trust for authority that is appropriate for a toddler but dangerous for an adult to have.