Last night Dana Rohrabacher, Ted Poe and FoxNews dropped a bomb during "The Big Story With John Gibson and Heather Nauert." Turns out, the United States is torturing prisoners. Wrongly imprisoned ones at that. Little did you know though, it's not at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or any number of other U.S. military prisons. It's not at the off-the-map CIA facilities or in nations who have accepted U.S. detainees for questioning. All that remains fine as far as these folks are concerned. But two border patrol agents- Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean- who shot 15 times at an unarmed man (wounding him) and then covered it up are apparently being tortured right here in American prison. Laments Rohrabacher:
The treatment is so outrageously bad of Ramos and Compean it really does meet the international standards of torture.
Why the histrionics? Well..turns out, Ramos and Compean don't get to watch much tv. Quoth Dana: "Their meals are very limited, they have no contact with the outside world. They end up not having to — they can't watch television, they have no exercise." Juxtapose that, as Rep. Rohrabacher does, with conditions at Guantanamo and you end up with terror suspects living the high life of Heroes and kickball games in the yard.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a few inconvenient details are glossed over as Rohrabacher and FoxNews ramble on about how these two men would be better off at Guantanamo. First, these two men commited a verifiable act, considered to be criminal. They were put on trial in a court of law and convicted utilizing the process determined by the Constitution of the United States. They have a specific sentence with an appeals process rather than an indefinite, whimsical detention. And oh yeah, they aren't targetted by methods of interrogation designed to break down the human psyche on a fundamental level. Or being murdered by their jailers as documented by military-issued death certificates.
But let's not stop there, that's just the first half. The way that these folks tell it, you might get the impression that these two particular U.S. prison inmates are being treated in a uniquely barbaric fashion. That somehow these two particular men, convicted of committing a violent crime and lesser charges, have been singled out for worse treatment than rapists, murderers, serial killers, or even domestic terrorists (like, say, Timothy McVeigh a few years back). None of them are receiving treatment at this level apparently. Just these two guys. But just to clarify, nobody here wants to actually change the practices of the prison system- the practices that meet the international standards of torture. Nobody is concerned about concerned with investigating whether anyone else is treated this way or whether the United States is engaging in torture of its domestic prisoners. No. (Apparently) not important. As Representative Ted Poe explains, "What we want to see is fairness. What we want to see is justice."
It all just leaves me very confused. Two members of the United States Congress have appeared on a major American news outlet and blown the lid off of the earth-shattering story that the U.S. prison system is apparently torturing its inmates. But they don't want to investigate anything or change anything. Could it be that they're just using scary buzzwords to obfuscate the truth and achieve an expedient political end that the actual law wouldn't otherwise allow? Republicans wouldn't do that would they? Just make up complete bullshit?