It's been a long time coming, but the Washington
Post has finally broken the code on the administration's doublespeak concerning torture: the Republicans believe they have the right to torture anyone, anywhere, on George Bush's say-so.
More on the flip ...
Torture and the Constitution
Sunday, December 11, 2005; Page B06
DOES THE Constitution permit the use of "waterboarding," or simulated drowning, to extract information from people detained by the government? To most Americans, the very question may sound ludicrous. Waterboarding, after all, has been recognized as a torture technique since the time of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. U.S. soldiers who were caught using it on enemy insurgents in the Philippines, in 1901, or the Vietnam War, in 1968, were prosecuted. When suffocation by water was used by foreign governments, such as the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the State Department didn't hesitate to call it torture.
Yet the Bush administration sees it otherwise ...
... administration lawyers have concluded that waterboarding and other CIA pressure methods don't necessarily violate the Constitution.
... That's why, when he was asked about waterboarding and a series of other abusive acts during his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified that "some might . . . be permissible in certain circumstances."
If waterboarding and similar tactics don't violate the Constitution, then there is no prohibition against using them against American citizens. This is not initially going to be a popular position to take -- despite the recent pop-culture efforts to make torture seem routine and necessary (as exemplified in nearly every episode of Fox's 24) Americans still view the use of torture as a demarcation between "good guys" and "bad guys" -- but it's essential to the police state the Republicans are building. It's not enough to lock away a few foreigners, you see; to effectively control a civilian population, you must have the freedom to put anyone away, and to make them suffer, with little or no recourse. In that way, the entire population becomes fearful of drawing the wrath of the state ... and the entire country becomes a prison camp.
Sam Alito's record at DoJ and on the bench suggests that he will support the full range of police state tactics: if, as Alito has argued, the Constitution permits a police officer -- on no one's judgment but his own -- to strip search American children and employ shoot-to-kill tactics against Americans suspected of nonviolent crimes, it's not much of a stretch to see it permitting "enhanced interrogation techniques" against any person, U.S. citizen or not, deemed by the executive branch to be a terrorist or "sympathizer."
Interpreting the Constitution as permitting waterboarding in secret prisons is, to most experts outside the administration, legally outrageous and politically untenable. It means that the Bush administration accepts, in principle, that the FBI may use waterboarding, painful stress positions, forced nudity and other methods on Americans, in American prisons, "in certain circumstances." That's why the Justice Department has classified its memos on the subject and kept its conclusions secret. That's why President Bush and Vice President Cheney have worked so hard to stop the McCain amendment, which would pave the way for legal challenges to their interpretation. They want to give themselves the authority to commit human rights abuses without having to explain or justify themselves to the public, the world -- or an impartial court.
The Post has finally figured it out. It's an editorial worth sending around to your friends, family, and local papers.