Torture and Wiretaps: the underlying link
Quick quiz: what does the Bush administration stance on torture, and their stance on wiretaps have in common? Disregard for constitutions and treaties? Well, that’s obvious, but how so? Disregard for human and civil rights? Sure, but exactly how so? There is something fundamental that ties together much of the Bush administration’s policy from the Ashcroft inJustice Department to the Gitmo detentions without trials. Before reading on and having your mind corrupted by my screed, think for a couple seconds about your take and drop it in a comment.
There are two fundamental aspects to the Bush worldview that ties together many of their human and civil rights violations:
- The ends always justify the means
- More importantly: Guilty until proven innocent.
The assertion that the Bushies make with respect to torture is “These are bad people.” Of course, this is formally unproven and, indeed many if not most of these people have turned out to have done nothing wrong. What these people are is accused of being bad people. There is a difference, and the respect for that difference is one of the founding principles (albeit, apparently not practices) of US law. Constitutionally speaking, our rights as citizens are fully protected right up until the moment that we are convicted of a crime, not from the moment we are accused.
The Bushies seek absolution in the claim that those subjected to torture are neither US citizens nor enemy combatants, but good, bad, citizens or combatants, John McCain put it best when he said “It’s not about who they are. It’s about who we are.” We are, in theory (but again apparently not in practice), a country that does not condone the use of torture. Of course, we have trained torturers for years at the infamous School of the Americas (which claims to have reformed itself), but presidents prior to Bush at least had an adequate enough understanding of US law and international agreements to deny that such torture was acceptable and to pretend that the School of the Americans was a training ground for democracy.
Meanwhile, are wiretaps a form of illegal search, prohibited by Constitutional protections? We do not have an explicit right to privacy in the US, but such wiretaps are clearly in violation of the law and the president swears to uphold the law. But again, the people being tapped are “bad people.” Since these taps are conducted without warrants and without due process, since they are in fact fishing expeditions to find out whether or not these are bad guys, this is on the face of it untrue. Traditionally, the surveillance of US citizens has been used to intimidate pacifist groups such as Quakers and has done less to protect us against terrorists and communists than to protect sitting administrations from domestic criticism.
The war on terrorism, like the struggle against communism, trucks no opposition. It cannot be questioned.
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