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June 16, 2005 Truth and Consequences By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignifica nt part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in rec onciliation: "No, don't! But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both ey es."
The Gulag Archipelago 1973 Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake - - not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right th e wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent. However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a poli tician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend to tr eat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly ratio ned in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other ha nd, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.
said on the Senate floor yesterday: When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to b e added to this debate. And I quote from his report: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more.
had been turned off, making th e temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detai nee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to hi m He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably ho t, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had b een since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in th e fetal position on the tile floor." If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent desc ribing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in t heir gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no con cern for human beings. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
Talk Left) I don't know much about Dick Durbin -- he's a solid, dependable Democrat, but definitely not one of the Senate's show horses. I also don't recall him playing the role of human rights champion before. So God help me, w hen I read what he said I immediately began to wonder what kind of polit ical advantage he hoped to gain from such extravagant use of the truth. The quote from former Vietnam POW Pete Peterson that Durbin included in h is floor speech said just about everything that needs to be said about t he practical risks: "From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a fore ign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival . This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy pris oners: because these standards also protect us . We need absolute c larity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treat ment of prisoners in wartime."
mistake, others only foot soldiers in the Taliban's army -- in 100 plus degree rooms for 24 hours without f ood or water, until they shit or piss all over themselves -- then you're truly beyond redemption.
wrote about this trait, and how the Cheka learn ed to use it to its advantage: There's an advantage to night arrests in that neither the people in the neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city streets can see how many have been taken away. Arrests which frighten the closest neighbors are not an event at all to those farther away. Along that same asphalt ribbon on which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of youngsters strides by day with banners, flo wers and gay, untroubled songs. Easier still to look the other way when the arrests take place half a wor ld away, the archipelago is entirely offshore and the prisoners aren't d riven through the streets in trucks but whisked through the sky by the C IA's own private airline. Add in the facts that those arrested are forei gn, non-Christian and non-white -- and that some of them almost certainl y are guilty of terrorist atrocities -- and you have the perfect excuse for a nation of Sergeant Schultzes to stick to its "We know nothing" lin e And why not? If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on t he hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going o n in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in the archipelago? Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why th e propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference to an e xtreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European c ountry in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amn esty International's use of a Russian word for forced labor camp. Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipe lago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. A t its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 25 million prisoners. T he number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or deliberate star vation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not million s The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of poli tical prisoners that I don't think has been matched since, not even by t hat wannabe Saddam. As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he d id. ") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be ope n and shut, but qualitatively . Compare, for example, the FBI's account of interrogation methods at Guantanamo -- the one cited above by Durbin -- with this scene from the Solzhenitsyn: In this "kennel" there was neither ventilation nor a window, and the pri soners' body heat and breathing raised the temperature to 40 or 45 degr ees Centigrade (104 to 113 degrees Farhenheit) -- and everyone sat ther e in undershorts . They sat like that for weeks at a time, and were given neither fresh air nor water -- except for gruel and tea in the m ornings.
passage from Peter Maass's visit to an Iraqi-run, American-ad vised interrogation center in Samarra: One of Falahs captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hi t or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard t he sound of the captains fists and boots on the detainees body, and we heard the detainees pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence. With this anecdote from The Gulag Archipelago: In the silence we could hear someone in the corridor protesting. They left the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a long time. In the suspended silence every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly. What happens on the remoter flyspecks in the American archipelago (much less the affiliated islands of our Saudi or Egyptian or Pakistani "allies") remains largely a closed book.
died in American custody, some appear to have been brutalized before they died. We don't know how many were subjected to outright tortur e, not just conditions "tantamount" to torture. We're asked by the Penta gon and the CIA to accept it on faith -- blind faith -- that crimes will be investigated and the guilty punished. But we already know that faith has been terribly abused. We have at least partial knowledge of life and death in the archipelago. There are still journalists willing to do stories and news organizations willing to run them -- Guantanamo e ven made the cover of this week's Time. Politicians gutsy enough to defy the right-wing slime machine ca...
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