Gavel Gamut
By Jim Redwine
OUR CHARTER IGNORED
We systematically tortured 119 human beings whom unnamed functionaries claimed were involved in 9-11-2001. At least 24 of them have been proven to be innocent of any terrorist acts. At least one was working with us as a confidential informant.
No usable intelligence was obtained via torture according to the report of the United States Senate’s Intelligence Committee. These are the facts as supported by Senator John McCain (Republican from Arizona) who championed the release of this information.
John McCain was himself tortured by the North Vietnamese after he was shot down and captured while bombing the city of Hanoi, North Vietnam. None dare call him naïve. Senator McCain knows torture is first of all immoral, and secondly ineffective. For as McCain says:
“I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering.â€
America’s Constitution, the charter upon which we are founded, in Article VIII of the Bill of Rights, prohibits cruel and unusual punishment (even of those fairly convicted of crimes).
The people we have tortured, two to death, did not receive a grand jury indictment as required by Article V, which also prohibits persons from being, “ … compelled … to be a witness against themselvesâ€.
Articles VI and VII are supposed to guarantee:
… the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed … and (these Articles require that a person) be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.â€
The 119 people were spirited away in secret, imprisoned at still undisclosed locations, without being charged, without attorneys, without the right to confront their accusers or bring out favorable testimony or have a jury trial, or any trial. Several of these 119 torture victims along with many other political prisoners have been held incognito for years.
Some may argue that these non-citizens should not be afforded any of the rights guaranteed by our Constitution. That is the same position taken by the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case in 1857. This legally defensible but morally reprehensible ruling helped bring about the loss of 600,000 American lives in the Civil War (1861 – 1865). Nations ignore their core values at their peril.
More importantly, the America we are so justly proud of should not act like the KGB of the old Soviet Union. We should not emulate the kind of inhumane and unconscionable behavior that we so properly condemned when it was engaged in by Stalin.
As one of our true heroes John McCain said, our actions in torturing these fellow human beings, “ … stained our national honor.†And he is a man well acquainted with both torture and honor.
It is time to close these gulags, including Guantanamo. It is past time to repatriate all illegally and immorally held persons. Or, if we do not wish to treat these people the way we would like to be treated in a similar situation, at an absolute minimum we should afford them the rights that our Constitution guarantees us all. We should do this not for their sake but for ours.
After all, how can we torture people for what a cabal of unregulated and faceless bureaucrats assume are violations of our laws when such torture is itself a more damning assault on our country’s foundation than the supposed acts of any hypothetical terrorists?
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