Dark Ages

Tim Rutten in the L.A. Times on Saturday aptly pointed out that our philosophy of war places us in a dark age. He notes that since 9/11 the U.S. has had a systematic draconian policy of extrajudicial imprisoning of foreigners and U.S. citizens. The term extrajudicial should seriously frighten us and move us to change the policy. It means that we allow no impartial oversight of our taking of prisoners and that we permit them _no_ rights. They are simply and completely at the mercy of whoever is guarding them. Rutten clearly suggests that immoral means do not lead to a moral end.

Midday on 9/11 as I sat alone on the rooftop of the Brooklyn library in which I worked and watched the smoke billow, I cried over the killings and the evil that had caused it--in some ways I was glad that my father hadn't lived to see this. Although I was scared that more would follow, I was also frightened by Bush and his cronies being in office. I deeply suspected that they would take a less intelligent, overeactive, and an emotionally irrational approach to the whole situation than Clinton/Gore would have. I also suspected that it might not have happened at all if Gore was in office (either it would have been prevented, or Bush's dirty connections in the Middle East helped cause it).

Although it took some time to see it (Bush was more patient about retaliation than I thought he would be--now it looks like they had do a catch-up on terrorism and make plans for invading Iraq)the Abu Ghraib situation now reveals to us how undermining the U.S.' extrajudicial approach to fighting terrorism has been.

To paraphrase Jimmy Carter, war is never good, but it is sometimes necessary. Sometimes our military must kill the enemy, but we show our true colors in the way we treat our enemy when they are naked and powerless. This should have been clear from the top down. Rutten reveals that it is not only the Bush people who have supported amoral policies, but also the press and elite commentators. He quotes Alan Dershowitz over a year ago (a Harvard law professor) suggesting that we should use "extreme measures" and "a torture warrant" against the captured Kahlid Shaikh Mohammed (alleged planner behind 9/11). More than half the CNN audience approved of such measures.

As Rutten points out, torture is what occurred in Hitler's concentrations camps, Stalin's Gulag, Pinochet's Chile, and Hussein's Iraq, and now us...

When America is not the good guy in this war, who the hell is? Are we comfortable joining the bad guys and fighting their kind of war? Maybe we should just start taking out THEIR civilian targets on purpose, that's where we're going with these kind of policies.