Depraved Government

by digby

Every once in a while I'm struck anew by the utter lawlessnes and barbarity of the United States government under Republican rule. I follow this stuff so closely that it all blurs for long periods of time until something, out of the blue, shocks me almost physically. Today, I have been catching up on some things and started reading in depth about the decision of Federal District Judge Trager's heinous decision to dismiss Maher Arar's case against the US for kidnapping him at Kennedy Airport and rendering him to Syria to be tortured for almost a year.

This is a Kafkaesque tale that makes shivers go down my spine when I read about it. I simply can't wrap my arms around the idea that the American government is openly and proudly doing these things --- or that those who dissent are veritably dared to speak out against it lest they be branded terrorist sympathizers.

We have normalized torture, which I find akin to normalizing pedophilia for all its deviant --- if not uncommon --- malignity. To be clear: what shocks me is not that torture happens or that our government tortures. We have ample evidence that it has historically done so. What is unprecedented is this banal, rather dull acceptance that torture is perfectly natural and necessary.

Nat Hentoff has an article in this Week's Village Voice about this Arar case in which he cites a previous Apellate Court decision about torture from 1980:

In this landmark decision, Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, David Cole points out, the appeals court decided that "the prohibition on torture was so universally accepted that a U.S. Court could hold responsible a Paraguayan official charged with torturing a dissident in Paraguay . . . The [U.S.] court declared that when officials violate such a fundamental norm as torture, they can be held accountable anywhere they are found."


Notice the language in that decision, "enemy of all mankind." Here's the final paragraph in the opinion in its entirety:


In the twentieth century the international community has come to recognize the common danger posed by the flagrant disregard of basic human rights and particularly the right to be free of torture. Spurred first by the Great War, and then the Second, civilized nations have banded together to prescribe acceptable norms of international behavior. From the ashes of the Second World War arose the United Nations Organization, amid hopes that an era of peace and cooperation had at last begun. Though many of these aspirations have remained elusive goals, that circumstance cannot diminish the true progress that has been made. In the modern age, humanitarian and practical considerations have combined to lead the nations of the world to recognize that respect for fundamental human rights is in their individual and collective interest. Among the rights universally proclaimed by all nations, as we have noted, is the right to be free of physical torture. Indeed, for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind. Our holding today, giving effect to a jurisdictional provision enacted by our First Congress, is a small but important step in the fulfillment of the ageless dream to free all people from brutal violence.


So much for that. In our quest to deliver the almighty God's gift of freedom to each man and women in this world, we seem to have decided that the fundamental human right to be free of torture is no longer operative.

This was 1980. In 2006, just 26 years later we see this (from Hentoff again):

Now let us hear how Judge Trager justifies his dismissal of Maher Arar's suit for the atrocities he endured in Syria because of the CIA. In his decision, Trager said that if a judge decided, on his or her own, that the CIA's "extraordinary renditions" were always unconstitutional, "such a ruling can have the most serious consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both."

A judge must be silent, even if our own statutes and treaties are violated! What about the separation of powers? Ah, said Trager, "the coordinate branches of our government [executive and legislative] are those in whom the Constitution imposes responsibility for our foreign affairs and national security. Those branches have the responsibility to determine whether judicial oversight is appropriate."

Gee, I thought that the checks and balances of our constitutional system depend on the independence of the federal judiciary, which itself decides to exercise judicial review.

Judge Trager went further to protect the Bush administration's juggernaut conduct of foreign policy: "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case, and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."

"More generally," Trager went on, "governments that do not wish to acknowledge publicly that they are assisting us would certainly hesitate to do so if our judicial discovery process could compromise them."


Right. He didn't even use a legal reason, just bought into the bedwetting cowardice that seems to have overtaken most of the government after 9/11 and hid under the covers. He left all the scary stuff to the preznit and his big strong armymen, rather than do his duty and follow the constitution or supreme court precedent. Nothing to see here.

When in American history have so many government officials in the other branches submitted themselves so willingly to executive authority? We are now three five years away from 9/11. The smoke has cleared and the rubble has been cleaned up. The "War on Terror" has been going on longer than WWII. If anyone thought that people would gather their wits about them and come to their senses about these things, the rubber stamp congress and deferential judiciary have shown that they have no intention of stopping the Bush administration's attack on the constitution or it's normalization of the depraved.

Democrats have got to win this next election. They are, for all their flaws, all we have standing between us a this continued abasement of American values. Taking the Republicans out of the majority is essential to the survival of what few ideals we have left.

If you find yourself wondering why you bother with politics, go read Arthur Silber's masterful series on torture. You'll be reminded why it's important.



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