Another Day "That Will Live in Infamy" - The Supreme Court Protects Torturers

Today, October the Tenth, is always a bad day. Beverly, my wife and high school sweetheart died on this day forty-seven years ago. Since then, bad things have happened again and again on the Tenth of October. My government, for instance, tried to kill me on this date, twenty-one years ago.

And so it is that I should not have been surprised to hear as soon as I turned on the television set this morning, that the U.S. Government has been up to its old tricks. At the computer – the truth is always much easier to come by there – I was directed by several friends and family members to articles like this one:


“WASHINGTON - A German man who says he was abducted and tortured by the CIA as part of the anti-terrorism rendition program lost his final chance Tuesday to persuade U.S. courts to hear his claims.

“The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal from Khaled el-Masri, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if courts allowed the case to proceed.

“El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers and was detained while attempting to enter Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003.

“He claims that CIA agents stripped, beat, shackled, diapered, drugged and chained him to the floor of a plane for a flight to Afghanistan. He says he was held for four months in a CIA-run prison known as the "salt pit" in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

“After the CIA determined it had the wrong man, el-Masri says, he was dumped on a hilltop in Albania and told to walk down a path without looking back.

“The lawsuit against former CIA director George Tenet, unidentified CIA agents and others sought damages of at least $75,000.

"’We are very disappointed,’ Manfred Gnijdic, el-Masri's attorney in Germany, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his office in Ulm.

"’It will shatter all trust in the American justice system,’ Gnijdic said, charging that the United States expects every other nation to act responsibly, but refuses to take responsibility for its own actions.

"’That is a disaster,’ Gnijdic said.

“El-Masri's claims, which prompted strong international criticism of the rendition program, were backed by European investigations and U.S. news reports. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that U.S. officials acknowledged that el-Masri's detention was a mistake.

“The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied el-Masri's account and, in urging the court not to hear the case, said that the facts central to el-Masri's claims "concern the highly classified methods and means of the program."

“El-Masri's case centers on the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terrorism suspects are captured and taken to foreign countries for interrogation. Human rights activists have objected to the program.

“President Bush has repeatedly defended the policies in the war on terror, saying as recently as last week that the U.S. does not engage in torture.

“El-Masri's lawsuit had been seen as a test of the administration's legal strategy to invoke the doctrine of state secrets and stop national security suits before any evidence is presented in private to a judge. Another lawsuit over the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, also dismissed by a federal court on state secrets grounds, still is pending before the justices.

“Conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec said the Bush White House uses the doctrine too broadly. "The notion that state secrets can't be preserved by a judge who has taken an oath to protect the Constitution, that a judge cannot examine the strength of the claim is too troubling to be accepted," said Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University.

“The court has not examined the state secrets privilege in more than 50 years.

“A coalition of groups favoring greater openness in government says the Bush administration has used the state secrets privilege much more often than its predecessors.

“At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said.

“The state secrets privilege arose from a 1953 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the executive branch to keep secret, even from the court, details about a military plane's fatal crash.

“Three widows sued to get the accident report after their husbands died aboard a B-29 bomber, but the Air Force refused to release it claiming that the plane was on a secret mission to test new equipment. The high court accepted the argument, but when the report was released decades later there was nothing in it about a secret mission or equipment.

“The case is El-Masri v. U.S., 06-1613.”


I chose to include that, verbatim, here because I fear I might lose my temper and throw caution to the winds. These, after all, are torturers. More, I have been in their sights before. I have listened covertly to their criminal machinations, heard them plot their outrages of the law and our U.S. Constitution. I know these people.

At least, I thought I did. Now this. Were I not already well-versed concerning how great is the corruption of the absolutely powerful, I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. The “Nation of Laws,” the “Home of the Brave.” Torturers!

Nothing – not the death of my sweetheart wife, not betrayal by my own country, not the bullets passing through my flesh on that occasion – has ever wounded me as deeply as this. God – I am so angry!

And ashamed. Ashamed for the millions of men who lie in graveyards and on battlegrounds all around the world, dead because they would pay that price for their country’s honor, honor now besmirched by the action a government comprised mostly away of cowards who would not so much as serve in their country’s uniform.

I am ashamed for generations of children, for our children today and for their children that their country, its honor sullied and flag disgraced, will never again be able to hold itself up to the world as an ideal. I am ashamed for dozens of things I must not enumerate here, fearful again of my own rage and the retaliation of the torturers against – as they were once willing to do – those whom I love. As I said, this is the lowest of the low of whom we speak. What they will not stoop to is hard to imagine.

I am ashamed knowing full well that the firestorm of public outrage that should sweep a nation “so conceived and so dedicated” to “the proposition that all men are created equal” as this one is will not happen. We’ve slipped that far, and current events as well as those of the near past demonstrate how corrupt and despicable, how dangerous to anyone who earns their disfavor, is the general U.S. public.

If I were the religious or otherwise superstitious man that I am not, I would say, “God damn you, George W. Bush and your despicable corporate criminal class, god damn you to hell” – and I would lament that no worse future for you exists. You have committed in our names the lowest of the low of human behavior; and by so doing enlisted us in the ranks of the lowest of the low of humankind, the torturer.

But that is hateful, and I do not hate – not the person, anyway. But I hate behavior, and there is no act more worthy of hate than torture. More, torture is the act of a hater, and I will not be brought down to the contemptibly execrable level of a torturer, under any circumstance.

I will wait, moreover, to see what my country and countrymen do about this. If those who suborn this crime against humanity – the U.S. Congress who stand idly feckless, and/or cynically by, and the Supreme Court, who by their actions in the matter have attempted to look the other way, that is – are not thrown from office and imprisoned (subornation and misprision of crime is to commit the same crime), I will stop flying the U.S. flag. More, I will withdraw as publicly as possible what support I still give the U.S. government (they, of course, have long since declared themselves my enemy).

The public and any citizen of the U.S. who does not protest in the loudest and most effective means possible torture also commits the crime against humanity that is torture. I will not be a torturer and I will not number myself among torturers.

And for the Sean Hannitys, the Bill O’Reillys, the Rush Limbaughs and their sickeningly sycophant, toadying, Uriah Heap kind, who hurl their FoxNews “Do you want to see the United States lose in Iraq,” this: yes, you’re damned right I hope we lose. I hope anyone who commits the crime of torture fails at whatever he attempts.

You can’t, as I just said, support crime without making yourself a criminal.

At this point in our history, it is clear that America is in the final stages of fascism; oh, it hasn't yet metastasized into the outright jackbooted fascism of Nazi Germany, but it is poised like a boulder at the top of a slope, ready to roll into the abyss. In fact, it will take a miracle to keep this from happening. Consider the facts:

The collapse of the US dollar is accelerating. Under the almost incomprehensible weight of spending loosed by the new Cold War supplanted by the War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others of which we are not yet informed, the subsequent and inevitable effects of the sub-prime loan swindle; soaring energy prices due the threat and certainty of peak oil; with catastrophic weather events caused by global warming; and, of course, the one thing that Bush's entire foreign policy guarantees will occur - another catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Any one of these could by itself usher in outright fascism. Put together any two of these, and fascism in the Land of the Free is dead certain.

In point of incontrovertible, by definition, fact, the full orchestration of outright fascism has already been accomplished. We have the SturmAbteilung, the infamous “Brownshirts’ of Nazi Germany. Or have you forgotten about so-called “private” security firms like Blackwater? Once known as “proprietary companies” of the CIA, they stand ready to serve in complete revocation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights under the new Patriot Act. When martial law is declared, they will do in the U.S. what they are doing in Iraq.

Neither is that all. The Pentagon has now established a new military command it calls Northcom, its purpose to organize military operations in the United States and Canada. The Posse Comitatus Act has in preparation been gutted in order to legalize National Guard service as police anywhere in the country. If that doesn’t convince you, consider the undeniable and published fact detention centers have been built across the land with plans having been made for internment of millions of U.S. citizens.

“Alea jacta est.” The die has been cast. As with the matter of torture, and just as experience tell us that once the individual has stooped to criminal behavior like rape, murder, or torture, he cannot be rehabilitated, history tells us that there is a point of no return in the evolution of fascism. There will be no going back now. The future will see destruction and death, death by the millions both inside and outside the U.S. Yes, I am angry as never before, and ashamed – ashamed of what we have done to me, to Khalid El-Masri, and to our children and their children.

For the love of God, THIS IS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?