Bush, totalitarianism, and "No Longer Enemy Combatants"

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes--Orwell, 1984

For a while, I've wondered how Bush (and by extension, the whole country) could possibly let detainees leave Gitmo after years of detention without charge. Either these people are innocent, in which case we detained them without charge or trial for years for no reason or they actually are "enemy combatants" like our government has claimed and the government chose to let the terrorists run free rather than give them fair trials[*]. The government basically has a choice between looking like a rogue state with no respect for human rights or incompetently (and publicly) endangering its own national security at that point. Until now, I never knew how they could justify it because both of those options looked so bad. Perhaps the media's awe of Our Commander In Chief In A Time Of War has meant that the government never had to justify it publicly, but one would think that the officials themselves would need some kind of pretense of justice and before they became disgusted with the whole affair and demanded changes.

I may have found a piece of the answer. A few weeks ago, I encountered what was, for me, a new phrase: "No Longer Enemy Combatant." That's the designation for people that never were enemy combatants and should be (but probably won't be) released promptly. The government simply chooses not to think about what that Orwellian phrase actually means. They simultaneously believe that the detention and the release are justified, even though justifying one necessarily dejustifies the other. You see, the government didn't make a mistake, the situation just changed. The government doesn't make mistakes, apparently. If you're like Adel Abdu al-Hakim or hundreds of others--trapped in a Guantánamo prison cell despite your obvious (and in some cases, proven) innocence, it is apparently impossible to prove that you never posed a threat to U.S. national security and should never have been detained; at best, you can convince Bush's stooges that you are "No Longer" an "Enemy Combatant." Even that doesn't end your problems, though. Here's what Amnesty International had to say on the subject a few months ago:

once a person is picked up and labeled an 'enemy combatant' by the United States, his life becomes one of constant torment and stigma. This terror does not end when the man is released and sent back to his home country. Many former detainees, even when reunited with their families, continue to be harassed, arbitrarily arrested and ill-treated by their own government.
"Absolutely outrageous," said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. "If someone is no longer considered an 'enemy combatant,' either he was erroneously detained in the first place or he has undergone a miraculous conversion. In either case, he will never be free from the stigma of being labeled a "terrorist." Moreover, the lives of the detainees' families frequently spiral down into financial and emotional devastation."

These people are paying an enormous price for the government's pretense of infallibility--for no reason other than that the military is incapable of admitting that they probably shouldn't have detained people solely because they owned a popular model of Casio watch.

And that's not the only government hubris we should be worried about. The government can listen to your phone calls with no oversight because they can be trusted not to abuse their power. They can then detain you (even if you're a citizen on American soil) with no chance for review and torture you because "they know what they're doing" and you should trust them. Even if it turns out they detained you by mistake, they can still keep you in detention or destroy your life because they don't make mistakes.

This obsession with executive power and infallibility is (or should be) offensive to both the liberal and conservative traditions in this country. It's anathema to everything conservatives supposedly learned from Burke and Hayek. It's arbitrary, it's unchecked, it's radical, and it's hubristic; it's all the things conservatism is supposed to protect us against through the rule of law, skepticism about governmental effectiveness and suspicion of governmental power. The left, with it's history of muckraking and its emphasis on civil liberties and fairness, should be equally disgusted. The Founders would have been appalled; such actions had been already illegal in the British Empire for hundreds of years in 1776. They had risked their lives and fought a bloody war against that empire to protest affronts against their rights that pale in comparison to everything Bush has done. They would be horrified that their successors intimidated "peaceably to assembl[ing]" protesters at gunpoint. The ways in which this government is "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"--through monitoring lawful, private discussions of political opponents and threatening them with paramilitary units and by threatening reporters with espionage charges--would have barely been conceivable when the Bill of Rights was written. The founders would be profoundly disappointed that the requirement that

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

was being disregarded entirely in sweeping programs that can monitor nearly every person in the entire country. They would be shocked that our prisoners were being "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against" themselves through torture techniques regarded by Spanish Inquisitors as more terrifying than being torn apart by the Rack. They would be outraged that citizens could be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" simply because the president wishes it. They would be horrified that the most important trials of the last few years have been neither "speedy" in any sense of the word nor "public," that there has been no "impartial jury," that suspects are neither "informed of the nature [nor the] cause of the accusation," that they have been kept from their own trials, could not examine the evidence against them, and were denied "the assistance of counsel for [their] defense" during their interrogations. They would be ashamed at the creatively "cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" upon those in our custody.

In short, what Bush has done is not offensive to me as a liberal. If I had learned about all of this four years ago, it would not have been offensive to me as a hawkish libertarian conservative. It's totalitarian, and it should be offensive to everyone in this country. Orwell was right that the doctrine of executive infallability and the assault on reality that it requires are just as much a part of totalitarianism as the torture we've been witnessing (and the torture we haven't been allowed to witness) in recent years. This isn't about liberalism or conservatism. Totalitarianism is offensive to me--and should be offensive to all of us--as Americans and as human beings. Amnesty International's spokesperson (quoted above) was exactly right when he said that the "denial of due process we have witnessed at Guantanamo Bay violates... our highest values as a nation." All those bits of the Bill of Rights I just quoted in bold are a part of our identity as Americans. I grew up believing that they made us special, that this was a great nation because we lived up to those values. And I know this country has never lived up to its ideals. But at least it's generally moved in the right direction. This may be the first time in history we've backslid this far.

That's why I think Glenn's book is so important. It tries to reclaim those values. That's why I spent my spare time researching it last spring when I could have been doing other things. That's why I write this blog (although if yesterday's traffic is any indication, I'd get way more hits if I just wrote about the X-Men every day).

June is Torture Awareness Month. I hope you'll check out my post on the subject and take some time to learn about (and maybe even blog about) this issue. We need more heroes to stand up and say "no."



[*]The government actually has a few more options when it extradites the prisoners rather than releasing them. None of those options are good, however, and they all make the initial denial of basic rights like habeas corpus unjustifiable in retrospect--does anyone really believe that thse people were too dangerous to be given lawyers but not dangerous enough to make it a problem if Syria takes over their cases? As I wrote a couple months ago,

If we send these people to be imprisoned in Britain (or wherever) and they get trials there, it could turn out that they were innocent the whole time (in fact, many of them are innocent). That would make the U.S. look pretty bad. If we release them ourselves, that raises the question of why we didn't do it immediately after they were captured. If they are terrorists and we send them to Pakistan or Syria, they could be released and/or serve as anti-US propaganda props, telling everyone about how we tortured them (which we probably did). Alternatively, if we send them to those countries and they get tortured, that could make us look pretty bad, too.

Categories: totalitarianism, gitmo, terror, bush, cheney, executive, torture, rights, ideology, america, courts, war