In 1995, I was among a number of Greenpeace activists arrested in a non-violent protest at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC. We’d embarrassed the Secret Service, so when we got to jail, they gave us the treatment. We were strip-searched, placed in handcuffs with restraining belts and leg shackles. We were rousted from our cells in the middle of the night, handcuffed to a murderer each, doused with water and taken to the only air-conditioned holding cell in the district. They turned the AC on high.
In 1998, another Greenpeace action, this time it was angry police in New London, Connecticut who decided to impound our clothes as evidence and brought us into court in our underwear for arraignment.
In 1985, Greenpeace embarrassed Dow Chemical by hanging a banner on its Midland, Michigan facility. Angry police drew blood samples from the arrested activists and later a Dow spokesman announced one Greenpeacer had venereal disease. She did not and Greenpeace’s lawyers wondered how a Dow spokesman had access to the results of
Midland Police Department blood tests. The woman in question bought a house with the settlement money Dow paid her.
All of the above was done in America, to non-violent protesters who had not only attorneys, but also public relations professionals standing by. Should anyone be surprised when the same kinds of things – to a much greater and more vicious extent – are visited on people in custody in Iraq or Afghanistan or Guantanamo?
Four weeks ago, I predicted that what was then a trickle of information about torture would become a flood by mid-June, and so it has. What’s surprising is that so much of the flood is in the form of memoranda from the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the White House counsel’s office. What’s not surprising is that the
Republican-controlled Congress hasn’t noticed our government is betraying everything it is supposed to stand for. The same people who impeached Bill Clinton for what was an error in personal judgment can’t get around to appointing a committee to investigate what appears to be an obvious case of war crime.
It doesn’t help seeing the Clintons at the White House, unveiling portraits and yukking it up with George W. This is the aspect of beltway culture most likely to induce nausea: at the end of the day, let’s put aside our differences and all get along. So what if W spent the day sanctioning torture? It’s after six; let’s go get a cocktail.
The idea of America is the idea that our citizens will act on the side of justice and democracy and humanity and in doing so we will prevail, because people of goodwill – who number in the majority – will rally to our side and make common cause with us.
If our nation’s leaders approve of beatings and torture and rape, if they condone the killing of innocents and bystanders, then we are no better than al Quaeda. If our political opposition, our press, our civic and religious leaders do not denounce and oppose these acts with all that is within them, then we begin to deserve the punishment the terrorists would inflict upon us.
The voices of true American values are emerging. Yesterday, 27 former diplomatic and military leaders spoke out against the illegal, immoral actions of the Bush administration in clear, unequivocal language. Secretary of Hypocrisy Colin Powell dismissed them as
politically motivated. There are none so deaf as those who will not hear.
On a more cynical, pragmatic level, America should not torture and rape because we don’t want those things done to our soldiers and civilians. Remember the opening weeks of the invasion, when Americans captured by the Iraqis were shown on television, how the Pentagon commentators howled about violations of the Geneva Conventions? Which
would you rather have happen to your son or daughter: their image appears on a video screen or they are stripped naked, attacked by dogs and sodomized with a chemical lightstick?
To deflect attention from all this, the White House trots out John Ashcroft to warn us that terrorists may attack this summer. What could inspire them to do that?
Humiliation, Revisited
In 1995, I was among a number of Greenpeace activists arrested in a non-violent protest at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC. We’d embarrassed the Secret Service, so when we got to jail, they gave us the treatment. We were strip-searched, placed in handcuffs with restraining belts and leg shackles. We were rousted from our cells in the middle of the night, handcuffed to a murderer each, doused with water and taken to the only air-conditioned holding cell in the district. They turned the AC on high.
In 1998, another Greenpeace action, this time it was angry police in New London, Connecticut who decided to impound our clothes as evidence and brought us into court in our underwear for arraignment.
In 1985, Greenpeace embarrassed Dow Chemical by hanging a banner on its Midland, Michigan facility. Angry police drew blood samples from the arrested activists and later a Dow spokesman announced one Greenpeacer had venereal disease. She did not and Greenpeace’s lawyers wondered how a Dow spokesman had access to the results of
Midland Police Department blood tests. The woman in question bought a house with the settlement money Dow paid her.
All of the above was done in America, to non-violent protesters who had not only attorneys, but also public relations professionals standing by. Should anyone be surprised when the same kinds of things – to a much greater and more vicious extent – are visited on people in custody in Iraq or Afghanistan or Guantanamo?
Four weeks ago, I predicted that what was then a trickle of information about torture would become a flood by mid-June, and so it has. What’s surprising is that so much of the flood is in the form of memoranda from the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the White House counsel’s office. What’s not surprising is that the
Republican-controlled Congress hasn’t noticed our government is betraying everything it is supposed to stand for. The same people who impeached Bill Clinton for what was an error in personal judgment can’t get around to appointing a committee to investigate what appears to be an obvious case of war crime.
It doesn’t help seeing the Clintons at the White House, unveiling portraits and yukking it up with George W. This is the aspect of beltway culture most likely to induce nausea: at the end of the day, let’s put aside our differences and all get along. So what if W spent the day sanctioning torture? It’s after six; let’s go get a cocktail.
The idea of America is the idea that our citizens will act on the side of justice and democracy and humanity and in doing so we will prevail, because people of goodwill – who number in the majority – will rally to our side and make common cause with us.
If our nation’s leaders approve of beatings and torture and rape, if they condone the killing of innocents and bystanders, then we are no better than al Quaeda. If our political opposition, our press, our civic and religious leaders do not denounce and oppose these acts with all that is within them, then we begin to deserve the punishment the terrorists would inflict upon us.
The voices of true American values are emerging. Yesterday, 27 former diplomatic and military leaders spoke out against the illegal, immoral actions of the Bush administration in clear, unequivocal language. Secretary of Hypocrisy Colin Powell dismissed them as
politically motivated. There are none so deaf as those who will not hear.
On a more cynical, pragmatic level, America should not torture and rape because we don’t want those things done to our soldiers and civilians. Remember the opening weeks of the invasion, when Americans captured by the Iraqis were shown on television, how the Pentagon commentators howled about violations of the Geneva Conventions? Which
would you rather have happen to your son or daughter: their image appears on a video screen or they are stripped naked, attacked by dogs and sodomized with a chemical lightstick?
To deflect attention from all this, the White House trots out John Ashcroft to warn us that terrorists may attack this summer. What could inspire them to do that?
(c) Mark Floegel, 2004