An ugly turn toward torture

Tom Teepen/Times Union | October 29 2005

Something has apparently agitated our nation's nasty gene, and we're off on a toot demanding free range for some of our ugliest impulses. Take two as examples:

The vice president of the United States is pushing Congress to adopt prisoner torture as avowed U.S. policy, and there's an effort afoot in the House to expand the number of, as capital punishment lingo puts it, "death-eligible" crimes and give prosecutors a second whack if the trial jury won't approve execution.

The inspiration for such resorts to extremism is presumably again 9/11, which has come to serve as the all-embracing excuse for giving up any of our civilized ways that one or another politician can defame as pattycake.

The United States already has been caught abusing prisoners, even unto death, in military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. In addition, we've been kidnapping suspects and whisking them secretly to countries who are happy, for a price, to torture them on our behalf. And the CIA is holding an unknown number of unreported prisoners in an unknown number of secret prisons around the world and is doing who knows what to them, all of that in plain violation of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture, U.S. law and an honorable and proud history of American military practice.

The odor from these abuses has become so rank that 89 senators recently joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in passing legislation directly forbidding "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of U.S. prisoners.

Which in turn frightened Vice President Dick Cheney into lobbying Congress to enact an option for the CIA to torture foreign prisoners held overseas, making those secret prisons the official torture chambers.

To add to the mayhem, the House is contemplating a law that would add 41 crimes to the 20 terrorism-related offenses currently eligible for federal death sentences. And, in a new twist, prosecutors could impanel a second jury if the first deadlocks over execution, a situation that now automatically invokes life imprisonment.

This boom in death was adopted on a voice vote -- and without hearings or debate -- as an add-on to the renewal of the Patriot Act, which itself short-circuits a number of traditional American civil liberties in panicky overreaction to terrorism.