Into harm's way : America sinks to the moral level of Saddam

Into harm's way

By 'rendering' suspects to torturers America sinks to the moral level of Saddam

Henry Porter

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Rendition is profoundly wrong and it happens to be against American law. In 1998 the US Congress passed legislation that confirmed the policy of the United States 'not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States'.

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Last week on a trip to Europe, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, clarified her country's policy by saying that America would meet its treaty obligations in respect of torture. Two points need to be remembered from her statement. The first is that it was flagged by her aides as an important shift in policy, from which we may therefore conclude that the CIA had been directly involved in the mistreatment of suspects. The second is that at no stage did Rice deny or condemn the practice of outsourcing torture to countries such as Egypt.

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We affirm and protect civilisation by behaving within its constraints, not by shipping blindfolded men into dungeons where they are plugged into the electricity supply. If only the Prime Minister had thought for a few moments before rising in the House of Commons last week to support renditions, he might have recalled that on that very day the court listening to the trial of Saddam Hussein heard evidence from women who claimed to have been tortured by the dictator's secret police.

What is the moral difference between Saddam's behaviour and the American renditions? There is none. For the dirty secret about torture is that it is not simply to gain unreliable information but that it is a weapon of punishment and extreme terror, which is deployed in exactly the same way by America as it was by Saddam. Knowing that, imagine yourself a Muslim and then see what you think about extraordinary renditions.


http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1664599,00.html

We have.

but the reality and the examples we set are:

o Abu Ghraib.
o Whitewash of Abu Ghraib (i.e. second, worse round of pictures/video efectively buried & never released; not one senior U.S. military figure called to account unless you count how General Karpinski was scape-goated.)
o Rendition for torture to other nations as our proxy torturers.
o Gitmo.
o So-called "Patriot" Act at home.
o Encourage/force Iraq to have an American-style constitution & election, regardless of its applicability to their very different culture, while we have an administration at home hellbent on destroying/perverting our Constitution and finding new ways to rig/steal our national elections.
o Our administration publicly rhapsodizes that we are bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq when in reality we have destroyed that country & replaced Saddam (who was evil) with chaos, ruin, death and civil war. We wanted control of the oil, and a permanent military base right in the middle of Southwest Asia (Iraq is not the only country with oil.) We got both, but spare me the lectures about democracy & freedom.
o When the history books of the future are written, the severe traumatic shock & gut-level FEAR engendered by the 9/11 attacks on the American public will be a significant part of the story of how a rogue administration came to power, cleverly & deliberately exploited that fear to their own advantage, led us into the morass of Iraq, and turned us into a torturing nation dashing headlong towards fascism.

In our law and in our morality we recognize that the role of accomplice is no better than that of those who did an actual deed. The individual who pulled the trigger is not the only one charged with murder -- the person who brought him the person to be killed is also guilty of murder. If there is a robbery, the person who brought the gun but who does not go in the store is as guilty as the person who goes in the store.

There is really no difference between handing somebody over to somebody else for torture, and torturing them ourselves. If the latter is illegal, it is a joke to argue that the former violates no laws. If the latter is wrong, then those who do the former cannot claim moral virtue.

Alonzo Fyfe
Atheist Ethicist Blog