G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg on Gitmo Decorum
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Mar 9 2007 - 9:30am
Once upon a time, our offshore prison at Guantanamo was the sort of place
where even an American National Guardsman, only pretending to be a
recalcitrant prisoner "extracted" from a cell for training purposes, could
be beaten almost senseless. This actually happened to 35 year-old "model
soldier" Sean Baker [1], who had been in Gulf War I and signed on again
immediately after the World Trade Center went down. His unit was assigned to
Guantanamo and he volunteered to be just such a "prisoner," donning the
requisite orange uniform on January 24, 2003. As a result of his
"extraction" and brutal beating, he was left experiencing regular
epileptic-style seizures ten to twelve times a day. (And remember the
Immediate Reaction Force team of MPs that seized him, on finally realizing
that he wasn't a genuine prisoner, broke off their assault before finishing
the job.)
If you happened to be an actual prisoner -- putting aside the female
interrogators who smeared [2] red paint (meant to mimic menstrual blood) on
Arab detainees as a form of humiliation -- you might end up like this [3]:
"The A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated
room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on
the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally
pulling his own hair out throughout the night."
Or this:
"I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an
Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light
flashing."
Or this [4]:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee
chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food
or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had
been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."
These were, in fact, descriptions provided by outraged FBI agents assigned
to Guantanamo in 2004 in memos or emails to their bosses back on the
mainland. They confirmed prisoner claims that "military personnel beat and
kicked them while they had hoods on their heads and tight shackles on their
legs, left them in freezing temperatures and stifling heat, subjected them
to repeated, prolonged rectal exams and paraded them naked around the prison
as military police snapped pictures," and so on.
Ah, but those were the good old days when Guantanamo was the real "24"
[5] -- the only problem being that there wasn't a "ticking bomb" prisoner in
sight, just a former Australian [6] professional kangaroo skinner, who had
joined the Taliban before September 11, 2001 and never fired a shot at
American forces, as well as a man who was supposedly Osama bin Laden's
chauffeur [7]. That was kind of top o' the line for the prisoners Guantanamo
held until, last September, the real bad guys -- 14 [8] of them - were
transferred there from the CIA's secret prisons and torture chambers
elsewhere on the planet.
Now, Karen Greenberg, Tomdispatch regular [9] and co-editor of The Torture
Papers [10], has visited the new Guantanamo and she offers us an up-to-date
lesson in Gitmo decorum. -- Tom
Guantanamo Is Not a Prison: 11 Ways to Report on Gitmo without Upsetting the
Pentagon
Karen J. Greenberg
Several weeks ago, I took the infamous media tour of the facilities at
Guantanamo. From the moment I arrived on a dilapidated Air Sunshine plane to
the time I boarded it heading home, I had no doubt that I was on a foreign
planet or, at the very least, visiting an impeccably constructed movie set.
Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to two-days-plus of a
military-tour schedule packed with site visits and interviews (none with
actual prisoners) designed to "make transparent" the base, its facilities,
and its manifold contributions to our country's national security.
The multi-storied, maximum security complexes, rimmed in concertina wire,
set off from the road by high wire-mesh fences, and the armed tower guards
at Camp Delta, present a daunting sight. Even the less restrictive quarters
for "compliant" inmates belied any notion that Guantanamo is merely a
holding facility for those awaiting charges or possessing useful
information.
In the course of my brief stay, thanks to my military handlers, I learned a
great deal about Gitmo decorum, as the military would like us to practice
it. My escorts told me how best to describe the goings-on at Guantanamo,
regardless of what my own eyes and prior knowledge told me.
Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up. Consider this a guide of sorts to
what the officially sanctioned report on Guantanamo would look like, wrapped
in the proper decorum and befitting the jewel-in-the-crown of American
offshore prisons. or, to be Pentagon-accurate, "detention facilities."
1. Guantanamo is not a prison. According to the military handlers who
accompanied us everywhere, Guantanamo is officially a "detention facility."
Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were
actually modeled on maximum and medium security prisons in Indiana and
Michigan respectively, and although the use of feeding tubes and the
handling of prisoners now take into account the guidelines of the American
Corrections Association (and increasingly those of the Bureau of Prisons as
well), it is not acceptable to use the word "prison" while at Gitmo.
2. Consistent with not being a prison, Guantanamo has no prisoners, only
enemies, specifically, "unlawful enemy combatants." One of my colleagues was
even chastised for using the word "detainee." "Detained enemy combatants" or
"unlawful enemy combatants," we learned, were the proper terms.
3. Guantanamo is not about guilt and innocence -- or, once an enemy
combatant, always an enemy combatant. "Today, it is not about guilt or
innocence. It's about unlawful enemy combatants," Rear Admiral Harry B.
Harris, Jr.,the Commanding Officer of Guantanamo tells us. "And they are all
unlawful enemy combatants." This, despite the existence of the official
category "No Longer an Enemy Combatant" which does not come up in our
discussions. Nor was the possibility that any of the detainees at Guantanamo
might have been mistakenly detained ever discussed. As the administrator for
the tribunals that are to determine the status of each detainee explained to
us, the U.S. Government takes "a risk when we transfer" detainees out of
Guantanamo.
4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo. Our handlers use the term
"habeas lawyers" as a seemingly derogatory catch-all for lawyers in general,
both defense attorneys -- those who are defending their clients before the
military commissions -- and habeas attorneys, those who seek to challenge in
U.S. courts the government's right to detain their clients. The U.S.
military and its Public Affairs Officers are convinced that the terrorists
are transmitting information to their colleagues in the outside world via
their lawyers. According to our escorts, "habeas lawyers" may be the
unwitting pawns of terrorists. As a power-point presentation at the outset
of our formal tour (and as subsequent remarks make clear to us), it is the
belief of the American authorities that the detainees are using their
lawyers in accordance with the directives outlined in the al-Qaeda training
manual that was discovered in Manchester, England in 2000. This manual, they
assure us, encourages terrorists to "take advantage of visits with habeas
lawyers to communicate and exchange information with those outside."
5. Recently, at least, few if any reliable journalists have been reporting
on Guantanamo; only potential betrayers are writing about it. "The media"
arrive with ostensibly open eyes. Yet these guests, graciously hosted from
morning to night, go home perversely refusing to be complimentary to their
hosts. They suffer from "the chameleon effect," as I was told more than once
by military public information office personnel, and "we just don't
understand it." For our part, we visitors didn't understand why we were
forbidden to walk anywhere -- even to the bathroom -- by ourselves, talk to
anyone other than those we were introduced to (none actual prisoners), or
even take a morning run up and down the street we were lodged on, although
there was not a prisoner in sight.
6. After years of isolation, the detainees still possess valuable
information -- especially today. When asked what kind of useful information
the detainees could possibly have for interrogators, many already locked
away in Gitmo for over five years, the answer was: "I believe that we are,
in fact, getting good and useful and interesting intelligence -- even after
five years." Right now, they are especially useful. This is because, Admiral
Harris told us, "We have up-and-coming leadership in al-Qaeda and in the
Taliban in Afghanistan [and] we don't know what they look like. There's
never been a photograph taken of them or there's never been a photograph
that US forces have of them. But their contemporaries. are quite often the
same individuals that are in the camps here today. So we will work with law
enforcement. and their sketch artists will work with these detainees, the
compliant and cooperative detainees. And those pictures will be sent out to
the forward fighting area." No one asked just how reliable our own memories
would be after five years of isolated detention.
7. Guantanamo contains no individuals -- inside the wire or out. The
prisoners are referred to not by name, but by number. The guards and others,
even outside the confines of the prison camp, remove the Velcroed names
which are on their uniforms, leaving blank strips on their chests where
their identity would normally be, or they replace their names with their
ranks. Either way, they strive to remain anonymous. They tell us that they
fear retaliation against themselves and their families from a presumably
all-seeing, all-reaching jihadi network. With the media, most follow the
same rules. We, too, could evidently land them in trouble with al-Qaeda.
Thus, many refuse to tell us their names, warning those we greet to be
careful not to mistakenly call them by name in front of us.
8. Guantanamo's deep respect for Islam is unappreciated. All the food served
in the prison is halal, prepared in a separate kitchen, constructed solely
for the detainees. All cells, outdoor areas, and even the detainee waiting
room in the courthouse where the Military Commissions will be held, have
arrows pointing to Mecca. All compliant detainees have prayer rugs and
prayer beads. All detainees, no matter how they behave, have Korans. The
library includes books on Islamic history, Islamic philosophy, and on
Mohammed and his followers. Our escorts are armored against our protests
about the denial of legal rights to prisoners. The right to challenge their
detention in court, actually being charged with a crime, or adhering to the
basic rules of procedure and evidence that undergird American law -- none of
this is important. They do not see that what's at stake is not building a
mosque at Gitmo, any more than it is about serving gourmet food, or about
the cushy, leather interrogation chairs we are shown. It is about extending
the most basic of legal rights, including the presumption of innocence, to
those detained here.
9. At Guantanamo, hard facts are scarce. This, we are told, is a security
measure. "As the 342nd media group to come through here, you'll notice that
we speak vaguely. We can't be specific. You will notice that we talk in
approximate terms and estimates only. Those are operational security
measures. We don't want to take away position" -- a phrase which I took as
shorthand for revealing actual numbers, names, locations, dates, etc.
Typical examples of preserving Gitmo security through a refusal to give out
specific facts:
"What is that building?" [I am referring to one directly in our view.]
"Which building?"
"How long has the lieutenant been here?"
"Since she got here."
"Where is Radio Range?" [This is the area on which the camps are built.]
"I never heard of it."
10. Guantanamo houses no contradictions. And if you notice any -- and
they're hard to miss -- it's best to keep quiet about them, unless you want
a sergeant without a name chastising you about the dangers posed by enemy
combatants, or one of the officers without a name reprimanding your lower
ranking escort for giving out "misinformation." Stories are regularly
presented to portray a policy as particularly generous to the detainees;
only later does someone mention that it might have been an answer to the
needs of the guards themselves. A typical example:
"We allow two hours of recreation a day in order to comply with the Geneva
Conventions," they tell us. But a guide at another moment leads us to
believe that there is actually a more pressing reason for allowing the
recreation. "We need them to go outside so that we can search their cells
for weapons and contraband."
These sorts of contradictions leave me ultimately feeling sorry for our
escorts. It is not their fault that they know so little about the place they
are charged with explaining to us. Most of them arrived roughly eight months
ago and were handed a defensive script. They are often quite sincere when
they tell us that they don't know answers to our questions.
They actually don't know what went on before their arrival, or where things
were located in earlier days, or if perchance abuses or outbursts, not to
speak of torture, might have occurred at Gitmo, or even who was in charge as
little as a year ago. Few, if any, from the old days are there to instruct
or correct them.
Of course, if they wanted to, they could learn the details that many of us
have picked up over the years simply by reading or by talking to those who
spent time there. But this is not their task; they are but mouthpieces,
nothing more, as they try to tell us time and again when we ask our
questions. And, anyway, they themselves expect to leave relatively unscathed
sometime this spring.
Finally, for those of us who want to write about Guantanamo and who are
grateful for having been shown around and had the myths and realities of the
Bush administration's most notorious detention facility laid out so clearly,
a final lesson:
11. Those who fail to reproduce the official narrative are not welcome back.
"Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back," one of our escorts warns me
over lunch.
Only time will tell if I got it right.
Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and
Security at the NYU School of Law and is the co-editor of The Torture
Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib [11] and editor of The Torture Debate in
America [12].
Copyright 2007 Karen J. Greenberg
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Mar 9 2007 - 9:30am
Once upon a time, our offshore prison at Guantanamo was the sort of place
where even an American National Guardsman, only pretending to be a
recalcitrant prisoner "extracted" from a cell for training purposes, could
be beaten almost senseless. This actually happened to 35 year-old "model
soldier" Sean Baker [1], who had been in Gulf War I and signed on again
immediately after the World Trade Center went down. His unit was assigned to
Guantanamo and he volunteered to be just such a "prisoner," donning the
requisite orange uniform on January 24, 2003. As a result of his
"extraction" and brutal beating, he was left experiencing regular
epileptic-style seizures ten to twelve times a day. (And remember the
Immediate Reaction Force team of MPs that seized him, on finally realizing
that he wasn't a genuine prisoner, broke off their assault before finishing
the job.)
If you happened to be an actual prisoner -- putting aside the female
interrogators who smeared [2] red paint (meant to mimic menstrual blood) on
Arab detainees as a form of humiliation -- you might end up like this [3]:
"The A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated
room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on
the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally
pulling his own hair out throughout the night."
Or this:
"I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an
Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light
flashing."
Or this [4]:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee
chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food
or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had
been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."
These were, in fact, descriptions provided by outraged FBI agents assigned
to Guantanamo in 2004 in memos or emails to their bosses back on the
mainland. They confirmed prisoner claims that "military personnel beat and
kicked them while they had hoods on their heads and tight shackles on their
legs, left them in freezing temperatures and stifling heat, subjected them
to repeated, prolonged rectal exams and paraded them naked around the prison
as military police snapped pictures," and so on.
Ah, but those were the good old days when Guantanamo was the real "24"
[5] -- the only problem being that there wasn't a "ticking bomb" prisoner in
sight, just a former Australian [6] professional kangaroo skinner, who had
joined the Taliban before September 11, 2001 and never fired a shot at
American forces, as well as a man who was supposedly Osama bin Laden's
chauffeur [7]. That was kind of top o' the line for the prisoners Guantanamo
held until, last September, the real bad guys -- 14 [8] of them - were
transferred there from the CIA's secret prisons and torture chambers
elsewhere on the planet.
Now, Karen Greenberg, Tomdispatch regular [9] and co-editor of The Torture
Papers [10], has visited the new Guantanamo and she offers us an up-to-date
lesson in Gitmo decorum. -- Tom
Guantanamo Is Not a Prison: 11 Ways to Report on Gitmo without Upsetting the
Pentagon
Karen J. Greenberg
Several weeks ago, I took the infamous media tour of the facilities at
Guantanamo. From the moment I arrived on a dilapidated Air Sunshine plane to
the time I boarded it heading home, I had no doubt that I was on a foreign
planet or, at the very least, visiting an impeccably constructed movie set.
Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to two-days-plus of a
military-tour schedule packed with site visits and interviews (none with
actual prisoners) designed to "make transparent" the base, its facilities,
and its manifold contributions to our country's national security.
The multi-storied, maximum security complexes, rimmed in concertina wire,
set off from the road by high wire-mesh fences, and the armed tower guards
at Camp Delta, present a daunting sight. Even the less restrictive quarters
for "compliant" inmates belied any notion that Guantanamo is merely a
holding facility for those awaiting charges or possessing useful
information.
In the course of my brief stay, thanks to my military handlers, I learned a
great deal about Gitmo decorum, as the military would like us to practice
it. My escorts told me how best to describe the goings-on at Guantanamo,
regardless of what my own eyes and prior knowledge told me.
Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up. Consider this a guide of sorts to
what the officially sanctioned report on Guantanamo would look like, wrapped
in the proper decorum and befitting the jewel-in-the-crown of American
offshore prisons. or, to be Pentagon-accurate, "detention facilities."
1. Guantanamo is not a prison. According to the military handlers who
accompanied us everywhere, Guantanamo is officially a "detention facility."
Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were
actually modeled on maximum and medium security prisons in Indiana and
Michigan respectively, and although the use of feeding tubes and the
handling of prisoners now take into account the guidelines of the American
Corrections Association (and increasingly those of the Bureau of Prisons as
well), it is not acceptable to use the word "prison" while at Gitmo.
2. Consistent with not being a prison, Guantanamo has no prisoners, only
enemies, specifically, "unlawful enemy combatants." One of my colleagues was
even chastised for using the word "detainee." "Detained enemy combatants" or
"unlawful enemy combatants," we learned, were the proper terms.
3. Guantanamo is not about guilt and innocence -- or, once an enemy
combatant, always an enemy combatant. "Today, it is not about guilt or
innocence. It's about unlawful enemy combatants," Rear Admiral Harry B.
Harris, Jr.,the Commanding Officer of Guantanamo tells us. "And they are all
unlawful enemy combatants." This, despite the existence of the official
category "No Longer an Enemy Combatant" which does not come up in our
discussions. Nor was the possibility that any of the detainees at Guantanamo
might have been mistakenly detained ever discussed. As the administrator for
the tribunals that are to determine the status of each detainee explained to
us, the U.S. Government takes "a risk when we transfer" detainees out of
Guantanamo.
4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo. Our handlers use the term
"habeas lawyers" as a seemingly derogatory catch-all for lawyers in general,
both defense attorneys -- those who are defending their clients before the
military commissions -- and habeas attorneys, those who seek to challenge in
U.S. courts the government's right to detain their clients. The U.S.
military and its Public Affairs Officers are convinced that the terrorists
are transmitting information to their colleagues in the outside world via
their lawyers. According to our escorts, "habeas lawyers" may be the
unwitting pawns of terrorists. As a power-point presentation at the outset
of our formal tour (and as subsequent remarks make clear to us), it is the
belief of the American authorities that the detainees are using their
lawyers in accordance with the directives outlined in the al-Qaeda training
manual that was discovered in Manchester, England in 2000. This manual, they
assure us, encourages terrorists to "take advantage of visits with habeas
lawyers to communicate and exchange information with those outside."
5. Recently, at least, few if any reliable journalists have been reporting
on Guantanamo; only potential betrayers are writing about it. "The media"
arrive with ostensibly open eyes. Yet these guests, graciously hosted from
morning to night, go home perversely refusing to be complimentary to their
hosts. They suffer from "the chameleon effect," as I was told more than once
by military public information office personnel, and "we just don't
understand it." For our part, we visitors didn't understand why we were
forbidden to walk anywhere -- even to the bathroom -- by ourselves, talk to
anyone other than those we were introduced to (none actual prisoners), or
even take a morning run up and down the street we were lodged on, although
there was not a prisoner in sight.
6. After years of isolation, the detainees still possess valuable
information -- especially today. When asked what kind of useful information
the detainees could possibly have for interrogators, many already locked
away in Gitmo for over five years, the answer was: "I believe that we are,
in fact, getting good and useful and interesting intelligence -- even after
five years." Right now, they are especially useful. This is because, Admiral
Harris told us, "We have up-and-coming leadership in al-Qaeda and in the
Taliban in Afghanistan [and] we don't know what they look like. There's
never been a photograph taken of them or there's never been a photograph
that US forces have of them. But their contemporaries. are quite often the
same individuals that are in the camps here today. So we will work with law
enforcement. and their sketch artists will work with these detainees, the
compliant and cooperative detainees. And those pictures will be sent out to
the forward fighting area." No one asked just how reliable our own memories
would be after five years of isolated detention.
7. Guantanamo contains no individuals -- inside the wire or out. The
prisoners are referred to not by name, but by number. The guards and others,
even outside the confines of the prison camp, remove the Velcroed names
which are on their uniforms, leaving blank strips on their chests where
their identity would normally be, or they replace their names with their
ranks. Either way, they strive to remain anonymous. They tell us that they
fear retaliation against themselves and their families from a presumably
all-seeing, all-reaching jihadi network. With the media, most follow the
same rules. We, too, could evidently land them in trouble with al-Qaeda.
Thus, many refuse to tell us their names, warning those we greet to be
careful not to mistakenly call them by name in front of us.
8. Guantanamo's deep respect for Islam is unappreciated. All the food served
in the prison is halal, prepared in a separate kitchen, constructed solely
for the detainees. All cells, outdoor areas, and even the detainee waiting
room in the courthouse where the Military Commissions will be held, have
arrows pointing to Mecca. All compliant detainees have prayer rugs and
prayer beads. All detainees, no matter how they behave, have Korans. The
library includes books on Islamic history, Islamic philosophy, and on
Mohammed and his followers. Our escorts are armored against our protests
about the denial of legal rights to prisoners. The right to challenge their
detention in court, actually being charged with a crime, or adhering to the
basic rules of procedure and evidence that undergird American law -- none of
this is important. They do not see that what's at stake is not building a
mosque at Gitmo, any more than it is about serving gourmet food, or about
the cushy, leather interrogation chairs we are shown. It is about extending
the most basic of legal rights, including the presumption of innocence, to
those detained here.
9. At Guantanamo, hard facts are scarce. This, we are told, is a security
measure. "As the 342nd media group to come through here, you'll notice that
we speak vaguely. We can't be specific. You will notice that we talk in
approximate terms and estimates only. Those are operational security
measures. We don't want to take away position" -- a phrase which I took as
shorthand for revealing actual numbers, names, locations, dates, etc.
Typical examples of preserving Gitmo security through a refusal to give out
specific facts:
"What is that building?" [I am referring to one directly in our view.]
"Which building?"
"How long has the lieutenant been here?"
"Since she got here."
"Where is Radio Range?" [This is the area on which the camps are built.]
"I never heard of it."
10. Guantanamo houses no contradictions. And if you notice any -- and
they're hard to miss -- it's best to keep quiet about them, unless you want
a sergeant without a name chastising you about the dangers posed by enemy
combatants, or one of the officers without a name reprimanding your lower
ranking escort for giving out "misinformation." Stories are regularly
presented to portray a policy as particularly generous to the detainees;
only later does someone mention that it might have been an answer to the
needs of the guards themselves. A typical example:
"We allow two hours of recreation a day in order to comply with the Geneva
Conventions," they tell us. But a guide at another moment leads us to
believe that there is actually a more pressing reason for allowing the
recreation. "We need them to go outside so that we can search their cells
for weapons and contraband."
These sorts of contradictions leave me ultimately feeling sorry for our
escorts. It is not their fault that they know so little about the place they
are charged with explaining to us. Most of them arrived roughly eight months
ago and were handed a defensive script. They are often quite sincere when
they tell us that they don't know answers to our questions.
They actually don't know what went on before their arrival, or where things
were located in earlier days, or if perchance abuses or outbursts, not to
speak of torture, might have occurred at Gitmo, or even who was in charge as
little as a year ago. Few, if any, from the old days are there to instruct
or correct them.
Of course, if they wanted to, they could learn the details that many of us
have picked up over the years simply by reading or by talking to those who
spent time there. But this is not their task; they are but mouthpieces,
nothing more, as they try to tell us time and again when we ask our
questions. And, anyway, they themselves expect to leave relatively unscathed
sometime this spring.
Finally, for those of us who want to write about Guantanamo and who are
grateful for having been shown around and had the myths and realities of the
Bush administration's most notorious detention facility laid out so clearly,
a final lesson:
11. Those who fail to reproduce the official narrative are not welcome back.
"Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back," one of our escorts warns me
over lunch.
Only time will tell if I got it right.
Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and
Security at the NYU School of Law and is the co-editor of The Torture
Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib [11] and editor of The Torture Debate in
America [12].
Copyright 2007 Karen J. Greenberg
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson