SECRET PRISONS? ARE SECRET POLICE NEXT?

Today we have reports that the Bush administration may have established a network of "secret" prisons throughout various parts of Europe and the middle east. According to reports (which are as yet unconfirmed) such operations may be in several countries in eastern Europe (Poland, Romania, etc.), and in Afghanistan. The purpose of these otherwise clandestine pokies is, we are told, to house captured terrorists. More importantly, it is generally understood that these locations are within countries otherwise disposed to "legal" torture. Never mind that this country presumes to oppose torture. Ignore the fact that we purport to comply with the Geneva Conventions (which specifically rule out torture as an interrogation method). Simply buy in to the notion that 9/11 "changed everything", and that the previous rules of civility have given way to the current anything goes attitude ( add in the Patriot Act for good measure), and you have the ingredients for this kind of chicanery.

Last night, in an interview on LARRY KING LIVE, former president, Jimmy Carter, when asked if 9/11 justifies our declining war time morality, observed that 9/11 was less devastating than Pearl Harbor, and he noted that we did not, as a consequence of that calamity, engage in an abeyance of our long established rules of civil deportment. Regardless the behavior of our enemies we did not torture prisoners, we did not subject them to demeaning and embarrasing rituals of the kind carried out at Abu Ghraib, we felt no need to enact something like the Patriot Act, and we did not shelve the Geneva Conventions. That our foes were notably less civil was apparent, but throughout the ensuing engagement (WWII), we maintained our sanity and our respect for the ideals conceived in the birth of this nation. Surely we were not less fearful of the Japanese and the Germans than we are of Al Queda and a bevy of Iraqi insurgents. Or are we?

The facts remain somewhat fuzzy. Are these prisons actually operating? Or are they the figments of a few fertile imaginations? We hope for the latter, but we suspect the former. And if secret prisons are now part of our modus operandi, is it a stretch to foresee secret police?

President Carter believes that we will, in time, reverse the decline of our moral compass. And, given the ever swinging pendulum of the American political process, he is probably right. We can only hope that it happens soon. In the meantime we would all be well advised to listen to Mr. Carter. It is not for nothing that he was given the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor no doubt impossible for our current president to consider. Too bad; we thought that striving for peace, and persuading the world of our peaceful intentions, was the president's most important mission. And to those who suggest that the world in its current state does not allow the luxury of such thinking we would remind them that a world in turmoil is EXACTLY the time when such ideals are most requisite.

Garrett500
11/3/2005