On American Gulags

I was blessed to be born in a beautiful city, in the richest state of the greatest nation on the planet.

And while San Diego, still beautiful if near bankruptcy, and California, still struggling to revive its once glorious educational system, no longer have quite the gleam of my youthful remembrance, still, the hardest loss is the dream that was the United States of America.

As President Bush has so frequently said, everything changed on 9/11. And on that day we began paying the price for the mediocrity of our leadership. But it was perhaps inevitably so. Though blessed by great forefathers, like so many children of the great, we latter Americans fall far short of the acheivements and ideals of our elders.

Today's Amnesty International report decrying various, undeniable US human rights abuses comes as no surprise, we've all been watching the news gather. What I find so disheartening is that it also destroys the last vestiges of the hope of American exceptionalism, that somehow, WE ARE DIFFERENT.

But no, when pressed, as with all regimes, past and present, the US behaves no differently than the merest flyspeck of states: round up the usual suspects, individual rights be damned.

A withered conundrum is this: how can a free nation combat an enemy without curbing its own freedoms, without echoing practices it would abhor in others?

The New York Times' Bob Herbert gives a sad accounting:

A recent report from Physicians for Human Rights is the first to comprehensively examine the use of psychological torture by Americans against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The employment of psychological torture, the report says, was a direct result of decisions developed by civilian and military leaders to "take the gloves off" during interrogations and "break" prisoners through the use of techniques like "sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, the use of military working dogs to instill fear, cultural and sexual humiliation, mock executions, and the threat of violence or death toward detainees or their loved ones."

"Although the evidence is far from complete," the report says, "what is known warrants the inference that psychological torture was central to the interrogation process and reinforced through conditions of confinement."

In other words, this insidious and deeply inhumane practice was not the work of a few bad apples. As we have seen from many other investigations, the abuses flowed inexorably from policies promulgated at the highest levels of government. [Emphasis mine]

Sadly, the United States has failed to answer that question affirmatively.

And that realization of our country's ordinariness I find a cause for despair.

The status quo cannot stand, and this is the test: will Americans finally demand those responsible for the atrocities at Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan finally be held to account?

If not I fear we will be relegated by history to the dustbin of failed experiments.

And we will deserve no better.