The Shame of Secret Prisons
by Jeff Davis
I’d like for my readers to sit back for a bit and roll over two words in your minds. “Secret prisons.” Maintained by the United States government, which has now admitted openly that such facilities exist outside the United States. Remember all that right-wing urban legendry from the Seventies and the Eighties, wherein conspiracy theorists either suggested that such institutions existed, or else that they would exist in the near future? And how we all got called “paranoid kooks” for our trouble? Looks like us “kooks” from the old days are having the last laugh.
A recent Reuters news article informs us that “The European Union condemned on Friday the detention of terrorism suspects by the United States in secret overseas prisons, whose existence U.S. President George Bush first acknowledged last week….European nations had held back from criticizing Washington over the matter after it first emerged in media reports last year, and said last December they were satisfied with U.S. statements denying any wrongdoing… Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA held high-level terrorism suspects, including alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in secret overseas locations.”
So, up until last week Bush and his little neocon buddies were lying to the world denying the existence of these prisons. Whatever happened to real journalism? Why weren’t reporters exposing this? We don’t know exactly where these secret prisons are located, but Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland have been suggested. It is even rumored that there’s one located close to Auschwitz. Did the Romanian authorities rent the CIA boys some of the old secret police torture chambers leftover from the Communist days?
I know, no one believes that these laws and these secret prisons and these secret interrogations under torture would ever be used against good old Baptist white boys with Amurrican flags on their baseball caps and rifle racks in their pick-up truck. I mean, those things are just for “dark-skinned foreigner heathen Muslims” right? Sure, Bubba, you just go right on thinking that, right up until the moment they kick in your door in the middle of the night, drag you away in your underwear, and put you on a plane bound for a secret torture chamber in the dungeon of Dracula’s castle in Transylvania.
Let me post two questions:
Question Number One: Since it is now possible and completely legal for anyone, including American citizens, to be arrested in secret, imprisoned in secret, tried in secret, tortured in secret, and executed in secret–how, exactly, do we know that these laws and torture techniques are NOT being used against white Americans even as we speak?
Question Number Two: Fine, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Fox News is correct, and George W. Bush is a sincere patriot (and not a dimwitted front man for incredibly evil corporate interests). Let’s assume Bush would never, ever do such a naughty thing as to have native-born white Americans arrested and tortured and killed under these tyrannical laws for secret surveillance and secret arrest. You know it’s possible we’re going to end up with Hillary Clinton as President in 2008. (And if she doesn’t win, there’ll eventually be another maximum criminal from the left wing like Bill Clinton). Do you REALLY trust Mommy Dearest with these same laws? Who do you think SHE will use them against?