First Circle: Liberty Has Been Lost
I had just finished reading the uncensored edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book, In The First Circle (Harper Perennial, 2009), when I came across Chris Hedges' article, "One Day We'll All Be Terrorists" (Truthdig, Dec. 28, 2009). In Hedges' description of the U.S. government's treatment of American citizen Syed Fahad Hashmi, I recognized the Stalinist legal system as portrayed by Solzhenitsyn.
Hashmi has been held in solitary confinement going on three years. Guantanamo's practices have migrated to the Metropolitan Correction Center in Manhattan, where Hashmi is held in the Special Housing Unit. His access to attorneys, family and other prisoners is prevented or severely curtailed. He must clean himself and use toilet facilities on camera. He is let out of solitary for one hour every 24 hours to exercise in a cage.
Hashmi is a U.S. citizen, but his government has violated every right guaranteed to him by the Constitution. The U.S. government, in violation of U.S. law, is also subjecting Hashmi to psychological torture known as extreme sensory deprivation. The bogus "evidence" against him is classified and denied to him. Like Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial, Hashmi is under arrest on secret evidence. As the case against him is unknown or nonexistent, defense is impossible.
Hashmi's rights have been abrogated by his government with the allegation that he is a potential terrorist or perhaps just a terrorist sympathizer. Another American citizen, Junaid Babar stayed with Hashmi for two weeks and allegedly delivered ponchos and socks to al-Qaida in Pakistan. Allegedly Babar used Hashmi's cell phone to reach others aiding terrorists. The U.S. government says that this suffices to implicate Hashmi in Babar's activities.
Babar made a plea bargain to five counts of "material support" for terrorism, but is working off his prison sentence by testifying as a government witness in other terror trials, including in Canada and the U.K., and as the U.S. government's only evidence against Hashmi.
Hashmi's real offense is that he is a Muslim activist defending Muslim civil liberties and making provocative statements about the U.S. As Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has pointed out, federal courts have given the U.S. government wide latitude to use Hashmi's exercise of his constitutionally protected rights to free speech and association as evidence of a terrorist frame of mind and, thereby, of intent to commit terrorism.
Brooklyn College professor Jeanne Theoharis warns us that an American citizen can now be tried on secret evidence. "You can spend years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantanamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi."
Indeed, Hedges reports that "radical activists in the environmental, (anti)-globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism." Hedges warns: "This corruption of our legal system will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later."
The silence of bar associations and law schools indicates an astounding insouciance to Thomas Paine's warning: "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Some of my Republican and conservative acquaintances are even gleeful that, finally, we are going to get tough and deal forcibly with "these people." They naively believe that they themselves will remain safe when law ceases to be a shield of the people and becomes a weapon in the hands of government.
In A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More cautions against cutting the law down in order to chase after devils, for with the law cut down, where do we stand when the devil turns on us?
Clearly, these fundamental questions are of no concern to the U.S. Department of Justice (sic), to Congress or the White House, to the "mainstream media," to the American people or even to very much of the federal judiciary.
Glenn Greenwald pointed out in Salon (Dec. 4, 2009) that the Convention Against Torture, championed and signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by the U.S. Senate, states: "Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law."
Two decades later, the U.S. government tortures at will. Justice (sic) Department officials write memos authorizing torture despite the ratified Convention Against Torture, U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. The Pew Poll reports that 67 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of Democrats support the use of torture.
And Americans think they have freedom and democracy and live under the protection of the rule of law.
The law is lost, and with it American liberty.
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"The Pew Poll reports that 67 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of Democrats support the use of torture."
This is after the eight years of terror and brainwashing under Bush, who really was the worst president in American history -- a tyrant and socialist of the worst sort. Rush Limbaugh, the cowardly chickenhawk, still refers to "Club Gitmo" as a joke.
It will take decades to restore American freedoms, if that ever occurs. But the first step is to call Bush, Cheney, Rush and the others what they are: tyrants, torturers, and sycophants who violate the essence of free America.
How right you are, Mr. Seiler. Bush-Cheney inaugurated an unnecessary war of choice. There are few things more evil. And such evil deeds harm the country that does them as well as their victims. I will believe there is hope of progress when "conservatives" have learned to admit how evil Bush and the Republican Party really are.
Of course, a the heart of the legal/morakl problem that Dr. Roberts addresses is that the category "American citizen" no longer has any moral content.
Mr Seiler if you would pardon me but Lincoln was far more of a tyrant then Bush.
Gentlemen,
Sometimes a certain truth raises its head repeatedly because it needs to be noticed early and often --- The Republican Party must be ignored by conservatives if it cannot be destroyed. It is a party based on holding centralized power and economic advantage over the defenseless --- both foreign and domestic --- and is a souless, blood-sucking, parasite on real political conversation. We have known for years what the democratic party is ---"a party based on holding centralized power and economic advantage over the defenseless --- both foreign and domestic --- and is a souless, blood-sucking, parasite on real political conversation."-- it is past time we tell this truth and quit wasting our votes by voting.
"radical activists in the environmental, (anti)-globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism". This is so absurd! The people from these movements are the people that are running the Obama government!! Perhaps we are we gonna see Al Gore in jail then!? (on second thought he does belong there.) I don't see any of these people in jail any time soon. In fact, while not being in jail they are succeeding splendidly in dismantling a few freedoms that we have left and destroying the country irreversibly. At this rate PCR's reasoning outside of the economics is on par with Larouche or in other words "incoherent". Please PCR, give it up.
@6: PCR is definitely off-balance, but that should not take away from the fire of his essential criticism of that bizarre thing they call American morality. Still, Dr. Wilson is right: the fly in the soup is that Dr. Roberts does not seem totally perceptive of how deeply corroded is society.
On the other hand, it is quite possible Barak Obama's co-opting of the movements you cited will eventually disappoint and deceive, and that he will encounter a left-wing opposition in the same vein as did Bill Clinton. Stay tuned...
@4: Lincoln was a tyrant. Bush was an amateur.
I just finished reading Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago-- all three volumes, and also read Michael Scammel's biography of him along the way. If you want to understand what is happening today under the so-called neoconservatives, study the history of the Soviet Union. Torture, false-flag attacks, a controlled media, ceaseless propaganda, the deliberate pitting of ethnic groups against each other-- all these are now recurring under our 'neocon' elite just as they did under the 'communist' elite of the USSR. (Of course the neocons are not conservative, neo or otherwise, and Solzhenitsyn demonstrates that the Soviet rulers were similarly phony Marxists.)
These elites are actually the same people, or their descendants. What I don't understand is why no one else seems to make this analogy. Gulag was bestseller in the US in the 70s. Didn't anyone actually read it?
#9. Your analogy seems a bit of a stretch, Yes we have a beef with Neocons, but they are nothing like Soviets. Also I don't see how it is useful to call Soviets phony Marxists. Perhaps on a certain level yes they were phony, but saying so does not help us in dealing with our current dilemma which is liberty vs tyranny in the USA. The government that is becoming too big doing things it is not supposed to while it cannot do properly even the things that it is supposed to do. American ideal is the pursuit of individual freedom and not of phony equality and phony security which is what the alternative is offering.
#7. I do believe that PCR is well meaning but nonetheless there are serious flaws in this approach of throwing everything in but the kitchen sink as it makes his criticism unbelievable and fringe. You never encounter these kinds of mistakes with Pat or Mr. Piatak for example and this is why these authors are effective.
Solzhenitsyn demonstrates that the Soviet rulers were similarly phony Marxists
I did not read the book, but if I understand correctly, leftism cannot survive without violating its own principles, so the chances of encountering a non-phony Marxist are slim to none.
Of course that is the natural spiritual consequence of living a lie: a large appendage of the self rots right off.
I agree with Andy Kornkven. You can substitute the word Komissar for the word Czar that Obama uses for his underlings.
I think S. meant to show that the Soviet leaders were merely like all politicians; for them belief systems were merely instruments of their lust for power. Like neoconservatives' "global democracy" and "democratic capitalism," Marxism was used only to bamboozle the cattle. As he showed, the typical behaviour of politicians was especially bad in the Soviet case because Lenin had built a system of totalitarian terror.
"It will take decades to restore American freedoms, if that ever occurs. But the first step is to call Bush, Cheney, Rush and the others what they are: tyrants, torturers, and sycophants who violate the essence of free America."
Never ever ceases to amaze that people like Seiler still believe these men are the string pullers in this former republic. Unbelievable. What about Kissinger? The House of Rockefeller? What about the certain wrinkled old former Security Advisor to Carter in the 70's? They are NEVER castigated for some strange reason.
One thing we fail to nore is that ideologists also become more "sophisticated" as time passes. The neocons, Trotsky;s offspring, don't need to act as 1930's communists with crude tortures, the communists became more and more sophisticated with their tortures, so that they could parade victims in public with no apparent effects from torture. That is why sleep deprivation was developed to a high art as torture by the communists, only leaving it to us to bring it to a higher state of art. In one of Solzhenytsin's writings, he describes sleep deprivation as the worst form of torture; after a few days without sleep, the body turns to mush. And then the "anti-communist" Republicans adopt and defend the communists preferred form of torture.
What is Mr Roberts trying to accomplish with the nonstop negativity? If it's that bad, move to Greenland or Mars or someplace.
Yeah Jack, like, you know, Solzhenitsyn, Jeremiah, Roberts, what's with these guys?
"The neocons, Trotsky;s offspring" - interesting. I thought I was the only one to notice that. They learned their lessens well, didn't they?