You Have the Right to Remain Chattel...

This one's been eating at me for weeks, now. In response to complaints about the dangerous and filthy conditions of the "little Guantanamo freedom prison" that was set up to hold people picked up by police in NYC during the RNC convention, Republican New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said "it's not supposed to be Club Med."

What he omits is what it is supposed to be. I'd wager it's not supposed to be a filthy, rat-infested, cancer-causing, rash-inducing hell hole, either.

The implication of the mayor's statement is that your life and health have no value, under any circumstances. If you are detained for any reason, valid or not, you are expendable, so there is no need to keep you safe, healthy, or even alive. You have no worth.

Think about that.

If you were picked up for simply walking down the street near your home, having committed no crime, Mayor Bloomberg thinks you deserve to be smeared in rash-inducing chemical goo, deprived of food and water, exposed to one of the worst cancer-causing agents known to man, and to have the nerves in both hands damaged - possibly permanently. For days on end. Without being charged with any crime. Without the right to call a lawyer. Without the ability to let your family, or anyone know where you are.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks it's just dandy to allow a man whose colostomy bag burst to sit on a bus and vomit uncontrollably for hours, leading to potentially life-threatening complications. Just because he was picked up by the police.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks it's OK for people to be denied the medications they need, just because they've been arrested.

Mayor Bloomberg isn't tough on crime. Mayor Bloomberg is tough on the constitution.

In Mayor Bloomberg's America, you have no rights before being arrested and you have no rights after you're arrested, even if you're arrested for no reason at all. Most of the people arrested did not commit any crime. That bears repeating: most of the people caged in the "little Guantanamo freedom prison" did not commit any crime.

The few who did commit "crimes," committed such terrible acts as riding their bikes in a way that blocked traffic (though moving out of the way for emergency vehicles). Most were arrested with no charges at all. Many were simply rounded up in a net (literally) while walking down the sidewalk, or through a park.

Welcome to the Brave New World of 1984 (oops! 2004), where every citizen has the right to be worthless, obedient chattel. This is the right-wing world of George Bush's cronies - coming soon, to a home near you. You won't be left out.

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Excuses, Excuses

In a desperate attempt to keep from being held responsible for the actions of his department, Donald Rumsfeld trotted out the following nonsense:

"American abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were terrible, but they are not crimes on par with beheadings and other acts carried out by terrorists, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said [Sept. 11, 2004].

"Has it been harmful to our country? Yes. Is it something that has to be corrected? Yes," he said. "Does it rank up there with chopping off someone's head off on television? It doesn't. It doesn't..."

The frame here:

• Beheading is horrible, and we didn't do beheading. Since beheading is worse than what we did, we're good.



• The horrid abuses we committed are not major violations of human rights, or abrogation of a treaty to which we are a signatory, but a minor oops - something "harmful," like a paper cut, something that needs to be "corrected," like a typo.

For the first frame: Bad logic! No donut!

There are two problems.

1. We killed prisoners, too. From the prisoner's perspective, I'd wager that being in the process of being beaten to death is at least as terrifying and painful as being beheaded - it just takes longer.


2. Skipping the words altogether, break the statement down into the logical assumption it makes: if A is bad and we do not do A, we are good.

That kind of argument might have saved Mr. Rumsfeld from a detention in elementary school, but it just doesn't cut it for the Secretary of Defense of the world's only remaining superpower. However, if that's truly the extent of his reasoning ability, we get a much clearer understanding of how he and Bush, et al. waltzed us into a war against a country that posed no threat, and was not about to pose one any time soon.

What's wrong with the logic? To see how it's false, let's say we do B instead, but B is also bad. Does our not doing A make our having done B any less bad? No. Both the perpetrators of A and B are bad, just for different reasons.

For the second frame:

When the United States ratifies a treaty, we are bound to uphold that treaty - not only in international law, but by our own constitution!

Article VI, Clause 2
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land...

The abuses at Abu Ghraib violate the Geneva convention - a treaty made under the authority of the United States. Violating the signed treaty violates our constitution. All of the people in the chain of command failed to uphold the constitution.

My Response

How would I frame the response to this hooey?

Killing prisoners slowly and painfully is no better than killing them swiftly and painfully. Both are inexcusable.

Correction is inadequate - those who allowed it to happen need wholesale replacement. The first step is to fire the guy in charge - that's you Mr. Rumsfeld - for failing to perform your sworn duty to uphold the constitution of the United States. The second step is for the new guy to show us the proof that our constitution is being upheld and will continue to be upheld going forward.

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