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We mustn't lose ourselves in the face of this danger

By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published November 20, 2005

The ink was scarcely dry on the Bill of Rights before Americans began going to jail for criticizing the government. Sedition, the Congress called it. The bloody excesses and feared contagion of the French Revolution were the pretexts.

It would not be the last time that we forgot ourselves in the face of some real or fancied danger. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus to imprison Southern sympathizers. The great Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was one of many people jailed under the Espionage Act of 1918 for opposing America's entry into World War I. Japanese-Americans, including citizens by birth, went to concentration camps during World War II. Early in the Cold War, Americans were imprisoned simply for being Communists and Sen. Joseph McCarthy waged a reign of terror against anyone he chose to accuse of disloyalty.

But we always managed to return to our senses.

Until now. The Patriot Act, with its several totalitarian excesses, is proposed to be made permanent, unlike the sedition laws of 1798 and 1918, which were allowed to expire.

Even in the worst of the earlier times, it was unthinkable that any American government would assert the power to employ torture as a weapon of defense.

Until now. President Bush is threatening to veto legislation that would forbid the government from doing it. We don't do it, he insists, but he doesn't want to be told that we can't.

No one can successfully talk out of both sides of his mouth on something as hideous as torture. You are either for it or against it. You can't say, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney imply, that "terrorist" enemies must be kept in fear that the CIA might use it. Even the threat of torture is torture, and torture is so universally deplored as a crime against humanity that it was one of the administration's own premises for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Are we now to be just like him?

Or are we to follow the lead of Sen. John McCain, the patriot who went to Vietnam while Bush and Cheney were dodging the draft and spent 51/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton, enduring torture much of the time and refusing to be repatriated ahead of his buddies?

McCain knows better than anyone else how wrong torture is. And how ultimately useless.

It's his amendment that Bush threatens to veto.

This moral crisis brings to mind two of the greatest of all American pronouncements. Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis wrote them in dissent to a 1928 decision, Olmstead vs. United States - which the court discarded a generation later - that upheld the convictions of some bootleggers on wiretap evidence obtained without a warrant and in violation of a state law.

"We have to choose," wrote Holmes, "and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part."

Brandeis: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law. . . To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face."

If Bush prevails, what will it say to the troops and to the CIA's clandestine jailers? How long before domestic law enforcement agencies take it as a wink and a nod? How long before "terrorism" becomes the pretext for imposing other tools of dictatorship, such as secret arrests and censorship, and even torture itself, upon the people of the United States?

Accusations of "treason" have been too freely indulged, more by the right than the left, during our assorted crises. The framers of the Constitution, mindful of British excesses, narrowly defined treason as making war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies.

But it would be difficult to think of anything that would give more aid and comfort to our terrorist enemies than to make ourselves like them.

For any American to practice or encourage torture would not constitute treason in the literal sense. But it would be nothing less than the moral equivalent of treason.

Martin Dyckman's e-mail address is madyckman@verizon.net

[Last modified November 18, 2005, 22:36:02]