The Allen Almanac

From ” This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like ”

I think it’s easy to think of as “it’s just water”.
But it’s important to look at this thing in context.

You’re dragged into a room, bound on hands and feet. Everyone is speaking a language you don’t understand and looking at you with hate in your eyes. You might not have had any food in a while. You are under someone else’s control. Through closed doors you hear murmers and cries for help. You haven’t slept. A bag is put over your head.

Still bound, blindfolder and gagged, you are thrown onto a rough, hard surface, tilted down. Your feet and hands are shackled, roughly. Some doors open. Someone says something you don’t understand, then laughs. Then it goes quiet. You hear a lighter and smell tobacco.

Blood is rushing to your head now, you’re dizzy and your feet are prickly, as if the worst case of pins and needles is happening, right now.

Questions are asked. You answer, as best you can. You’re confused, not quite sure what the interpreter is saying because his accent is so strange. You wonder if you’ll ever see your family again, and that sensation of remembering your past makes you stronger for a while. You think to yourself “This cannot be happening!” and a sense of anger builds within you. For a while you refuse to answer questions, thinking there’s got to be some kind of justice.

Then suddenly, water hits your head, streams into your mouth and nose, icy cold as if it’s come from a freezer. You can’t breathe, breathe anyway, cough hard, convulse, but your body can’t bend over and the pain in your stomach is unbearable. Your retch but nothing comes up, and more water hits your face while someone laughs at you. You try to breathe but swallow water and then, finally, you throw up, the taste of your own stomach smeared over your face, running into your eyes inside the bag over your head. The water stops and all you do is scream and scream and scream for mercy, your own sick all over, your piss running down towards you while the world spins and spins and spins.

Then the questions start again. Someone says “we’ve got all night” and laughs and then bites into warm food which you can only smell but know you’ll never taste again.

And you might not even be guilty of anything.

Is this humane treatment?

This is now legal in our country. And not only against convicted terrorists, but against anyone suspected of being a terrorist. There is no oversight of the President’s actions. There is no habeas corpus. They can choose to try you or not. You can be hidden away and tortured LEGALLY for the rest of your life. The Detainee Treatment Act redefines who can be classified as an enemy combatant, and it does not rule out American citizens. This could be done to you! This could be done to your mother! This could be done to your children! And there is no legal recourse to challenge it if it does happen. Is anyone else as outraged about this as me?

Perhaps this bill will never be used against an American citizen. Does it suddenly become ok to torture people just because they were not born here? Are we such an arrogant nation that we believe that we alone have the right not to be tortured? When native Georgean Martin Luther King, Jr. was asked why he was fighting for the rights of Alabamans he said, “Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.”

I keep thinking of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”

This is the very core basis of our government. Men are all equal. We all have unalienable rights inherently. They do not come from the government. The government exists to secure those rights. Rights do not come from the government. If I hear one more Republican claim that Democrats want to give terrorists more rights, my head is going to explode. The government cannot give what it has no right to possess.

In passing this bill, our government has once again declared that all men are not equal. Some men do not have the unalienable right not to be tortured. Some men do not have the right to be charged with a crime. They can be held captive at the President’s whim. A President who is suddenly above the law. And this is acceptable? Do we live in America or Oceania?

Everyone knows the next line of the Declaration: “–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Sorry to have gone off on such a rant, but the time for complacency is over. It is time to pick sides. Do we follow the rule of law or the rule of man?