C.DLT

Two Fridays ago I found myself at an intimate gathering in DUMBO, Brooklyn’s art district, to look at some photos. The photographers were from the big media outlets—the Associated Press, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, and others. These journalists were at various times embedded with troops in Iraq following the post-9/11 invasion.

The experience exhausted me, seeing those photos. How the people live—the ones our government thinks of as monsters. It was heartbreaking to see decapitated soldiers and dead children in the streets. But the Iraq War is an abstract thought here at home; it’s easy to dismiss our nation’s drift into a fascist ‘neutral zone.’ One by one, our constitutional freedoms are being taken away. Do we feel the temperature rising?

In a recent Huffington Post article, Stephen Funk details a trip to the Presidio’s San Francisco National Cemetery. He writes how 30,000 tiny recycled American flags mark the graves of ex-patriots, and how he doubts he’ll ever be buried alongside military personnel there—or anywhere—because of the fact that he’s spoken out against the war and because he went to prison for speaking out. And because he’s gay. Soldiers have no first amendment rights.

I read Nat Hentoff’s Village Voice article that tells the story of a young German, Murat Kurnaz ,who at age 19, upon traveling to Pakistan to learn more about his faith months after the 9/11 attacks, was kidnapped by the U.S. government and imprisoned for 5 years—tortured even when overwhelming evidence pointed to his innocence. I’m not surprised to learn of this, after reading Naomi Wolf’s controversial book The End of America:

One of the first things the Nazis did was to establish prisons in legal “outer space,” often in basements, guarded by SS officers who were not accountable to the state….Hitler came to power in a democracy that at first still possessed an independent judiciary, human rights lawyers, an accountable military, and a legitimate prison system. But, in a matter of months, he had deployed a paramilitary force answerable to him; set in motion an alternative system of tribunals in which his representatives served as judge, jury, and executioner; and established a network of illegitimate prisons where torture took place.

In addition to other crimes, the Bush Administration has circumvented the United States Constitution to expand governmental jurisdiction for the War on Terror. A system of secret prisons was created to facilitate rendition and justify the use of torture. Using these prisons off of American soil represents a legal loophole; torturing and detaining ordinary citizens without provocation on American soil is against the Constitution. According to Wolf’s research, “Guantanamo… was, in fact, outlawed by the Geneva Conventions of 1949.” (Wolf, 51). Kurnaz was tortured by the U.S. government in a place ‘condemned’ by the Geneva Conventions, for five years, even though he was innocent. And he isn’t alone. In 2006, Jose Padilla was found guilty by the U.S. Supreme Court for conspiring to set off a dirty bomb (more on Padilla here). And at home, the U.S. government has built up the largest and most powerful privately owned paramilitary force. Blackwater and other private military contractors aren’t bound to the Constitution as the military is.

Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein at The Washington Post wrote a breathtaking article about U.S. immigrant concentration camps. Yusif Osman, a native of Ghana, died in one of these prisons because of “shabby medical care.” His health wasn’t taken seriously. And his case isn’t unique:

Osman’s death is a single tragedy in a larger story of life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country. Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here.

This invisible network of prisons is, at worst, akin to the Nazi concentration camp. Aushwitz prisoners weren’t cared for, and like the Nazi camps, these immigrant concentration camps also imprison the innocent:

Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somali without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear fro his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.

If the image of Nazi persecution doesn’t make you think about how American freedoms might eventually fade, imagine neighbors turning neighbors in over such issues as undocumented immigration. With the passage of his 2007 immigration reform bill, Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry took power from the federal government and created a hostile environment for that state’s estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants by endorsing discrimination in housing and education.

What baffled me in DUMBO that night was the ignorance displayed over our invasion of Iraq. I was expecting to engage an educated lot, but when the lights came back up I had instead taken a time machine to past theories about why the United States would invade a sovereign nation that had made no declaration of war—at the risk of insulting your intelligence, I’ll remind you that there were no weapons of mass destruction uncovered in Iraq. Shortly after discussion began around the invasion and occupation, I raised my hand, and when I suggested that the United States could have invaded Iraq for oil and to destabilize the region, I was greeted by vacant stares. These people acted as if they had no idea what I was talking about; I was even scoffed at by a man to my right when I suggested we look to the future to solve our problems—did he think I was some sort of pollyanna?