U.S. torture debate underscores shifting view on personal liberties

Strangely, it is America's conservatives, the people to whom personal liberty is a supreme value, who seem most willing to give it away.

"If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about," they say, while pushing new powers for law enforcement and the growing surveillance-industrial establishment.

That, of course, is the cheapjack police-state justification; the sort you hear in countries that are said to be "not ready for democracy." It is most un-American in spirit, but the law-and-order bunch doesn't see it that way.

Egged on by mostly Republican politicians, governments in this country have over-criminalized and over-incarcerated to an extent you would only expect to see in places like today's Egypt.

But most frightening of all is that a crime in America seems to be becoming more what authorities say it is, rather than what the law says.

The most obvious example is the prosecutors who appear to have guided grand juries away from indicting police who killed unarmed citizens, even when there was no obvious need to deploy that kind of force.

Another would be the senior justice department officials who decided not to lay charges against the Wall Street bankers whose greed and corruption nearly wrecked the economy.

These execs, the government judged on its own, were too big to jail; doing so might have caused business failures and job losses.

But then America's values have been under attack since Reagan, the bedrock is crumbling. And, sadly, of course we have our admirers of this lunacy in Canada as well.

Trifling offences are now aggressively punished under the so-called "broken windows" doctrine of policing. Resisting, as recent events in Missouri and New York have demonstrated, can be suicidal.

At the same time, minor transgressions are increasingly being reclassified as serious crimes, creating the phenomenon known as "felony creep."

Lawmakers have also restricted the traditional discretion of judges.

American magistrates often have no choice but to send the wretches standing before them to prison; judges have wept in court as they passed sentence.

The civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate, among others, makes a convincing case that because of over-criminalization, most Americans regularly commit felonies, usually unwittingly, on a regular basis.

He cites, among several examples, the parent who finds and disposes of his child's marijuana stash (obstruction of justice); the employee who decides to take a phony "mental health day" and call in sick (honest services fraud).

Think about that: if for some reason some official takes a notion to target you, and deploys all the weapons available to law enforcement, you could end up behind bars.

This is a country that has sentenced children as young as 13 as adults, and put them away for life.

One of those was Canadian citizen Maher Arar, falsely denounced and scooped up at a New York airport, then shipped by the CIA to Syria for some proxy torture.

Another was Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen who was beaten and sodomized in a CIA "black" prison until his captors realized they had the wrong Khaled al-Masri.

"Public_Domain" said
"It should be no surprise, then, that the U.S. justice system is losing the consent of the governed."

Sadly, they don't need consent.

"Thanos" said
The deeply disturbing part of all of this, and it's something that I'm fully guilty of too, is that the absolutely evil and vile nature of the so-called 'victims' (and the obscene cause they're fighting for) is so overwhelming as far as stench goes that the default reaction to them being tortured is pretty much complete indifference.