Lack of education a true act of torture

Last week, I was sitting in a coffee shop reading from the Al Jazeera Website and an over-stimulated suburbanite bustled up to inform me that she could not read "Eastern News" because she just couldn't understand "why the heck those folks hate us so darn much." I replied by turning my computer screen in her direction to point at the headline of the story I was reading: "C.I.A. has secret terror jails."

The story explained how the C.I.A. has established secretive prisons to hold terrorist suspects without having to tell anyone. In these prisons, inmates are privy to what the C.I.A. calls "enhanced interrogation techniques," such as mock drowning, extreme light exposure, denial of pain medication for injuries, hanging people from their wrists and convincing inmates that they are being interrogated by a different government, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Washington Post reported an incident in which a young man being detained at such a facility was chained naked overnight to a concrete floor. He froze to death.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the story, which I tried to point out to the suburbanite, is that the prisons, the processing of detainees and the tactics used to get confessions from them is all illegal in the United States through Federal and military law as well as binding human rights agreements internationally. Therefore, Bush and his boys just picked out some friends in at least eight other countries like Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern European nations to host their prisons.

Al Jazeera reported that one of the prisons in east Europe was based in a former Soviet prison. Why build your own gulag when you can just remodel?

The C.I.A. now has the ability to waltz into a country, grab anyone who might be a "terrorist" (i.e. if they have dark skin, practice Islam, speak a different language or criticize the West) ship them to the former U.S.S.R. and do to them whatever they please.

Inmates have no basic rights. They have no promise of being connected in any way to the outside world. While in custody, they may be starved, beaten, raped, electrocuted, or attacked by dogs, according to Amnesty International reports.

Through it all, no one would hear an inmate's scream.

In fact, if they never returned, no one would know where to begin looking.

I turned to my new desperate housewife friend and proposed the idea that maybe the people of the Arab world are a little upset about the disappearances and torture-not to mention the wars-they have endured for nearly five years.

"These are extreme circumstances. We have to fight the terrorists. The government wouldn't do it unless they absolutely had to."

While Bush and Company frequently utilize this talking point, Amnesty International refutes it with 41 years of human rights abuse documentation showing that once torture becomes excusable, even in the most isolated scenario, it becomes common practice.

Don't believe it? Remember in 2001 when the C.I.A. kept arrestees in metal storage lockers that, according to The Guardian, a British newspaper, caused 43 people to suffocate to death? We said that was a mix-up under pressure and forgave the C.I.A.

How about the reports that came from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the moment the prison opened saying that inmates were placed in unsanitary conditions, were being beaten and denied every basic legal right for prisoners of war? We said they were terror suspects, and we weren't obligated to make them comfortable.

What about the footage by journalists such as Metro's very own Urban Hamid, which documented soldiers degrading and abusing Iraqis in December of 2003? We said that was in the middle of a war, and sometimes you have to bend the rules to survive in chaos.

If you missed all that, I am sure you caught the Abu Ghraib scandal in which the American public was presented with photographic evidence of the sexual and physical abuse of prisoners. But, of course, the rapists, murderers and abusers were just bad apples blowing off steam.

Next came Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. military personnel burning bodies in Afghan villages early last month.

Now we have secret prisons, and everyone is mortified all over again.

War criminals and international terrorist organizations like George W. Bush and the C.I.A. don't make friends easily. Historically they never have, why would things be different now?

My coffee shop teach-in ended quickly. The perturbed Arvada patriot walked away from my table before I could even begin to explain the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the definition of crimes against humanity.

As I recovered from my interaction, a new question came to my mind.

Never mind why "they" hate us; how can we, as citizens of this ruthless country, stand ourselves?