Two pieces of news have caught my eye in recent weeks. The first is the impending confirmation by the Senate of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA. Haspel has been an unusually controversial nominee because she, as director of a CIA black site in the George W. Bush years, oversaw the torture of a number of prisoners. Under questioning at her confirmation hearing, she refused to acknowledge that the actions over which she presided were immoral. In spite of this and the vehement opposition of Sen. John McCain (himself a torture victim) her confirmation has been made all but certain because of support from Democrats, in particular the influential Mark Warner of Virginia.
The second piece of news has been less high profile but if anything more disturbing. As part of this administration's increasingly ruthless crackdown on undocumented immigration, the Department of Justice has announced plans to criminally prosecute anyone crossing the border without documentation. This means in practice that when families are detained their children will be regarded as having been smuggled into the country. They are to be separated from their parents while their parents await court dates. One proposal currently being evaluated is to house the children in units on military bases.
These two stories may not be obviously linked, the fact that these things are happening right now is indicative of how anesthetized we have become to acts of barbarism committed in our name by our government. Under conventions on torture adopted by the United States, we have a legal obligation to criminally prosecute anyone found to have ordered or carried out an order to torture. The Nuremberg Defense ("I was only following orders!") is explicitly rejected by the convention. Instead, we are elevating someone who took part in this shameful activity - who is in effect a war criminal - to lead a highly secretive unaccountable bureaucracy. Mark Warner says he believes she would refuse an order to resume the use of torture as an interrogation method, in spite of the fact that she did no such thing when given the chance and failed even to say that having followed the directive was wrong.
The psychological effect of 9/11 created a political environment in which there is no moral imperative higher than the prevention of terrorism against the United States. Anything at all that the state deems necessary to maintain that level of control, it receives. In the last 20 years we have tortured people, held them for years without legal recourse on scant evidence, killed hundreds of civilians while trying to "surgically strike" terrorism suspects with unmanned aircraft, and occupied two countries on an essentially open ended mission all in the name of security.
Similarly, we have come to accept that the utter removal of people from their existing social contexts, even those who have never known any other place as home, is justified because they or their parents failed to acquire the appropriate documents before living here. We accept uncritically that the designation of an action as illegal justifies whatever punishment the state decides to wield against it.
The systematic, potentially long term separation of parents from their children because they came to this country to build a life for those children is an act of inhuman cruelty. Torturing human beings, whatever the cause motivating it, is barbaric. Is the illusion of control over social and international problems so important to us that we are willing to sacrifice our humanity for comfort?
It disturbs me that we look on historical social breakdowns that end in autocracy, war, genocide, or all three as if they are zoo animals - curiosities to be studied, important to know about, but fundamentally foreign to us in some sense. We don't have to wonder how and when political violence will become acceptable in the United States. It has already become so. Do not allow the fact that it is being used on people who we so naturally categorize as others - foreigners, immigrants, terrorists, and do we not frequently allow those categories to overlap in our cultural discourse? - to blind you to the reality of what it is.
Whether it ends in social disaster on a historic scale is immaterial, because by allowing the barbaric treatment of others as the usual course of things we are normalizing it. By saying there is a line between those who deserve to be treated as human and those who don't we implicitly open up for debate the correct placement of that line. We may find, before all is said and done, that we don't much care for where the line has been established.
