For the Record: Torture

The New York Times published an article today about the findings of the independent, non-partisan 11-member panel appointed by the Constitution Project to review "interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." Those who are horrified by our country's use of torture after the 9/11 terrorist attack will feel vindicated by the review. Those who have convinced themselves that torture is justified--despite our country's repudiating torture in the past, seeking convictions of those charged with perpetrating torture, and being a signatory of the International Convention Against Torture--will probably continue to support the Bush Administration's decision to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners. The power of propaganda lives on in the Orwellian language of the Bush Administration's torture memos.

But for the record, one more non-partisan review panel has concluded that our country did, indeed, torture people and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The Republican leader of the panel, Asa Hutchinson, who served in the Bush Administration, said that "after the panel’s nearly two years of research . . . he had no doubts about what the United States did":

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews. 

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds. . .  

. . . .The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

This report may be lost in the heavy media coverage of the most recent terror attack, that of the explosions at the Boston Marathon and the horrific--and fatal--injuries resulting from that attack. As of now, no one knows who is responsible for the attack--home-grown terrorists, an individual malcontent, or international terrorists. In the midst of such horror, some people are too ready to surrender freedom to fear, just as our country surrendered its ethics to fear in adopting torture after 9/11. But as these recent attacks indicate, we can never be completely protected from harm. Losing our "moral compass" is not worth such an impossible goal.

For further information:
The Constitution Project's Report on Detainee Treatment, at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/16/world/16torture-report.html

Still Here

I've been absent from this blog since the end of January but not absent from my garden. Last fall, my daughter gave me snapdragons she had grown in her college greenhouse management class, and those snapdragons are still flourishing in the flower bed at the back of our house. You can see them in the photo at the left. I found the football in brush at the southern edge of our lot that runs along a neighborhood street. I'm thinking of painting it with bright colors and using it as a garden decoration. 

We had a mild winter with only light frosts until March, when we had a couple of late freezes. Most of the garden plants survived since we protected the delicate ones though we seem to have lost one of our banana plants. I planted sunflower and zinnia seeds a couple of weeks ago, thinking that temperatures would stay above 50⁰ at night. However, we had a couple of cool fronts that brought temperatures down into the thirties and forties at night, so those seeds have been slow to sprout. I'm waiting for even warmer weather before I plant basil seeds, but I did buy some purple basil sprouts and lemon basil sprouts from a vendor at the Covington Farmer's Market. I planted those last week. Also, I planted poppy seeds on February 18th; those have sprouted, and I thinned them last week. Poppy flowers enjoy cool weather, I think, so I don't know how well they will do as the weather gets hot here in southeast Louisiana.

My husband successfully sprouted about sixty tomato plants, and he planted fifty-six of them. We didn't have enough room in our big garden, so I suggested he plant the remaining ones in a couple of beds that I had prepared for flowers. These are heirloom tomatoes--Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Brandywine, German Johnson--and I am hoping that they will all produce a lot of tomatoes for canning and for making salsa. Last year our tomatoes were infested with stink bugs; I hope that this year's late freeze will have slowed down the bug population. I'm not looking forward to doing bug patrol on fifty-six tomato plants, but I'll do what I have to do.

In addition to gardening, I've taken on a few more craft projects, have become involved in some community activities, and am still scanning and transcribing Armstrong and Nugent letters. My virtual world may be dormant, but the real world continues to revolve.

I created the trellis for morning glories and purple hyacinth beans.

Last summer's parsley is now bolting.