The Torture Never Stops

On the same day that I read the newspaper stories telling how Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri has recanted his confession that he planned the attack on the USS Cole and other al Qaeda attacks on the United States, claiming that he confessed to make the torture stop, I also read the obituary of Chase J. Nielsen, one of the Doolittle Raiders who bombed Tokyo in 1942. That obituary notes that "Nielsen and his fellow prisoners, who were taken to Tokyo, were beaten and tortured while being interrogated. Among other things, Nielsen said in interviews, bamboo splints were shoved under his fingernails and then lighted on fire, and the bottoms of his feet were burned with hot coals." The obituary continues "Nielsen ... returned to China in 1946 to testify against his former captors in war crimes tribunals in Shanghai."

Now, of course, it is entirely possible that Mr. al-Nashiri is lying about being tortured and there will never be an occasion for his captors to be tried for war crimes. If, however, he is telling the truth, then each of us bears part of the blame for his torture. We had the opportunity to question why the Bush administration has been so adamant that US troops not be subject to any international war crimes tribunal. We have seen how Bush's legal advisors have told the country that the captives in our "War on Terror" need not be treated as prisoners of war because they are criminals and need not have access to habeas corpus because they are combatants. The stories of extraordinary rendition, alone, are so pervasive, that if they are true, any claims on our part that we were unaware of what our government has been doing, will be justly treated by the world the same way that it treated those Good Germans who never noticed the trainloads of Jews heading east for "relocation."

This is the problem with living in a democracy. We are the government -- each of us. And for this reason, we are each responsible for any crimes that our government commits. If we fail to hold our elected officials to account for violations of international law, we will have no excuse when the world unites to do so.

Isolate Prisoners from Each Other

Another prisoner has been killed by his cellmate in a California prison. The L.A. Times said that prison officials were not sure whether it was "linked to what is widely regarded as severe overcrowding in California's prisons." Whether it was linked to overcrowding or not, it was preventable. There is no reason, other than an unwillingness to pay for keeping such a large percentage of our population locked away, for keeping prisoners in cells with other prisoners. In fact, it would seem to lead to exactly the sort of problems these people are in prison for in the first place. We should be moving towards a systems where each prisoner is locked away and is not allowed contact with the other prisoners.

I realize that this may seem to be a harsh punishment, but once the prisoners are released on parole, they will not be allowed to associate with other felons. So why do we require that they do so while they are in prison. This is not to advocate the sort of severe isolation that prisons maintained in the early 1800s. Prisoners should have regular human contact to protect their mental health. It's just that the contact should be with the sort of humans we want the prisoners to emulate.

It would seem far better for a prisoner to spend their days interacting with therapists and educators who can help them change the environmental and interpersonal problems that led them to prison in the first place rather than having them hang out with other criminals who can help them plan new crimes and teach them to avoid the errors that led to them being caught.

The supposed purpose for these prisons is to protect the honest people from the bad guys. Once they people who have messed up and landed in prison are there, we have an obligation to protect them from the bad guys too. Otherwise, we might as well issue shanks to each new prisoner so they can protect themselves. Even if we aren't willing to protect the prisoners, putting all the criminals together to plan future crimes seems to be unwise.

So let's isolate our prisoners from criminals and only allow them to associate with honest people and hopefully, we will wind up with less crowding in our prisons and less crime outside them.