I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room

In case you haven't seen it, I highly recommend taking a look at the International Committee of the Red Cross confidential report that details the torture of prisoners held in US captivity. The ICRC is tasked by the Geneva Conventions to provide an objective analysis of the treatment of prisoners, and if violations of the Conventions are discovered, the country in question must proceed with an investigation or else violate the terms of the treaty. Typically these reports are confidential to encourage government cooperation, but this report was leaked to the New York Times.

The report details the abusive treatment of 14 different detainees. All the claims are "alleged" because they are based on interviews with the detainees themselves (and I think some US officials as well), but there is not much doubt as to the authenticity of their accounts because of their high level of detail and consistency with one another.

Especially gripping are the excerpts from interviews (Annex 1 and 2 in the report), which give you a true idea of how far off the deep end the United States went in prosecuting the "war on terror". An excerpt of the excerpt:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room.... After some time...I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks.... I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go the toilet, which consisted of a bucket....I was given no solid food...while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit...Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day....

I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face....

Later, the "real torturing" starts:

I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. As I was still shackled, the pushing and pulling around meant that the shackles pulled painfully on my ankles....

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply....The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

He then goes on to explain that he was routinely waterboarded after that, as well as beaten by being slammed into the wall with the towel as described above. The account of the worst of the treatment ends with this chilling, Nazi-esque image:

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor.

The United States tortured, and these actions were authorized at the highest levels within the Bush administration. They were done in accordance with secret memos of dubious legal merit that were drafted by the President's lawyers--memos that were kept secret not just from the public, but from the other co-equal branches of the government. We now know that for seven years since the attacks of September 11, the executive branch continuously and systematically flatly breached the Constitution of the United States--by violating the Fourth Amendment, by internally declaring for itself the power to violate any other number of provisions in the Bill of Rights (including those contained in the First Amendment), by assuming for itself the power to unilaterally strip citizens of their habeas corpus rights, by violating the United States' obligations under the Geneva Conventions...

If these deeds go unacknowledged, let alone unpunished, it means that the Constitution is de facto non-binding. It means that everything that America proclaims itself to be, at it's core--a free nation, a nation of laws--is a simple factual untruth, because it will be the case that any President who has the will can violate those freedoms and ignore those laws without consequence.

So I am now watching the Obama administration with extreme interest, and hoping that he understands the following: that after this serious a bout of lawlessness and quasi-despotism, reinstituting a proper liberal democratic regime is not enough--that he must pro-actively take steps to address what happened in the previous administration, and establish a precedent that such lawbreaking at the highest levels of government will have consequences. If he does not, then he reveals himself to be not a President but a Napoleon--a benevolent dictator who chooses to allow us our freedoms and who chooses to circumscribe his own power in accordance with the Constitution, but is by no means actually required to do any of these things.

Of course, in a way, this is already a lost cause, because I am reduced to pleading to the executive branch to enforce the Constitutional limits of executive power. Just as a legitimate democracy can't be founded by executive decree, a broken democracy can't be relegitimized by executive decree--because the ultimate source of democratic legitimacy is not the decree of a single will, but the consensus of many wills. Sadly, there does not seem to be a sufficient consensus in 21st century America--neither amongst the public, the press, nor the members of Congress--that basic tennants of democracy such as the rule of law and due process are not mere suggestions, but real and rigourously enforced contraints on power.

A constitutional convention for California?

I don't generally like to post about California politics or the current budget crisis, because I know--and everyone else knows--exactly what the underlying problem is, and there's a limit to how many different ways you can point out that the government has been hijacked by an intransigent Republican minority. The California government is seriously flawed, and the reckoning is upon us.

Of course, the natural steps to take in fixing some serious procedural flaw with the government would be to rewrite the constitution. But as the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters points out, the same forces that prevent California from passing a budget would also prevent it from agreeing on a new constitution:

Fundamentally, however, a constitutional convention is only a process, not a product. And there isn't even any agreement on the process – how many delegates would be selected, how they would be chosen and how they would go about their work.

The state constitution is silent on those issues, leaving it to an ideologically polarized Legislature to set the ground rules with a two-thirds vote required.

Some legislation calling for a convention or setting forth its procedures has already been introduced, which is a clue to the pitfalls of the process. If the Legislature is incapable of dealing with California's burning political issues, including the budget, how could we expect it to agree on how a constitutional convention would work – especially the partisan or ideological makeup of convention delegates?

Democrats would want a convention likely to embrace removing impediments to raising taxes, for instance, by containing a strong majority of their colleagues, while Republicans wouldn't go along with that – thus mirroring their essential conflict over the budget.

What all this basically means is that California has painted itself into a corner: every possible path to a fundamental change in the way the government works would need the approval of an overpowered and entrenched minority party. I only see two ways out: the first is that the state of affairs is allowed to proceed to utter crisis, causing such a tectonic shift in the political dynamics of the state that obstructionism becomes a liability for the Republicans. The second is that Republicans are somehow unscrupulously removed from their position of power, for instance via some gerrymandering scheme.

Neither of those options is very palatable--or likely. So I'm guessing that this crisis will go like the others: at the 11th hour some concession will be made to get the budget passed, the state will stagger onwards--and we will all find outselves in the same situation next year.

What an anti-torture amendment should look like

Daydreaming about an anti-torture amendment to the Constitution, I decided I would peruse the internets to see what other people might have proposed along these lines. Surprisingly I couldn't find anything that looked authoritative, like from an anti-torture organization or a legal scholar or lawyer. And most of the ones I did find, disappointingly, were pretty much clueless from the standpoint of Constitutional panache.

Look. If you're going to write an amendment concerning something as morally fundamental as a ban on torture, you can't bog it down in half a dozen "Sections" and lump a laundry list of examples into each one. When James Madison authored the First Amendment, he didn't belabor the point with all sorts of examples of what kinds of laws might abridge speech or even what he meant by "speech", exactly--he just dashed off a single bad-ass sounding sentence, added in some extra commas (as was the style at the time), and had a sandwich.

It all makes sense when you realize that the literary parallel to the Bill of Rights is nothing less than the Ten Commandments. God knew if he wanted to get the point across it would have to be with an awesome-sounding bullet list--"I'm God! I'm the only God! Don't say my name! You can take Sundays off! And no killing!"--and that the mundane details could be safely left to the Talmud nerds. Madison followed suit, to satisfyingly dramatic effect--"Talk! Shoot! Fuck Redcoats, am I right? And no snoopin'!". See? It's wisdom*, distilled into Power-Point-sized chunks for easy consumption.

So, anyway, if we're not talking about some nerdy amendment like allowing an income tax, we'd better be making sure that it lives up to its rhetorical pedigree. That's why my version would look something like this:

Amendment XXVIII.
Congress shall make no law permitting the use of torture against any person.

There you go. All of the ticking time-bomb shit, all of the ambiguities about what counts as torture--those can all be sussed out by Supreme Court nerds. Indeed, sensibilities are bound to shift over time, and there's certainly nothing wrong with letting those emerge via Court decisions over the years. But this way, you're sending a clear message about where the United States stands on the issue of torture and human rights.

*Er, wisdom minus the whole slavery-is-bad bit. Both lists seem to be okay with it.