(U-WIRE) AUSTIN, Texas – “Inter arma enim silent leges.” In times of war, the law falls silent. At least, that used to be the unspoken standard for most of the world’s great powers. Certainly U.S. history is dotted with examples that prove the rule: Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War and the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, to name but a few.
Logically and intuitively, this position makes a certain amount of sense, even as it leads to otherwise repugnant actions.
As circumstances become more untenable, as things become more precarious, any person or group – family, corporation or nation – will dig deeper, cut corners, sacrifice more and do what it has to do to survive. After all, most of what’s being sacrificed, the family savings, corporate R&D funds, niceties of civil procedure, are meaningless if the person or group itself is destroyed.
So let’s be honest here: Would we, as a country, allow torture in a ticking time-bomb scenario if acting brutally toward one man could save hundreds or thousands or millions of lives? Yes, we would. Which brings us to the pending civil liberties bill in Congress, a bill that seeks to redefine the rights and treatment prisoners can expect in U.S. custody. The bill as currently written is generally agreed to be somewhat ambiguous, but most observers note that it cuts back on the rights of appeal for those taken into custody.This is a problem because, should the bill pass through Congress and be signed into law, the law will no longer be silent in time of war. It will have become a paid shill for the war, a prostitute that sacrifices all honor, principle and meaning in the name of security.
This is one of the key ideas that the Bush administration fails to understand. In the country’s struggle with Al-Qaida and Iraqi insurgents, we will inevitably fall short of our ideals. Good men put in extraordinary circumstances will turn bad, and bad men will turn monstrous.
War is hell. But it’s infinitely worse to redefine hell as normality, and redefine our principles in the name of expediency.
It’s surprising that George W. Bush hasn’t thought of this more in Christian theological terms. Torturing those in our custody – men who are by definition powerless, helpless and not 100 percent guaranteed to be guilty – is a wicked, immoral thing to do. Redefining the entire concept of sin makes Christianity meaningless in the first place. Man is fundamentally flawed in Christian theology, and will inevitably make mistakes as he lives his life. But he continues to live his life regardless and finds meaning and redemption in the idea that his sins will be forgiven if he dedicates himself to a higher power.
Likewise, we as a country are not perfect and likely never will be. Our history, while not long by many standards, is frequently ugly and bloody. But at the end of the day, we continue to be Americans. We move forward with the idea that the principles this country stands for, freedom, justice and democracy, are just an excuse for our sins and make our struggles worthwhile.
But if the torture bill is signed into law, we’ve stepped away from those principles and declared that justice only applies to foreigners in uniform. We’ll have publicly declared that brutality can, and inevitably should, be used as standard operating procedure by clandestine agents acting under a president’s aegis.
Our representatives in Washington desperately need to get this right. Democrats, as the opposition party, have a political and moral mandate to block this bill, and those Republicans who occasionally have the will to push the president in line must do so as soon as possible. If John McCain’s experience on the other end of the torture stick means anything, then now is the time for him to show it. If those who make the law don’t speak up now, then the power of the law’s voice may find itself permanently muted, unable to speak with any moral authority at all, ever again.
Chris Jones is an electrical engineering student at the University of Texas. His column first appeared in The Daily Texan on Sept. 27.