The Yoke of Oppression
During the Jewish Holyday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance, a day of fasting, congregations around the world read from the book of Isaiah, where God describes our hunger pains as merely symbolic. The true “fast,” we are told, includes acts of tikkun olam, healing the world.Part of the exhortation notes:”Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”
These words were recited only a few days after the US Congress passed legislation suspending our 800 year old history of habeas corpus– a right dating from the Magna Carta itself, a principle that any prisoner could go to a court and challenge “who has the body and why?” This notion is one of the lodestars of justice. All the three of the major Western religions have a shared spiritual concern for pursuing justice.
But the Administration’s detention program departs radically from such civilized and religious values– “disappearing” people, maintaining secret gulags or “black sites” where an estimated 100 people are being imprisoned, barring lawyers, not requiring trials, eliminating due process, This radical action is a shameful violation of ethical, societal, and spiritual standards, and certainly not, in any way, “conservative”.
Let us consider the outrages in the Arar case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of A Canadian guy snagged by the US as he changed planes in at JFK airport. He was shipped to Syria to be tortured in order to reveal information claimed vital to national security. The present Administration refuses to talk to the Syrian government for constructive ends, such as dealing with the turmoil in Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine; but it is happy to discuss having Syrian officials torture people the US hands over in a process aseptically called “extraordinary rendition”. (What happens in merely ordinary”rendition”, I wonder?)
After almost a year, Arar was released by the Syrians due to Canadian pressure. Anyway, they couldn’t get him to say any thing incriminating. So he is an example of the (maybe many) innocent people in Guantanamo and at the other unknown sites.
But is “innocence” relevant? The Administration claims that all the detainees are evildoers. But isn’t that supposed to be determined by a trial?
The Washington Post recently ran an editorial entitled Tortured by Mistake: The case of Maher Arar shows why the Bush Administration’s secret detention program is wrong. Let us be clear–the Geneva Conventions (and our ethical traditions) do not say that torturing “bad people” is OK. No one is to be tortured. Indeed, the bar against torture exists because of the reprehensibility of the conduct, not the culpability of the victim.
Secondly, the Administration’s secret detention program would be barbaric and illegal even if no torturing occurred within it. This program violates a number of Constitutional norms and ethical standards common in civilized nations–right to a speedy trial, assistance of counsel, right to confront one’s accusers, etc.
We have entered a very dark time. Perhaps Isaiah’s words can help rally people of faith to confront this new totalitarianism. It will take a long and sustained fast, I would predict.