The brutal road to Iraq and Torture

How has America in the early twenty-first century come to the point of justifying the capture, imprisoning and torture of people almost at random, with no regard for rights under the Geneva Conventions and more importantly, for generally accepted minimal rights in the civilized world? How has this prosperous and advanced society turned back the clock on the painful progress towards a more civilized and less dangerous world, for which thousands if not millions have sacrificed their lives?

I believe much of the current attitude can be traced back to the 1980s, when the neocons in the Reagan administration pumped up the rhetoric to absurd heights to justify a proxy war in Central America, while they exploited a highly publicized and inflated rise in urban crime, which led to the reversal of trends in criminal justice. In the 60s and 70s, there was an emphasis on the rights of the accused, to redress the balance of individual rights and society’s interest in preventing crime. Perhaps most importantly as well as symbolically, capital punishment was no longer considered a just sentence or effective deterrent.

The subtext of that trend was this: A civilized society does not enact revenge for its own sake, nor does it feed a spiraling culture of revenge. A modern civilized society finds more effective ways to deter crime and deal with criminals, just as many previous societies had done: without capital punishment. Capital punishment brutalized society.

Though this is now accepted in much of the rest of the world, it is likely to be news to anyone who came of age in the US in the 1980s or after. The culture has turned completely around, and justice is equated with vengeance. You need look no further than the ever-popular crime dramas on television. In the 60s, popular series like “The Defenders” and “The Law & Mr. Jones” portrayed defense attorneys as heroes, protecting individuals against abuses by prosecutors and police, against juries being swayed by emotional appeals to exact revenge, and against aspects of the law that treated the “innocent until proven guilty” unjustly.

In today’s crime shows, the heroes are prosecutors and police who use any means necessary to convict suspects. In surfing TV channels the other night, I caught a minute of a willowy blond prosecutor objecting to an accused killer not getting the death penalty because he had a biologically caused mental illness. “We’ve convicted psychotics and schizophrenics before,” she complained. This is typical. You can see the difference even over the life of one series: “Law & Order.”

We all know of the cases of mentally deficient prisoners who were executed. We know of other cases in which prisoners who committed crimes in their youth were executed many years later, when they were demonstrably no longer that person. We also know that the US has the highest proportion of its population in prison than any other “civilized” democracy. We know that there are innocent executed because they could not afford a decent defense, and that African Americans and other minorities are disproportionately jailed because of race as well as economics.

But crime and support for the death penalty were so politically hyped that even though the President has nothing to do with capital punishment, it became the central issue leading to George Bush the First defeating Michael Dukakis in 1988. This despite the fact that the vast majority of voters were untouched by violent crime, except through their television sets. Having hyped the threat, politicians exploited natural fears by promising to get tough, and enacting three strikes laws and bringing back capital punishment. No more attention to the economic crises in the inner cities, or the collapse of manufacturing jobs, or the patterns of racial injustice. Meanwhile, demographers showed that the jump in urban crime was largely predictable by the jump in the proportion of young men, and would abate as the trend reversed. Which is what happened.

By 2004, capital punishment had become such a non-issue that when John Kerry said he was opposed to it, hardly anyone noticed. But the brutalization had done its work.

The demagogic appeals of the 1980s had expanded into a rhetoric of the right wing which is historically startling in its violent oversimplifications, outrageous untruths and brutal assumptions. But there were also countertrends contending for the national soul. It took the match of 9/11 to set this house aflame again.