'Silent policy' of torture addressed in ACLU talk

By Lee Hammel
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Nov. 12, 2006

WORCESTER— While Tuesday’s election gave cheer to opponents of the Republican administration, a Mount Holyoke College professor said, it failed to address what he called “perhaps the greatest scandal in American history … the Bush administration’s policy of torture.”

Politicians of both major parties have remained “deathly silent” about torture, politics professor Christopher H. Pyle told 75 people at the Worcester County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts annual meeting at the Crowne Plaza on Thursday. That is why the United States is “so despised around the world, why it is losing so many soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, and why we are less safe from terrorists than we were before the attacks of 9-11.”

The professor from South Hadley questioned the country’s commitment to opposing torture. While Democrats did not raise the issue of prisoner abuse by American soldiers in the recent political campaign, Mr. Pyle said, some Democrats joined Republicans this fall in passing the Military Commissions Act, which he said permits future torture and grants amnesty for torture in the past.

That act, signed into law Oct. 17, does not grant amnesty to military interrogators or guards, but it does protect CIA agents, private contractors and administration officials from prosecution for any war crimes over the past seven years, he said. It re-established military commissions to try alleged terrorists who have been tortured, Mr. Pyle said. They replace the special military commissions that President Bush authorized two months after the 2001 terror attacks, which supplanted ordinary courts-martial and which Mr. Pyle said were created specifically to admit evidence obtained by torture.

Mr. Pyle said the law authorizes the president to designate anyone as an “enemy combatant” and subject those so designated to whatever the president defines as not “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” during an indefinite period of imprisonment.

The political atmosphere is generated by “deceitful use of language by politicians and their pocket journalists who manipulate public fear of evil enemies in far-off lands, to justify a perpetual concentration of wartime power” as well as by some professors, he said. If President Eisenhower were here, Mr. Pyle said, he would warn the country of the surveillance-industrial complex in which billions of homeland security dollars are diverted to security and software companies.

The ACLU chapter also presented its annual civil liberties award to Brian Newark of Douglas. The ACLU chapter said Mr. Newark, a Bellingham High School teacher, stood up to pressure from the school administration to require students to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance and report those who did not, as well as to stop teaching about American soldiers abusing prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Three Burncoat Senior High School students — Angela Amissah and Jimmy MacDonald, first-place tie, and Dan Burke, second place — were given awards and prizes for essays. Robert Wadleigh, who is leaving the chapter’s board after 30 years, was recognized for his service.