Secrecy is a betrayal of American values
On his new blog, No Comment, Scott Horton writes about, “Torture, Secrecy and the Bush Administration.”
This is an excellent review of the principles of justice starting with Cromwell in England and concluding with the travesties of justice carried out at Guantanamo by military tribunals.
A snippet after the flip:
The use of torture to secure confessions. The receipt of secret evidence. The exclusion of the public from proceedings. The offering of evidence in the form of summaries delivered to the judges, without the defendant being able to confront the evidence or conduct a cross-examination. These practices were the definition of tyrannical injustice to the Puritan fathers and the Founding Fathers. We thought them long-banished a hundred years and more before our own revolution. And now suddenly here they are again.
Secrecy has reemerged just as torture has made its comeback, being justified on the public stage, by government officials for the first time since the famous gathering at the Inns of Court in 1629 at which the judges declared “upon their and their nation’s honor” that torture was not permitted by the common law.
The two fit together, hand in glove: torture and secrecy. Torture and secrecy. Where one is used, the other is indispensable.
Torture is no longer a tool of statecraft. Today it is a tool of criminals, though sometimes of criminals purporting to conduct the affairs of state. Having resorted to these “dark arts,” to quote Dick Cheney, the torturers now have the dilemma faced so frequently by criminals. They seek to cover it up. And so the path flows from torture to secrecy, the twin dark stars of the tyrannical state.
If we look quickly at the proceedings that held the world’s attention down in Gitmo over the last two weeks, we see what the secrecy is all about.