You can do a lot of things with water, and recently China and the Bush administration have become the connoisseurs of the pain and suffering that water, or the lack of it, can bring. China is moving along with its plans to build a hydro-electric dam across the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, potentially wreaking havoc on the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh , and since the Justice Department was forced today to release its Top Secret CIA documents on water-boarding and other forms of torture, the Bush administration seemed equally fascinated with the destructive capacity of water. (China's plan has been in the works for several years. Read a fuller account here.)
Two modern imperial powers, equally intent on maintaining their empires through coercive means. And with Obama's decision today not to prosecute CIA officials who were responsible for this brutality, the United States gives up much of its credibility in negotiating with nations like China whom we accuse not only of tolerating, but actively indulging, conduct that violates our fundamental human rights.
I wrote earlier about China and America belonging to the small group of barbarous nations who still practice capital punishment and carry it out in some places with a kind of righteous gusto. Now I write about China and America belonging to that same group of barbarous nations who have been caught red-handed in violation of fundamental human rights and who decide to do little about it.
Whether we prosecute or not, though, the fact remains that our country is guilty of human rights violations; and that our administration's disapproval of the Chinese torture of Tibetans is hypocritical, at best, and feigned, at worst.
As a country, we argue now against human rights violations from a weakened position.
But there is another side to this issue that indicates some real progress in our country's support of human rights. It is important that President Obama allowed the release of these sensitive
documents; he did not extend Bush's rampant abuses of executive privilege. He decided, in fact, not to fight the ACLU in their FOIA filing, and in doing so, he allowed the working manual for our little shop of horrors to become part of the public domain. Surely, he felt that a simple revelation of these documents was enough, that if the goal is to stop such abuses in the future, and not to punish those who formulated and implemented these horrors, then such a public revelation will make it much more difficult for this to occur in the future. And so we must read these documents, and make them part of our historical knowledge; we must enter them into the record of our national consciousness, making this inhumane practice less likely to rear its ugly head in the coming century.
It's the least we can do.
