Yes, it’s another bang-head-on-keyboard post on prisoner abuse. I don’t like being this repetitive, but I feel like we’re at a key moment right now: We stop this, or as Anne Applebaum says, “the subject will change” and this will become permanent.
But like Jim Henley, I think the time has come not to kvetch, or even to hold forth eloquently, but to organize.
So: Congress. Yesterday Senators Patrick Leahy and Dianne Feinstein made a request to subpoena Justice Department documents on the Bush administration’s policies towards prisoners. The Judiciary Committee voted it down, 10-9, on purely partisan lines. From the NY Times:
The proposal, which was rejected in a 10-9 vote, identified 23 memos, letters or reports from Sept. 25, 2001, through March of this year on topics that included the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and rules for interrogation.
According to the proposal, the documents include a memo from Mr. Rumsfeld to Gen. James T. Hill, the senior officer of the Southern Command, dated April 2003 and titled, “Coercive interrogation techniques that can be used with approval of the Defense Secretary.” Another memo dated Jan. 4, 2004, written by the top legal adviser to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, and sent to military intelligence and police personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison, is titled, “New plan to restrict Red Cross access to Abu Ghraib.”
So, please, please please: if your Senator is on the Judiciary committee and s/he voted against the subpoena, write or call him and ask him to reconsider. Here’s the list, with contact information:
Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia. Phone: (202) 224-3521. E-mail/contact form.
John Cornyn, R-Texas. Phone: (202) 224-2934. E-mail/contact form.
Larry Craig, R-Idaho. Phone: (202) 224-2752. E-mail/contact form.
Mike DeWine, R-Ohio. Phone: (202) 224-2315. E-mail/contact form.
Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina. Phone: (202) 224-5972. E-mail/contact form.
Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Phone: (202) 224-3744. E-mail/contact form.
Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman. Phone: (202) 224-5251. E-mail/contact form.
John Kyl, R-Arizona. Phone: (202) 224-4521. Email/contact form.
Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama. Phone: (202) 224-4124. Email/contact form.
Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania. Phone: (202) 224-5225. E-mail/contact form.
Specter is in a competitive election, and it might be worth asking his opponent to raise this issue.
If your Senator voted for the subpoena, please thank him or her and ask him to keep up the pressure for a real investigation. (If your Senator is Patrick Leahy, thank him a whole lot–I’m pretty sure he’s done more good than anyone else in Congress on this stuff. If your Senator is Chuck Schumer, thank him but maybe explain to him why the “ticking bomb” hypo is not such a good reason to legalize torture, and why you wish he would stop implying to the press that it is.)
Joseph Biden, D-Delaware. Phone: (202) 224-5042. Email/contact form.
Richard J. Durbin, D-Illinois. Phone: (202) 224-2152 . Email/contact form.
John Edwards, D-North Carolina. Phone: (202) 224-3154. Email/contact form.
Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin. Phone: (202) 224-5323. Email/contact form.
Dianne Feinstein, D-California. Phone: (202) 224-3841. Email/contact form.
Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts. Phone: (202) 224-4543. Email/contact form.
Herbert Kohl, D-Wisconsin. Phone: (202) 224-5653. Email/contact form.
Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, ranking minority member. Phone: (202) 224-4242. Email/contact form.
Charles Schumer, D-New York. Phone: (202) 224-6542. Email/contact form.
If your Senator is not on Judiciary, write to him anyway. He may be on Armed Services, or Intelligence, or some other committee that could have jurisdiction over this. Or maybe he’ll make a floor speech–it’s better than nothing. Write to your House member too.
Or write to the President–what the hell. Or call John Kerry, and ask him to show some leadership on this issue.* Or email the Applebaum article and your Congressmen’s addresses to your friends (especially if they’re constituents of Judiciary Committee members.) Or post this on a weblog that actually gets traffic. Or any combination of the above.
*While you’re at it, ask Kerry not to pick Dick Gephardt as VP, because Matthew Yglesias is so right about that.
I applaud your linking to the comments pages for Senators. Making it easy to give nearly immediate feedback is a service to democracy.
I hope more blogs follow your example on a regular basis.
You must feel like a pro-life moderate in 1973.
I’ve sent a message to my senator. Thanks for providing the links.
I’m a little surprised that Graham would oppose this. He seems to be genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of this scandal.
Just realized that my comment probably sounds snarky. It wasn’t meant to be, it was a sympathetic response to: “I don’t like being this repetitive, but I feel like we’re at a key moment right now: We stop this, or as Anne Applebaum says, “the subject will change” and this will become permanent.”
Sebastian, thanks for your followup comment, since I’m afraid otherwise I would have perceived snark where none existed. (And probably snarked at you, and you would have snarked back, and so on until there’s a massive feud and all our families out to the most boring cousins are dead. And so on.)
Back in November 2002 I read a column that took that parallel and ran with it. It is of course quite antithetical to your politics in all directions, but it is a good piece of writing, and you might find it of interest. Saving Invisible People