Two things make the illegal imprisonment of Mike Hawash, and the violation of his human rights, especially noteworthy.
- It’s a signal from this government, driven by it’s security apparatus: Don’t step out of line. Rights are second to security. Remember what we can do to you and your family at any time. And see there will be no riots in the streets, no revolution, no blaring outcry from the press. And those who speak on your behalf can simply be called unpatriotic. They are the enemies of state; easily identified as those who speak and those who listen to them. The world will not charge us with crimes against human rights; it will let you rot, until it is convenient for us to let you go, or until we’re done programming you and them for your release.
- It’s a high profile distraction from the many others who are similarly imprisoned. With Mike, there’s such a storm of protest (and there should be) – but largely because he fits a certain profile. Socially and economically, he’s ‘normal’ (one of the reasons point 1 works so well). But others less ‘defensible’ have also been placed in a legal/journalistic black-hole. Others languish there without the benefit of a web site documenting the abuse. Theoretically, when Mike’s case is redressed, all will be quiet once more. It will be, like this illegal invasion and all the others, “what we had to do then and can apologize for later”. We will be supposed to be placated when Mike’s ordeal is over and he’s back at Intel, but there will be those that this same illegal government knows we have forgotten.
As government-sponsored “public service announcements” tell us that a loving parent is one who “spies, snoops” (yes, those are the exact words) – that “questions” (without being specific) are an “anti-drug”, priming this generation of youth to expect and consider normal the routine invasion of privacy by authority figures, acclimating them to the security state, we should consider:
Mike Hawash, and the others who are worse off because we haven’t heard their names, because they may never be the ones selected to emerge from their dungeons, are us. The “war” is currently being waged on two fronts. In every nation that rejects US/UK internationalism/colonialism, and in the proverbial “Homeland”s of these beligerents, where we must now be ‘careful’, where any citizen can be a ‘traitor’, ‘disloyal’, ask ‘dangerous questions’, or commit ‘sedition’.
Don’t be surprised, either, if some of these kidnapping victims who have been “disappeared” by their governments – governments that claim to be invading their economic prey to put a stop to this very same behaviour – emerge saying how it was uncomfortable but “understandable”, “necessary”, or a “misunderstanding”. How they were treated “reasonably well” (excepting of course the eradication of all their human rights and dignities).
In a place where terror is the norm, where one (as under Stalin) needn’t have done anything in particular, where it is not clear what is criminal and what is legal – for government or individual, where one never knows what behaviour might result in an arrest, validating the status quo is a means of survival.
Even the press plays along. There’s a mild (relative to the import for a constitutional republic) “page six” response to the rights we make meaningless by these acts, while our opponents’ abuses make page one. The response is just enough to maintain the suggestion of journalistic independence long since lost to repeating edited official statements and trading objectivity for ‘access’ and status. There hasn’t been a deeply investigative press exploring the truly heinous offenses against liberty in the US in a lifetime. The last of that died the last time the US/UK were called the “Allies”.
Your belief in liberty and justice, dear reader, is to be judged by your application of it to the least of your neighbors and your holding to it the greatest representatives of your power. Lose that, and you are the rabble of humanity, chanting the slogan of your petty tribe in the face of history from behind your bloody weapons and the torches with which you set fire to the world and reason. Trade the one torch for the other, and you are a savage in the suit of a man. A cannibal. An eater of the dead.
The government-funded PSA’s are such a mockery of such men. “Violence against women is a crime”, they tell us. And how many mothers and daughters are mourning or maimed while we sip our morning Latte and smugly talk of our nations’ strength?
Our strength is in our honesty. Force, and our daily violence, is the opposite of power and the obituary to that basic sense of truth prerequisite to any real strength.
