Selections from: Jill Lepore, "The Dark Ages," The New Yorker, March 18, 2013.
"No member of the [military] commission need be a lawyer. The ordinary rules of military law would not apply. Nor would the laws of war. Nor, in any conventional sense, would the laws of he United States. In the language of the order, 'It is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.' "
In the final draft of the military order concerning the "Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism," signed by President George W. Bush on November 13, 2001, suspected "terrorists could be imprisoned without charge, denied knowledge of the evidence against them, and, if tried, sentenced by courts following no previously established rules."
"Beginning in the fall of 2001, hundreds of men were taken into custody and interrogated, all around the world, but especially in Afghanistan, where the U.S. military dropped flyers offering, in exchange for information about men with ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, bounties of millions of dollars. 'This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life,' one flyer read. Detainees later said they were sold for between five thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars."
More camps were built at Guantanamo Bay to house more prisoners, "eventually seven hundred and seventy-nine, from forty-eight countries."
"Methods described in the torture memos include stripping, exposure to extremes of temperature and light, false threats to family members, and the use of dogs." "In the memos, these techniques have names like 'Fear Up Harsh' and 'We Know All,' and are daubed with the greasy paint of the bureaucrat. 'Sleep Adjustment' is adjusting the sleeping times of the detainee (e.g., reversing sleep cycles from night to day.). This technique is NOT sleep deprivation." "Water boarding: 'the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual's feet are gently elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers the nose and mouth.' In this fashion, 'water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches,' so that the individual experiences the sensation of drowning. After a break of three or four breaths, 'the procedure may then be repeated.' "
"Many of these forms of torment, including subjecting prisoners to stress positions, sleep disruption, semi-starvation, and extreme cold, came from a 1957 study, conducted by the Air Force, called 'Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.' "
"An ancient form of adjudication known as trial by ordeal became commonplace after 500 A.D.; its heyday lasted from 800 to 1200 A.D.. In trial by ordeal, a defendant submits to a grueling physical test, the outcome of which is taken as a sign from God, an indication of guilt or innocence. In the end, man is judged by God alone. Trial by ordeal was practiced throughout Latin Christendom."
"The Church's sanction for trial by ordeal was withdrawn in 1215, by order of the Fourth Lateran Council."
"In England, trial by ordeal was replaced not by judicial torture but by trial by jury." "In 1215, the year the Church effectively abolished trial by ordeal, King John signed the Magna Carta, pledging certain liberties to the people..."
"The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a revolution in punishment: blood sanctions (maiming and execution) began to be replaced by forms of bondage (galley slavery and indentured servitude) and of confinement (short- and long-term imprisonment)."
"In time, the rule of law, revulsion at torture, the abolition of blood sanctions, and the law of evidence became the means by which the nations of he West came to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world (including, not least, non-states like the Taliban insurgency and terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda). Nobody, not even a king, could imprison someone without cause."
"The laws of war can be debased and made, even, into weapons of war. The rule of law can be made a travesty. Still, sometimes laws are all that stand in the way of imprisonment, torture, trials, and executions conducted at the king's pleasure."
It was the Bush II administration that envisioned for the first time "a permanent legal structure under the president's sole command."
In 2006, a team from Seton Hall School of Law released a study of the five hundred and seventeen prisoners then remaining a Guantanamo; according to Department of defense data, only five per cent of these men had been captured by U.S. troops; at least forty-seven per cent had been arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces during the months when the U.S. government was offering bounties."
"In February [2013], NBC News released a confidential, undated Justice Department memo, titled 'Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa'ida or an Associated Force.' It explains in sixteen pages, how it is that the president of the United States has the power to order not imprisonment without charge but the killing of men without anyone bringing evidence before any judicial body, not even an unconstitutional military commission."
"The past is often figured as dark, a prison, a tomb; the future, bright, blue sky, a spaceship. This is an inheritance of the Enlightenment, with its faith in progress and reason and law. Part of the terror of September 11th was the gleaming skyscraper become a tomb, the seeming backward march of time, the horror of the unreasonable. What, then, of the assassin become an unmanned flying machine?"
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