http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000901Bush and the Art of Breaking Human Beings
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED August 15, 2007
Out in West Texas, from which the New England-bred and Andover, Yale and Harvard-educated George W. Bush pretends to hail, the word “break” is most often used with horses. (Bush of course is famous for his fear of horses. It took quite a bit of coaxing in 2000 for photographers to get him into a shoot with some of these creatures in whose form artists for centuries have found the expression of freedom.) The phrase means stripping the animal of its free spirit, and bending it to the will of its human master. For Bush, however, the term has taken on a new meaning, namely “breaking” human beings. The sense is the same: to destroy the free spirit of the subject and to bend him to the will of his captor.
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Yale law professor Jack Balkin comments on the Monitor article:
It’s important to remember that the Bush Administration did everything it could to deny Padilla even the basic right of habeas corpus. It argued that courts had no power to second guess the President’s determination that Padilla was an enemy of the United States and could be held in solitary confinement indefinitely. It argued that no one had the right to contact Padilla and that no one had the right to know what the government was doing to him. It argued that courts should defer to the President’s views about who was dangerous and who was not—that once the President declared a person an enemy, that person had all the process that was due them and courts should respect that determination.
It argued, in short, that the President always knows best. If the President had his way, the government, on the basis of information that never had to be tested before any neutral magistrate, could pluck any citizen off the streets, throw them in a military prison, and proceed to drive them insane.
Those are the powers that the Bush Administration sought. I will not mince words: They are the powers of a dictator in an authoritarian regime. They are the powers of the old Soviet Union, of the military junta in Argentina during the time of the disappeared.
The Padilla case is important as a demonstration of the power of isolation tactics to destroy a human being—without producing anything of gain. Torture apologists find it easy to defend, but they ignore the psychological truth, namely, in the words of John Donne, “solitude is a torment which is not threatened in Hell itself.” And the case is important for another purpose, namely: it helps demonstrate how tactics which are introduced to deal with “foreign enemies” suddenly wind up being used on United States soil and against United States citizens with very little additional thought.
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