WHAT DOES THIS...

From AlterNet:

Supreme Court OK's Strip Searching for Minor Offenses

Some potential offenses for which you might be strip-searched, according to Breyer: violating a leash law, failing to pay child support, or driving without a license. And it probably goes without saying that protest-related arrests would count. And since the point of strip-searching is to hunt down "contraband" it's pretty clear that drug-related arrests (including the many from racist stop-and-frisk policies) would count as well.

More here.

HAVE TO DO WITH THIS?

From Informed Comment courtesy of Hullabaloo:

Polish PM Reveals that US Tortured at Black Sites in his Country

Poland had only escaped the grip of the Soviet Union in 1989, and so its democracy was a fledgling one. For the Bush administration to seduce its high officials into committing torture risked permanently marring its politics and undermining that democracy. Polish human rights workers have been deeply critical of Soviet-era torture, and to be put in the position of having to acknowledge this practice in their own country weakens their moral standing and besmirches the name of those tortured in the Stalinist era.

Waterboarding and extreme stress techniques are also illegal in US law and practice.

And

President Barack Obama ordered, on coming into office, that waterboarding and other torture cease. He has, however, gone out of his way to block victims of torture from launching legal actions, and has run interference for guilty officials, ensuring that there is no accountability for the torture programs.

More here.

Longtime Real Art readers know well of my outrage and disgust with the fact that the United States is now a nation that embraces torture as official policy. And that's bad enough in itself. I mean, torture, by its very nature, is barbaric, uncivilized, and evil. Any nation practicing it, whether officially or under the table, is necessarily corrupt and immoral. Any nation that practices it as official policy, is even worse.

But that's just a simple argument about morality. There are other problems with embracing torture as official policy of the United States. One of them is that it normalizes and mainstreams the practice, bringing home to its citizens what was first justified for use only against official enemies. It is now the law of the land that the police can strip search you for speeding, or not coming to a full stop, or not shutting up when a cop tells you to shut up, or protesting outside of the designated "free speech zone," or for "driving while black," and on and on and on. Because it is historically unlikely that the average traffic violator has a gun shoved up his ass and plans to use it to kill the ticketing officer, one can only conclude that strip searches for minor infractions exist solely to humiliate for purposes of control, and that comes remarkably close to procedures and policies used against torture victims in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, this black ops site in Poland, and probably lots of other places we don't yet know about.

In short, Bush's torture regime, Obama's refusal to prosecute him, as well as our current President's probable continuation of at least some of his predecessor's "enhanced interrogation techniques," have coarsened and degraded our national morality. It is impossible to take this decision out of that context. And that makes it a very sad day for the US, indeed.

Its chickens are coming home to roost.



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