*A Socialist Teen 'Zine*
June 2004, Editor: Joan Braune
The Politics of U.S. Torture
Ongoing revelations of torture at Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay call to mind an article from the July 2002 Cause, about a ring of brutal juvenile penal camps in Florida founded by Mel Sembler, a Bush ambassador to Italy. The Abu Graib revelations call to mind that over the last fifteen years at least twenty teens have been murdered and others tortured in similar private camps funded by U.S. companies.
These revelations also call to mind the case of young John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban." Before 9/11, Lindh converted to Islam and moved to Afghanistan, where he began joined the Afghan military and battled Northern Alliance rebels. At this time Afghanistan was a U.S. ally. This is how he was treated when he was arrested following the U.S. invasion:
"Shot in the leg prior to his capture, and already starving and badly dehydrated, Lindh unconscionably was left with his wound untreated and festering for days despite doctors being readily available. Denied access to a lawyer, and threatened repeatedly with death, he was duct-taped to a stretcher and left for long periods of time in an enclosed, unheated and unlit metal shipping container, removed only during interrogations, at which time he was still left taped to his stretcher. (Hundreds of his Taliban and Al Qaeda comrades actually were deliberately allowed to die in those same containers in one of the more monstrous war crimes perpetrated during this conflict.)"
The government allowed Lindh to cut a deal for a twenty-year sentence because he agreed to sign a gag order, which would prevent the stories of POW torture in Afghanistan from being exposed in court.
Can we chalk up such abuses to "faulty intelligence gathering"? Maybe we should all just blame Donald Rumsfeld to make ourselves feel better. But for those who know the history of U.S. international relations and can see the current trends, such responses cannot be satisfying.
Torture was used by the CIA and U.S. military in the days of Reagan (who was a jerk, by the way), and before, and after; it was based on the view that Marxism had to be wiped out by any means necessary. But never before in American history has pre-trial torture, exacted to obtain confessions, been treated so casually and publicly by a Presidential administration. The administration and some corporate media have advocated for official legalization of torture. And it was recently revealed that in March 2003, a team of lawyers wrote a memo for Rumsfeld, suggesting legal loopholes that would allow executive branch officials, including some military personnel, to be considered exempt from anti-torture laws.
A fascist regime is emerging the U.S., as our Argentine correspondent points out on the final page of this issue. Through the Patriot Act (which John Kerry will partially "change," rather than dispose of), the Bill of Rights has been shredded. COINTELPRO meets legality. The U.S. sponsored torture in Latin America and where ever else governments desired assistance in protecting the capitalist system; now it seems that the chickens came home to roost on 9/11 in more ways than one. I can only say that I hope that ten years from now they will not speak of us as we now speak of the pre-Nazism Germans, "Why didn't they do more? Why didn't they see what was coming?"
Interview with Robert Meeropol, By Scott Satterwhite
Robert Meeropol is the youngest son of executed victims of the Cold War, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. He is also the adopted son of songwriters Ann and Abel Meeropol. Abel Meeropol wrote the classic anti-lynching anthem "Strange Fruit" made famous by Billie Holiday.
Scott Satterwhite is a longtime Cause reader in Pensacola, Florida, and a key activist in the city. He is editor of Mylxine.
This interview has been cut significantly; I highly recommend reading the full text online at https://www.angelfire.com/zine2/robertmeeropol.
Satterwhite: Do you remember much about your parents?
Meeropol: Well, I remember...they were arrested shortly after my third birthday so I remember virtually nothing about them before their arrest. I do have a memory that is a vague memory of a warm and loving family. Whether this is a myth of a golden age or whether it's a real memory, I can't tell you. There's just no way of knowing that. Then starting approximately a year after their arrest, which would mean it was the end of the summer or the beginning of the fall of 1951 when I was four years old. From that period until their execution in June of 1953 when I was six we, my brother and I, must have visited them at least a dozen times in prison. And I do remember them from those prison visits. Now again, I was a little kid, and I can't say that I can differentiate one prison visit from the next. But what I do remember is seeing them both. I do have visual images. I remember thinking how short my mother was. I'm saying that because I had grown and she was wearing these flat prison slippers and she was quite short. She was only five feet tall. And I remember my father playing these sort of word games with my brother at table a in the room that we visited them in. And what I also remember is that they were calm, quiet affairs. I later learned from reading my parents prison correspondence that they made a real effort to pretend that things were as normal as possible. And I wanted that to be the case, too. So I would say that they made and effort to fool me and I wanted to be fooled. So, you know, if someone wanted to do a dramatization of these visits they would try to make them filled with anxiety and emotional outbursts and that type of stuff. And I think that would be false. That the reality of that was that if somebody portrayed them fairly accurately they would be kind of boring. That's what I remember.
How old was [your brother] then?
At that point [Michael] was ten and he knew what was going on. And yet they were just acting normal, like "See you next visit." And he broke down. He started wailing "One more day to live!" and they both ran out of the room. Actually, they may have been in the room together then. That was the last visit, and I think the only visit the two of them were in the room together with us. they ran out of the room and Michael was very upset. It maybe seem strange that it was Tuesday and the execution was set for Thursday and he said "One more day to live." But I guess what he says he meant was Wednesday...they would be killed on Thursday and Wednesday was the "one more day." And he was upset that they wouldn't acknowledge the situation. This caused my mother to write a letter, the next to last letter she wrote to us. And really to Michael. She explained that she would have liked to break down, too but she felt it was more important for her not to do that in his presence and that she hoped the last minute maneuvers would work. So, he does remember more, but I think for both of us, that they were actually good things. We, during this period, didn't have a very stable existence. We were shifted around to a bunch of different places. Everything about our lives was temporary.
One of my favorite parts about your book was the recollection of historical events early in you life. I liked it so much because it contrasted so heavily with what's accepted as the american perspective. Like with Kennedy's assassination, the U2 spy plane being shot down, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Can you tell me a little about what it was like growing up in a Communist household?
Well, one of the things that it was like was...and I think this is very healthy because when you're in opposition to the dominant culture, yet you're intellectually oriented...we got the New York Times. We watched the news shows. The world was very important to us, the Meeropol family, but it was all filtered by a pro-american media. So what happened was, we got all the information, then filtered it ourselves. We'd interpret it ourselves. We would say "This is what the New York Times says is what's really going on." So it because a never-ending instruction in critical reading. I don't remember seeing Communist material in my parents' house. Perhaps during the McCarthy period they were just leery of all that. So, it was wasn't like someone handed me a piece of paper and said, "This is what you should think." It's that I got all this other very sophisticated information and there was all this discussion about what was wrong with it. I was shocked when I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan to read a study which concluded that in the social sciences areas, the average student didn't read textbooks critically until their second year of graduate school. They just sort of accepted what was said as given, rather than saying, "Wait a second, maybe this person has a slanted point of view and that there is something wrong here." If it's in a text, then it must be the word of god or something. And that shocked me because I had been reading things critically since I was ten years old. That's just the way I was raised. So that was very interesting, to have that perspective on the world. Though I admit, I don't want to say that I was all that politically sophisticated as a child. A lot of times my politics basically were if the united states says it's right, then it must be wrong. Like with the Cuban Missile Crisis as a good example. Everybody always talked about Soviet missiles 90 miles from our shore. Is that terrible? Well, what about the Cubans? They have a lot more american missiles 90 miles from their shore. Nobody every talked about that. The Cubans hadn't invaded the united states, but the united states had paid for the Bay of Pigs invasion. There was this, what I saw, as this double standard. And that double standard goes on to this day. There's no country on earth today that had invaded more countries than the united states has. No country on Earth that had more troops overseas, foreign bases. There's no country on Earth that has a bigger, more powerful military, that has taken more aggressive action. And yet we're always claiming that everybody else is the aggressor. That kind of double standard, and what I see as hypocrisy, and in some cases just a willful blindness. Refusal to acknowledge what's so obvious. I grew up with that and I saw it over and over and over again, so that's what it was like.
How do you feel about their execution today, politically or emotionally?
My parents execution, and I'm going to talk more generally in terms of capital punishment... I felt when I was a kid growing up that I knew for certain that they were innocent. That they were framed, that they were innocent. They were killed because they were Communists who wouldn't lie. The whole idea that my parents, the ordinary people who were living on the lower east side of Manhattan who had no money, stole the secret to the atomic bomb was absurd. But I didn't know anything about my parents' case. That was just emotional. That's what people I trusted told me and that's what I believed. And I believed that their execution was wrong, not because executing people was wrong, but because they were innocent. I was not anti-capital punishment. And it wasn't until I went to law school many years later, and I didn't go to law school fresh out of college. I went ten years after I graduated. I went to law school in my thirties and took a look at the american judicial system. Anyone who goes to law school who wants to think about this, they read all the cases where it's really clear that the court makes all these mistakes. Our system is just far from perfect. And the reasoning behind decisions, you could make an argument one way or you could make an argument another way, it's clear that there's some sort of truth that has some sort of inherent value to it that is so clear has been discovered. And given the flawed nature of the court systems. How could you trust such a flawed system with matters of life and death to determine whether someone should live or die? So I became convinced that our system was flawed... and I think that all human systems are incapable of perfection and that capital punishment requires perfection because you can't afford to make a mistake. As a result, I became anti-capital punishment and remain so to this day. So I believe my parent's execution was wrong, in part because I believe executing anybody is wrong.
In terms of my views of my parents' case, I started out with this emotional belief that they were innocent. I then, as a teenager, started reading about the case so that when people started asking me questions I wouldn't appear stupid. Because I really didn't know the answers to questions about the case. Then I became intellectually convinced of their innocence. You know I learned that they were only charged with conspiracy. I learned that there was no physical evidence against them. I learned that the chief prosecution witnesses had perjured themselves. I learned all of these things and that just prove that they were innocent. Then I went to law school again, as I said, and one of the things I realized was that yeah, we'd proved they didn't steal the secret of the atomic bomb. That was absurd. We'd proved more things because during the 1970's I got involved in this re-opening effort and I didn't go to law school until the 80's. And we'd forced a lot of previously secret documents that reinforced our knowledge of the fabrication of evidence and lying on the part of government witnesses. Also, the bias of the judge in the fact that the judge and the prosecution secretly communicated with each other and basically orchestrated my parents' execution. Which is truly outrageous considering the way the system is supposed to work.
So I learned all these thinks and I said OK, I knew they had never had a fair trial. I know they should be presumed innocent based on never having had a fair trial. But that's very different from proving them innocent. I realized that you could frame guilty people. Just because all the evidence against them was fabricated and the prosecuting witnesses lied, that didn't prove they were "innocent." Yeah, maybe they didn't do the thing they were killed for, but that didn't prove they didn't do anything. Armed with that sort of new perspective and as new material has come out starting from 1990 onward, I believe at this point that the evidence is overwhelming that my mother was never a spy of any sort. I think I go into that in some detail in the book. And the evidence against my father...Well, you know if the Venona transcriptions are accurate, then he was a non-atomic spy [ed. note-Venona was the code name for secret KGB messages sent in the 1940's that were compromised by a double agent. These documents were used as secret evidence against the Rosenbergs during their trial. The Venona transcripts were released by the National Security Agency in 1995.]. Military-industrial spy, working or helping the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler during World War II, when incidentally we were allied with the Soviet Union. But that material may not be accurate. It might be disinformation. And I go into quite a bit of detail about how just because something might be true doesn't mean it is true. I've dealt with a lot of people on both sides of the issue of my parents' case who want to make definitive determinations, which tend to reflect their political positions, I think, more than the facts of my parents' case. I've come to the conclusion that I really don't know whether or not my father did anything. I know he didn't do the thing he was killed for, or I don't want to say I know, but I'm virtually certain. But, did he do something else? Well, that's possible. That little analogy in the book where I talk about what if my parents had been convicted of mass murder instead of stealing the secret to the atomic bomb and there was a big controversy. Forty years later the government released material showing that they'd engaged, my father at least, has engaged in a series of armed robberies in which no one was killed. And the government said "See! They were guilty." Well I'd have a hard time if that were true saying that my father was innocent. But it would be the government who was guilty of murder. Not my parents. And that kind of analogy, understanding that...
Do you feel that the same thing that happened to your parents could happen again?
Oh absolutely. As long as there is a death penalty. I mean, there's one way to make sure it can't happen and that is to abolish capital punishment. As long as that's the case, then it can't happen. The characters might be different because they will reflect the political tones of the time, but yes. America today, america of 2003, is unfortunately too much like america of 1953. America of 2000 had many differences, but america of 2003 has too many similarities. And the current administration, which is building its entire policy, the entire policy, on frightening people. Frightening Americans.
Like Truman and Eisenhower did... Yes, it's very much like the policies of the McCarthy period. One thing I've learned and have been around long enough to realize is that groups of frightened people do stupid things. And groups of powerful frightened people do stupid and dangerous things. So, I'm afraid that a fearful and aroused American public can be a very dangerous animal and we live in very dangerous times.
Sadly, the hordes of Fascism are advancing in the world (Do you remember that history about a man called Hitler?). Today they have taken the Gulf, tomorrow they will come for the water reserve of South America. Yes, I know they're already here, lining their pockets, but some day they will come with their rifles and their B-52s.
Argentines feel that the U.S. people have been grotesquely brainwashed. Do your neighbors know what happens in Guantánamo? Does the nightly news anchor say that the American soldiers' boots trample on human dignity? Hysteria and paranoia are the perfect excuses to manage the masses: just give them an enemy in turban, burgers and Hollywood movies, and Americans will give you trust and a blind vote. Some years ago Bush seemed like an idiot--we all remember his mistakes in speeches--but he's not idiotic regrettably.
Of course, I’m not an American and I'd be stupid to say what you have to do. But I'd like to offer you a piece of advice: don't trust the TV, don't support the current administration, and do not vote Bush in November. That's the best thing that you can do. (Well, maybe you could do something more, but I don't want to promote an insurrection).
Something about Argentina
Since May, Argentina has undergone deep political and economic changes. Our new president, Néstor Kirchner, is a moderate Peronist, who came from the south of the country (where it snows constantly). He was interested in the left wing during the 70s, but now his position is, seemingly, the center. People trust him. The middle class support him, and the lower classes have no choice but to believe and wait.
There are a lot of critiques of this government, but so far they're not really important–yet. The social tension has calmed down a bit, and industry has grown. That's because cheap importation is being replaced with national production, creating more employment. In other words: in the last decade this nation was Neo-liberalism's paradise. The ex-president Menem opened the doors to vulture companies protected by the US and the IMF. (Did you know that US is trying to do the same throughout the continent, with a Free Trade Area in 2005? Our products never could compete with the subsidized American rubbish).
Anyway, the crisis still is too near, the poverty still is atrocious, the cops still are corrupt, and the fight just is starting. But people need something to believe in. That's all right. It was long ago and I don't remember it, but I think it's called hope.
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