The end of democracy as we know it?

My friend Jules Siegel's credentials and accomplishments are so long even his own website doesn't list all of them. He favors us today with a new book review on Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, By Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray.

Jules has a lot to say on the brutal excesses of our government-sponsored torture, which taken as whole as detailed in the volume is, as he puts it, enough to "nauseate any sane human being." Of interest to drug policy reformers however, is the analogy he finds between the conditions at Gitmo and those of our own prison system in the US, especially as related to the war on some drugs.

While many well-meaning people on both left and right profess to be shocked by the stories that continue to pour out of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, they usually fail to understand that these atrocities are well-rooted in American culture.

"None of what is known to have happened in Guantánamo is alien to American prisoners." says Paul Wright, Editor, Prison Legal News. Sexual assault, long term sensory deprivation, abuse, beatings, shootings, pepper spraying and the like are all too familiar to American prisoners. Coupled with overcrowding, this is the daily reality of the American prison experience."

Perhaps the only real difference is that the White House argues more forcefully than usual that no court can forbid it to arbitrarily detain and torture anyone it designates an unlawful enemy combatant, a definition that it has applied not only to foreigners but also to American citizens. We have seen how the drug exception to the Constitution has nullified basic American rights such a freedom from illegal search and seizure. But the war on drugs was merely a test run. Some rights remained intact. Now comes the permanent war against terrorism in which all human rights are annihilated.

And as we all know the Bush administration has been working overtime to form a nexus between terrorism and drugs with their continued references to narco-terrorists and the ONDCP's ads alleging smoking pot finances terrorism. Jules wonders if we are now bearing witness to the end of democracy in the United States. I have to wonder myself.