"An Entire Army of Potential Terrorists"

The following is excerpted from NPR this past week, on the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. This is a reading of her final article, left unfinished:



http://guide.real.com/dir/news/world/12035075_a_russian_journalist's_final_story.html



The story she was writing is haunting as it is blunt. She was investigating the treatment of suspected Chechen rebels by the Russian government, in images that will strike us as all too familiar in human rights reports covering our own U.S. government's treatment of Arab and Muslim detainees:



"...subject to humiliation of their human dignity,"

"..on basis of their ethnicity; not allowed out of solitary confinement.."



The conclusions she came to should also have a familiar tone for us:

"They have produced more people who wanted to take revenge, i.e., potential terrorists."



"...an entire army that will return to us with warped lives and warped notions."



How often have I heard it said, or even have thought it myself, that our ‘pre-emptive’ tortures are only creating more people with reasons to hate us and seek revenge against us?



Tens of thousands of Iraqi young men, from young teens to retirement aged men, languish in our numerous desert prison camps, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and beyond. They are subjected to the daily humiliations of prison camp life, and without access to legal representation, judicial processes, or often, even to letting their families know they are still alive, being held months and now years on end (www.cpt.org; www.hrw.org). Tens of thousands of men with very legitimate reasons to hate us…forget the madrasas; we’ve created our own terrorist training camps, enough to keep us in a senseless war for eternity.