President Bush gave a good talk, but can he walk the walk?

Last Thursday, Bush observed the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy by articulating what William Safire has called “the central theme and purpose of his presidency.” Deliberately placing himself alongside luminaries such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR, Bush outlined an optimistic vision for the expansion of global democracy.

Combining Reaganesque rhetoric with Churchillian tones, he spoke of a “freedom deficit” in the Middle East that can be traced back to the military dictatorships that sprang up in the postcolonial period. Just to remind us of his most recent rationale for the invasion of Iraq, he pointed out that the Ba’athist “dictators in Iraq and Syria” are the inheritors to “a legacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin.”

Very inspiring. But unlike Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, Bush only took the time to define his hazy idealistic vision long after he committed the country to a protracted overseas engagement. And his remarks about torture are puzzling: If Syria’s President Assad is so moved by Bush’s words that he initiates sweeping democratic reforms, we’ll loose a vital cog in the U.S. torture system.

“We don’t torture people in America,” Bush insisted in October, and he may even be right. Why do it at home when you can outsource it?

Consider the case of Maher Arar. A Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Arar was detained at New York’s JFK airport last year on suspicion of being a terrorist. Despite the appeals of the Canadian government, which apparently had mistakenly put his name on a watch list, Arar was not turned over to Canadian law enforcement but rather detained without a phone call or even lawyer.

According to a Nov. 5 Washington Post article, Arar was then shackled and flown to Jordan, where he was tortured, then transferred to Syria, where he was repeatedly tortured and forced to sign numerous confessions before being released.

The Post quotes anonymous U.S. officials who say Arar’s case “fits the profile of a covert CIA ‘extraordinary rendition'” — a procedure in which low-level terror suspects are handed over to the intelligence services of countries with laxer restraints on torture than our own. Indeed, “The Syrian government has provided some very useful assistance on al Qaeda in the past,” according to Cofer Black, former director of counterterrorism at the CIA and current counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department. Apparently torture is a legitimate weapon in the pursuit of terrorists, even when innocents are caught in the snare.

The Supreme Court has announced that it will hear the appeals of 16 British, Australian and Kuwaiti detainees in Camp X-Ray who argue that they are being held illegally in “a prison … that operates entirely outside the law.” The makeshift prison houses over 660 “enemy combatants” captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere; they are held without charges and under a communications blackout. They are to be tried by secret military tribunals if and when the U.S. government declares an end to the “war on terror.”

“We don’t torture people in America.” I suppose not, if you don’t consider the appalling conditions in many U.S. prisons to be torture. But Camp X-Ray is south of the border, located at Guantanamo Bay, a naval base on land leased to the United States by Cuba. Media reports of suicide attempts and mental health problems corroborate the claims of attorneys representing many of the prisoners, who allege that torture — such as tying prisoners to posts under the sun, firing rubber bullets or forcing prisoners to kneel with arms straight out until they collapse — is used routinely to force out confessions.

The U.S. government has claimed that since the detainees are not prisoners but “enemy combatants” — a turn of phrase as meaningless and universally applicable as Stalin’s “enemy of the people” — they are not entitled to the legal protections that American prisoners would enjoy or the protections of international law that prisoners of war are afforded. They are persona non grata in the United States because of their hazy legal status, and in Guantanamo, anything goes.

“We don’t torture people in America.” Nevertheless it will probably become commonplace in a U.S.-governed Iraq, where the Coalition Provisional Authority is retaining much of the Ba’athist (read: Saddam-era) legal code, civil service and police force in order to maintain a minimum of infrastructure.

Bush’s speech was not the defining moment of his presidency; it was only the latest rationale for an invasion that was justified using false, politicized intelligence and ever-shifting objectives and goals. We may not torture political prisoners in America, but increasingly it appears we do anywhere else we can. Bush’s democratic rhetoric rings hollow when U.S. interests in the Middle East depend on the undemocratic nature of its governments.

Actions speak louder than words, Mr. President.

Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in philosophy and political science.