LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO MY FRIEND EUGENE-- WHOSE NOT HAPPY ABOUT U.S. TORTURE POLICIES

A couple years ago I was sitting at my computer when the doorbell rang in the middle of the day. When I opened it, it was a Clean-for-Gene kind of guy, whose name, as a matter of fact is Gene and who was actually clean for Kerry. He was looking for money for the Kerry campaign. I can be a jerk and I started telling him how great Howard Dean is and how Kerry is too corporate and had lost that great spirit he had when he got back from VietNam (a few decades ago). He seemed to pay attention, which surprised me. Obviously I didn't give him any money but we stayed in touch and a year later he told me he had taken my advice and investigated more progressive organizations than the Democratic Party. (Of course, now the joke's on me, with my hero Howard Dean heading up the DNC!) Anyway, Eugene was born in the Ukraine in 1983 (just like my grandpa-- only earlier). His family moved to Milwaukee when he was 6 where he grew up. He just graduated from Brandeis with a double major in philosophy and politics (and a minor in law). This morning he wrote to me and told me about his feelings about the CIA's gulags in Eastern Europe. He had written letters to the 2 Wisconsin senators, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold and the 2 Massachusetts senators, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, and he said it would be ok for me to share it with everyone.

Dear Senator

This is not the first time I have written to my elected officials, but
I can honestly say that I have never been this compelled to do so.
Never have I been so deeply shaken.

The reports of the CIA's eastern-European holding facilities are
distressing on a very personal level. My family, like so many others,
fled the former Soviet Union to escape repressive regimes with secret
prisons.  Why did we bother with the Cold War if we have now adopted
the same tactics and accepted that notion that human rights can be
sacrificed out of convenience? How can we continue to call ourselves a
nation of the free when we are slowly becoming everything we have long
rejected?

This recent disclosure has left me embarrassed and ashamed.  Forgotten
men cower in dark cells, where they are held by American hands without
having been charged, tried, or convicted.  They are kept purposely
away from our collective gaze, where there is no law or oversight, as
if an ocean's length can obscure our commitment to justice.  I am
deeply hurt that a country I have loved from my first steps on its
soil is capable of such action.

There is a segment of the nation that accepts this "by any means
necessary" approach, desiring to viciously suppress and destroy any
perceived threat.  Perhaps there is a part in all of us that wishes
this, but these sentiments represent the worst of our nature.  We look
back at the terrible chapters of American history – our treatment of
Native Americans and African Americans, our inexcusable inaction
during genocides in Europe, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur – and marvel
at our own ability to endure the suffering of others.  We avert our
eyes and scratch our heads when school children ask about these
horrific realities.  We say that had we had the power, we would have
done things differently.

While the Anti-Torture bill may be a step in the right direction, it
is overly broad and lacks the components of workable legislation.  It
is a nice symbolic gesture, but much more practical steps are needed.
I implore you and your Senate colleagues to denounce these barbaric
prisons as blights on this nation, and to aggressively seek their
decommission.  Let them stand to serve as reminders of a time when
human liberty was stifled by the cloak of oppression.

It seems that for the last few years, America has struggled with its
commitment to our founding principles.  Surely, the heightened sense
of global threat has forced us to ask hard questions about the
freedoms we have enjoyed.  I submit that it is at these times that our
principles become most important.   We must expressly stand by them
when it is hardest to do so.  We must stay true to our convictions
when it is most inconvenient, for that is the true measure of any
freedom-loving nation.

Thank you.