Blog chatter over the Tennessee torture case has taken an unfortunate turn into petty Red State-Blue State territory.

Andrew Sullivan picked up the story yesterday, and pondered a link between CIA torture and torture by drug cops, suggesting that when the federal government condones torture overseas, we probably shouldn’t be surprised when government agents at home are given light sentences for torturing drug suspects. He then suggested that the Bush administration’s rather callous approach to civil liberties on other fronts might play a role in this kind of behavior from law enforcement at the local level.

That caused Glenn Reynolds to approvingly link to two sites mocking Sullivan for, as they put it, “blaming Bush for police brutality.” That then degenerated into a childish “blame Bush for everything” caricature of Sullivan’s position.

I’ll take a pass on the CIA torture/Abu Ghraib link to the Tennessee case. Sullivan raises some interesting points, as have others commenting on the connection. I’m not sure I buy it. Excesses in narcotics policing began to tick up in the Reagan administration. My guess is tha the Tennessee incident would have happened regardless of whether we’re operating “black sites” in Eastern Europe, or Lindy England made the cover of Newsweek. Nevertheless, it’s certainly worth considering, and not outside the bounds of reasoned discussion.

But Reynolds and the sites he links to mischaracterize what Sullivan wrote about this administration’s more general record on civil liberties, seemingly intentionally. Sullivan didn’t lay blame for every incidence of police brutality at Bush’s feet. He merely suggested that this administration’s disregard for personal liberty at the federal level may have a deleterious effect on policing at the local level.

And he’s right.

It is the Bush administration, after all, that has sent federal SWAT teams into hospices and convalescent centers, where they’ve aimed assault weapons at cancer patients, AIDS patients, and post-polio patients for the crime of attempting to alleviate their symptoms with marijuana.

It is the Bush adminstration that likewise continues to send SWAT teams into doctors’ offices, arresting physicians with otherwise spotless records for the crime of treating chronic pain patients with high-dose opiate therapy, proven to be effective, but which drug cops without medical degrees have decided is “outside the course of normal treatment” — all in an effort to battle a phantom “epidemic” of OxyContin abuse.

It was the Bush administration that abandoned all allegiance to federalism, effectively smothering in the cradle the Rehnquist revolution that began with Lopez, when it decided that using federal laws to deny a sick woman access to the medical marijuana that gave her relief was a more important priority than states’ rights.

The name on the other side of the Raich decision was “Gonzalez.” It wasn’t “Reno.” Clinton took a hands-off approach to medical marijuana, and let states make their own policy.

It is the Bush administration that filed an amicus brief in the Hudson case on behalf of the police, taking a position that would inevitably lead to more no-knock raids, and consequently even more “wrong door” raids, and the continued terrorizing, injury, and death of innocents that comes with them.

Most pertinent to this dicussion, it was the Bush administration that ran inflammatory ads accusing recreational drug users of financing international terrorism, attempting to make the case that there’s no moral distinction between dope dealers and al-Qaeda operatives. When the White House’s top drug policy people run a million-dollar ad campaign suggesting that small-time drug dealers are no better than terrorists, it’s certainly reasonable to wonder if that might contribute to the mindset that leads drug cops to treat drug suspects like terrorists, isn’t it?

At this point, the usual response from the blogosphere-right is to point to Bill Clinton’s drug war record. Please do. He certainly wasn’t worse than the likes of Karen Tandy or John Walters when it comes to dehumanizing drug users. But he wasn’t a whole hell of a lot better, either. I have no love for Clinton, Reno, or Barry McCaffery. A pox on them, too.

But there’s no question that Bush’s drug warriors have ratcheted up the vitriolic rhetoric, expanded the drug war to new frontiers, and found new ways to wreak damage with the drug war hammer. It was John Walters’ old boss, ardent Bush supporter, and Bush I drug czar William Bennett, don’t forget, who once suggested we suspend habeas corpus for drug dealers, then later suggested they be publicly beheaded.

It’s disingenuous to support an administration that paints drug users and dealers as subhuman scum no better than the 9/11 hijackers, then feign shock when someone dares to suggest that such rhetoric and policies might be to blame when drug cops do in fact treat suspected drug users or dealers …as subhuman scum no better than the 9/11 hijackers.

What’s unfortunate is that the reflexive pro-Bush/anti-Bush rhetoric has buried the lede, here. Which is that we have audio of five police officers torturing a small stakes drug dealer. You’d think that drug war critics would be more interested in getting that audio in front of as many people as possible than quibbling over whether red state or blue state values are to blame for it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 11:58 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.