Remembering Dr. Alfonsín

Dr. Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín, who died yesterday at the age of 82, will very likely be judged more fairly by history, as the major statesman he was, than he has been in his own lifetime. The former president of Argentina has often been more highly criticized for passage of the so-called “Full Stop” Law – putting an end to trials against repressors who kidnapped, tortured and murdered citizens and foreigners alike under the military’s bloody National Reorganization Process – or for leaving office six months early (after what was arguably the most arduous presidency in Argentine history) than he has been praised for taking the former military juntas to trial or for capably putting down an extremist military revolt that threatened to immerse the country in civil war.
In terms of the unrealistic expectations that President Alfonsín’s rise to office generated and the largely unfair criticism that his administration’s term in office ultimately elicited, parallels might well be drawn with the Obama Administration in the United States. In both cases – and making allowances for subtle degrees of ignominy - the voting populations were reacting to eight years of unprecedented abuse of authority, disrespect for human rights, undermined rule of law and hidden yet clearly underlying economic chaos and manipulated stagnation. Like Barack Obama, Raúl Alfonsín’s election victory brought an almost delirious outpouring of popular celebration. Dr. Alfonsín’s December 1983 rise to office produced a spontaneous manifestation of public support that choked the streets of downtown Buenos Aires and the lawn of Plaza de Mayo in front of Government House with cheering crowds estimated at well over a million people. Never before had Argentine politics witnessed such a mass demonstration of political frenzy and celebration – not even in the days three decades before when Juan and Eva Perón harangued the “descamisados” from the balcony of the presidential offices.
For nearly a decade – starting with the reign of terror that began even before the 1976 military coup, provoked by the band of thugs that formed part of the entourage surrounding Isabel Perón when she took office following President Juan Perón’s death in 1974 – Argentines had lived in fear of authority, in fear of politics, in fear of almost anything but going from their homes to their jobs and from their jobs back home. President Alfonsín, very much like President Obama, seemed to represent the blazing beacon at the end of a very dark tunnel. And the brilliance of that light made Dr. Alfonsín – like Mr. Obama – seem just a little bit bigger than life.
Such tall expectations, however, can be a true liability. Colorless leaders in boring times have the advantage of being quickly forgotten and free from blame. Leaders of great promise are subject to close scrutiny and to myriad accusations when what they seek to achieve falls even slightly short of the mark (as witnessed by the campaign of “de-mystification” mounted against President Obama from his first hour in office and the demands that he keep his campaign promises word for word and show instant results after only two months in office).
The newborn democracy that President Alfonsín inherited was, in a sense, a “democracy by permission” from the military. It was semi-transitional in the sense that there was nothing unconditional about the political and judicial power in place at the time. The military had taken steps to ensure that its members would continue to enjoy the impunity they had during their seven-and-a-half-year usurpation of power: General Reynaldo Bignone, the last in the series of dictators at the head of the ‘Proceso’, handed a sweeping general pardon to all military personnel and officers for their part in the massive human rights abuses and murders that took place under the regime.
Considering the earlier half-century of Argentine history, in which elected presidents had been removed from office like barely tolerated pawns by one military coup after another, it was a truly bold move on Dr. Alfonsín’s part to rescind the Bignone pardon and push ahead with the long and highly publicized trial of members of successive ‘Proceso’ juntas. Bolder still was his forming of the National Commission on Missing Persons (CONADEP), the high profile of which he ensured by asking world famous Argentine novelist Ernesto Sábato to head it. The CONADEP did its job swiftly and thoroughly, bringing home the truth about some 30,000 disappearances under the military regime by gathering documentable evidence on as many cases as possible. When Mr. Sábato handed the report to Dr. Alfonsín, 8,900 victims of State terror were no longer stuck forever in the limbo of “the disappeared”. Suddenly, they had names and faces and the details of their abductions, incarcerations and deaths were published in black and white for all the world to see. And people like Lieutenant General Jorge R. Videla – the emblematic first president of the dictatorship – who had cynically stated that the word “missing” said it all, that those who had disappeared simply “didn’t exist”, was now in court, sitting before the special tribunal at a table with the other ‘Proceso’ accused.
Despite the fact that successive military uprisings led by insurrectionist extremists in the middle ranks from lieutenant colonel down would force the president to negotiate an end (albeit temporary) to further court action against the former regime, the trials and sentencing against the general officers of the military juntas stood, in what was an unprecedented victory for national democracy.
And Dr. Alfonsín made other rapid inroads against armed forces domestic dominion, by shifting the concentration of military might away from the Federal Capital and into areas of strategic importance in case of foreign attack, as well as by restricting the economic autonomy of the Armed Forces. One of the major ways in which he did this was to remove the country’s top defense contractor, the powerful Fabricaciones Militares, from Armed Forces control and place it under the administration of the Federal Government. This was a move so unpopular within the military that the Alfonsín Administration was forced to order literally scores of general officers (generals and admirals) into retirement to quell opposition to the action and thus prevent organized resistance.
Despite concessions made in putting down the revolts of the so-called carapintadas (painted-faces) – a relatively reduced group of military rebels who hid their identities by smearing their faces with camouflage grease-paint – President Alfonsín demonstrated outstanding leadership in not only rallying public support from the civilian population, but also by maintaining the backing of the bulk of the Armed Forces, in the face of a situation that could well have sparked civil war and the return of a military faction to dictatorial rule. Even the “Full Stop” on prosecution of military men accused of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity was not an outright ban as such. It limited legal action against several hundred suspected repressors to trials against only those who could be indicted within a 60-day period following passage of the law. Be that as it may, due to the reluctance to testify of many of those who had suffered at the hands of the ‘Proceso’ and considering the plodding pace of the Justice System, a two-month statute of limitations was practically an effective ban and clearly compromised the otherwise stellar return of rule of law in Argentina. But in all fairness to Dr. Alfonsín, and in 20-20 hindsight, at that point in history, his pragmatism on this point is very likely what kept the country from being plunged back into a pending coup mode – and this time led by rightwing extremists who would have made the ‘Proceso’ look like a walk in the park.
Furthermore, his democratically elected successor, opposition Peronist politician, Dr. Carlos Menem, far from rescinding the amnesty, further sealed it, by promoting the so-called “Due Obedience” Law. This law basically stated that the former juntas that had already been tried and convicted were the only officers responsible for the horrendous crimes of the ‘Proceso’ era and that all others were “only obeying orders”. Despite the Nazi-like ‘logic’ behind the tenets of this law and the international precedents for placing no statute of limitations on heinous crimes against humanity, it is only now, a quarter-century after Dr. Alfonsín’s election triumph and nearly two decades after the Menem Administration took over from him, that the ban has been lifted and a handful of aging repressors are finally tottering before the court for indictment and trial.
Despite such setbacks, with the election of President Alfonsín, Argentines breathed a new air of freedom on the streets of the country’s cities. For the first time in decades, citizens could look policemen and military men in the eye and not fear being detained, beaten or tortured on an arbitrary whim. The government went from being the nation’s jailer to being at the service of the people and the law. The courts became independent of Executive “oversight” and people’s civil and human rights were fully and demonstratively respected. Journalists, politicians and the common folk regained their voices and posed their opinions. Dissidence was once again considered a right, and taking a stance almost became a moral and ethical obligation. Artists, writers and intellectuals who had lived in exile – and often in hiding, even abroad – came back by the score, some with pre-adolescent children, or husbands and wives, who had never known their spouses’ or parents’ native land. It was a celebration of freedom and democracy, a national honeymoon with a new destiny. But expectations were blatantly unrealistic and jealous political motivations made them even more so. In the end, President Alfonsín would find himself embattled and berated on all sides, in spite of his having consolidated a new national legacy of democracy, ethics and respect for the individual like no other in recent memory, and having done it all in a mere half-decade.
In point of fact, President Alfonsín’s most powerful enemy – like that of President Barack Obama – was the economy he inherited. And his merciless political opponents, particularly in the Peronist movement, used it to their advantage to undermine his government’s popularity and credibility at every turn, while creating a climate of impending chaos. The chief opposition party made use of its pressure groups, and particularly of the Peronist labor unions grouped under the General Federation of Labor (CGT), to severely hamper the administration. While to his credit, firebrand CGT leader Saúl Ubaldini had previously organized several nationwide general strikes against the military, during President Alfonsín’s administration he promoted no fewer than 13 general stoppages that paralyzed the country.
The economy inherited from the military was in ruins, with the juntas having run up tens of billions of dollars in foreign debt spent on Pharaonic projects and arms for a near war with Chile and an effective conflict with Great Britain – the Falklands (Malvinas) War, the loss of which spelled the beginning of the end for the regime – at a time when international interest rates were on the rise. Although the country was recording modest growth and a better than modest trade surplus, these attributes were ravenously swallowed up by the looming shadow of the burgeoning international debt, which had reached crisis proportions. Already by the end of the military regime, following the South Atlantic War fiasco, the country’s inflation was soaring at around 18% a month. But by Dr. Alfonsín’s second year in office, it had skyrocketed to almost twice that much, breaking world records, and the country’s currency was devalued practically by the hour.
Seeking to counter this and inject new confidence into the economy, the Alfonsín Administration created a new currency, the austral, which was swapped for the old peso argentino at a rate of a thousand pesos to one austral. President Alfonsín tied promotion of the new currency to the similar promotion of a plan to move the Federal Capital from Buenos Aires to Viedma, gateway to Patagonia, seeking to de-concentrate the population in and around the country’s largest city, while sparking a wave of development and settlement in the largely under-populated interior of the country.
Meanwhile, the administration sought renegotiation of the foreign debt and injections of new direct foreign capital investment into the economy. But for the most part, international confidence in Argentina’s economy was shattered and the crisp new austral, that had opened foreign exchange trade at a higher than parity rate against the US dollar was not sufficient (even with imposed product price controls) to stem the tide of rampant inflation at home.
Complicating matters still further, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States and was clearly unfriendly to the Alfonsín Administration. Mr. Reagan had had two years to get to know the military regime and one of his first acts back then was to send word to Buenos Aires to tell the ‘Proceso’ leaders that the Jimmy Carter era, with its human rights priority in foreign diplomacy was over and that the military’s stand against international communism was more important now to Washington than the atrocities the regime had committed against its own citizens. Even when the regime took over the South Atlantic islands and courted war with Britain, the ‘Proceso’ managed to maintain fairly civil relations with Reagan’s Washington. US-Argentine relations became severely strained, however, when the Alfonsín Administration withdrew support for Washington-backed Contra guerrillas that were resisting the leftist Sandinistas that overthrew pro-US dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. The ‘Proceso’, for its part, had been providing the Contras with material support in order to win favor with Washington. The Alfonsín Administration further miffed Reagan by turning down an offer to reinstate US arms sales to Argentina, telling Washington that “arms were not a priority” for the nation’s new democratic government. So it was that the Reagan Administration remained less than receptive to Buenos Aires on principle throughout the rest of President Alfonsín’s term in office.In spite of the lack of solidarity shown by Washington and the flurry of rising criticism over the “Full Stop” Law from formerly staunch allies in the international human rights movement, the Alfonsín Administration managed to start mending fences with Britain and to promote the end of a border dispute in the Beagle Channel with neighboring Chile, as well as scoring numerous other international diplomatic victories and positioning the country as a moral and ethical force in the Americas and the developing world.
But without the economic help and massive investment that the country needed to rise above its economic woes, the moral capital accrued and the democratic legacy constructed by the Alfonsín presidency was doomed to be overshadowed by impending economic and social chaos. Hyperinflation spun out of control, rendering the austral worthless and opposition political shock forces took advantage of the confusion to organize rioting and supermarket looting that thrust the country into a nightmare of disorder and decay. By the end of Dr. Alfonsín’s presidency, most people had forgotten what his election had signified for democracy and what his outstanding leadership had done toward consolidating the republic and ensuring that the ‘Proceso’ was the last of Argentina’s myriad de facto governments.
Today would be an excellent day to recall what Raúl Alfonsín and his presidency signify from a panoramic historical viewpoint and honor him as the great Argentine statesman that he was. Twenty years ago, when Dr. Alfonsín was practically shoved from office in near-disgrace, his former Foreign Minister, Dante Caputo, placed things in historical and political perspective when he admitted that there were still grave economic problems to be resolved in Argentina, but added: ''The fundamental accomplishment of Alfonsín has been to prove that we Argentines – not just the Government – were capable of breaking the vicious cycle [of authoritarian rule] and constructing a democratic country.''

Captions:

• Top - President Alfonsín wearing the Presidential sash.
• Lower - Crowds jam Plaza de Mayo on Inauguration Day.

Waterboarding – Aquatic Sport or Torture?

Night-time talk show host Jay Leno recently did an on-the-street survey in which he asked random urban Americans questions that just about anybody who watches TV news (let alone anyone who ever went to grade school) should know the answers to – things like: Who is the President of the Senate? What is Gitmo? And so on. About the only give-away question he didn't ask was the classic Groucho Marx bonus query on the iconic comic's 1950s TV game show, You Bet Your Life: Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

And like the responses Groucho used to get, the ones Leno's survey elicited were as hilarious as they were pathetic, in a country where information and the technology to acquire it are available to the point of overload.

One question I don’t believe Mr. Leno asked, but which he might well have, if he had wanted to hear some truly side-splitting answers is: What is waterboarding? Even after all of the debate that this practice has generated in the news, in government and among political and social organizations from one end of the spectrum to the other, I am almost willing to bet that there would have been any number of answers involving aquatic sports: You know, like, snow-skiing/snowboarding, water-skiing/waterboarding…

Actually, it would have come as no surprise to me at all if no one in an on-the-street survey were to have described it as a form of torture. After all, President Bush doesn't. And neither do certain high-profile apologists for some of Mr. Bush’s more questionable policies, like top conservative news show host Bill O'Reilly at Fox News. In fact, when once backed into a corner by Carol Bogart of the NGO, Human Rights Watch, over his support of waterboarding as an alternative interrogation technique to save American lives, Mr. O’Reilly blithely described waterboarding as having a little water poured over your face. Mr. O’Reilly has repeatedly brought up waterboarding on his prime time show, The O’Reilly Factor, always in a positive light and always minimizing its pernicious effects – both on the victim and, more importantly, on rule of law.

This is not an attitude that is worthy of Mr. O’Reilly’s intelligence, experience, learning or background. Waterboarding is torture, pure and simple, and his reiterated defense of it – like the President’s – is simply unconscionable and wrong. He might as well say right out what he is thinking, that it’s okay as long as it is being done to what he considers “bad guys” and not to him or anyone he knows – you know, good guys. It doesn’t seem to matter to him, or to the President that torture precludes due process of law and that it is precisely through due process that we find out who the bad guys really are, instead of torturing anyone he or President Bush would like to torture in order to find out if they are – or so as to get them to confess that they are, whether they are or not.

Mr. O’Reilly holds degrees in history, journalism and public administration and, as such, should surely be aware of the threat that such “flexibility” with other people’s rights signifies for society as a whole. Especially since he covered Argentina during the Malvinas (Falklands) War, at the end of the authoritarian regime that I myself had been covering for most of a decade when he arrived, and if he didn’t learn anything else from that experience or from his coverage of the civil war carnage in El Salvador, which he also covered, he should have at least learned what happens when authoritarians are permitted to suspend individual rights “in the name of national security”. If, despite his vast education and experience, he can continue to promote the “limited use” of waterboarding at the discretion of the Executive Branch, then, as he himself might say, he needs to “wise up”.

What is Waterboarding?

Waterboarding is a form of torture - I repeat, a form of torture – that dates back, at least, to the Spanish Inquisition. Back then, the Inquisitors would stuff a cloth into the victim’s mouth and pour pitchers of water over it so that all of the water was forced into the prisoner’s gullet, causing him/her to choke and strangle and experience drowning, but permitting the torturer to control how fast the drowning process occurred and, thus, prolong the symptoms – and the suffering – until the victim cracked and confessed to whatever “demonic ritual” he or she was accused of.

Water torture of this and other kinds has been applied by just about every authoritarian regime before and since the Inquisition and has played a role in some of the darkest chapters of America’s own human rights abuse history from the Salem witch trials – in which women accused of witchcraft were strapped to a seat on a long lever and dunked in a river or pond repeatedly until they “confessed” to being witches – to the modern-day waterboarding of post-911 terror suspects held by the government without trial or due process.

In the modern version of waterboarding, victims are immobilized by being strapped to a board on their backs with their heads inclined downward. Water is then poured from a hose, tap, bucket or pitcher onto the face, running into and filling up victims’ breathing passages and causing them to feel that they are drowning. The difference between waterboarding and more common water torture techniques – like dunking the victim or holding the victim’s head under water until asphyxia is imminent, is that waterboarding has the added element of activating the gag reflex. Victims cannot fight waterboarding by holding their breath because the water is poured directly into the breathing passages through the mouth and nose, immediately causing severe gagging and choking. This is said by experts to cause the victim’s resistance to break down in record time – usually less than half a minute. For tough to break prisoners (one of the recent victims of U.S. government torture is reported to have held out for more than 20 minutes of water torture before finally breaking down) there are varying degrees of waterboarding, with one of the advanced stages including tightly wrapping the victim's entire face, including the nose, in clear plastic cling-type wrap, then opening a hole for the mouth and repeatedly pouring water in through the opening. This is a variation on the long-used technique applied by the ruthless mass murders of the Khmer Rouge in torturing prisoners at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after the United States pulled out of Indo-China at the end of the Vietnam War. Testimonies by prison survivors tell how the Khmer Rouge interrogators would strap prisoners down with an absorbent cloth over their entire face and then gradually pour on water with a sprinkling can or bucket until the fabric was so saturated that the victim had no choice but to breathe in the water that ran from it. One such survivor was Vann Nath, who painted an illustration of the technique, which now hangs on the wall of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

The added advantage for those applying this torture is that, unlike techniques that make use of instruments of torture (electric cattle prods; blow torches; beatings with rubber truncheons; flogging; pliers, clamps or vices applied to nails, appendages, genitalia or other body parts, etc.) waterboarding leaves no obvious physical marks. What this means is that it is hard for the victim to prove he or she was ever tortured if they later wish to claim that their confession was obtained under duress.

Bad Company

Water tortures including waterboarding have been used by the very regimes that, over the course of modern history, the United States has denounced as inhuman and as being violators of international law and treaties (the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, among others): Both Hitler’s Gestapo and the Imperial Japanese forces made use of variations on waterboarding alone or in combination with other tortures during World War II, with some of their number being sentenced to long years in prison for war crimes as a result of their interrogation techniques in Allied war crime trials that followed the war – trials of which Washington was a major proponent.

One compelling testimony of such cruelty to prisoners came from a US airman called Chase Nielsen who was captured in a retaliatory raid on the Japanese following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Providing a chilling and concise account of the waterboarding process, Nielsen said that he was “put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I’d get my breath, then they’d start over again... I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.” What the former airman describes is a perfect definition of the waterboarding technique that Mr. Bush’s administration would have the world believe is a legitimate, alternative, interrogation method.

The elite French paratroopers used the method in Algeria against suspected rebels during French colonial occupation of that country. French law eventually placed an official ban on waterboarding, but not before numerous captives died from induced drowning and a campaign against these methods was organized by renowned French intellectuals including Sartre.

In President Bush’s own state of Texas, in 1983, a county sheriff and three of his deputies were convicted of “conspiring to force confessions” for using waterboarding on prisoners. They ended up being sentenced for the crime – the sheriff to ten years in prison and his deputies to four – described in court as “a suffocating water torture ordeal” and which was detailed as very much the same method that President Bush and his apologists have repeatedly condoned.

Many experts including not only human rights activists but also former law enforcement, military and CIA officers point out that the procedure is not only illegal and morally objectionable, but also unreliable. As with any torture, when the level of suffering reaches a certain phase, at which the prisoner either fears imminent death or wishes for it, he or she will “confess” to almost anything merely in order to make the torment stop. And as Arthur Miller so masterfully points out in his classic “The Crucible”, we’ve been aware of that fact since the Salem witch trials, where innocent women were tortured until they could bear it no more and confessed to witchcraft, only to be summarily executed (murdered) afterwards, with the blessing of the local authorities.

Just as the Puritan authorities of those times filled the people with such fear that they saw witchcraft at every turn, so too the Bush Administration has managed in eight years to generate such a high level of paranoia among large sectors of the US population that many Americans also see a terrorist behind every tree and so have been willing to give the President any latitude he wants in order to exterminate this perceived threat. But with the Bush government on its way out of office, the question Americans should be asking themselves is, at what cost to democracy and civil and human rights has this license been granted?

If it Walks Like a Duck…

Even if we throw the international rule book out the window because “they did it to us and now it’s payback time”, or simply because Washington suddenly feels itself completely above international law and above long-standing treaties that it not only signed but once championed, torture is still prohibited under the US War Crimes Act. So is there a technical question here for defending the indefensible? I mean, is waterboarding torture, or isn’t it?

There are plenty of military men, forensic medical examiners, jurists, intelligence experts, lawmakers and other interested parties, including victims, that would agree that it is. But the best way to tell is to look at the evidence and if it looks like a duck, talks like a duck and walks like a duck, then...you know the rest. And every description or testimony that you hear about it makes it clear that waterboarding is, indeed, torture – that is, unless you believe, like Mr. O’Reilly pretends to, that “they just pour a little water on your face”.

In its advanced stages, waterboarding cannot even be considered mild torture, much less “a valid, professional interrogation technique”, as those advocating it have suggested: Human rights researchers say that while waterboarding, if very moderately applied, doesn't always cause lasting physical damage to the victim, in its most extreme stages, it poses the risks of severe pain, brain damage, pulmonary damage, indirectly related injuries like joint dislocations and fractures (from the victim's desperate struggle against restraints and impending death), heart failure and, not infrequently, death by asphyxiation. Furthermore, the psychological effects on the survivors of waterboarding can be long-lasting, even permanent.

The bottom line is that if you have to torture someone to find out what he or she knows, there is clearly reasonable doubt about their guilt or innocence, and therefore, doubt too about whether the torture is being applied to someone whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time, no matter what their prior criminal or political record may look like.

Good Company

Furthermore, any American who recognizes the inherent wrongness in the authorities' condoning this kind of behavior – indeed, promoting it, as the Bush Administration has – is in excellent company, historically speaking. Some US Armed Forces officers who have, in the past, applied waterboarding to captured enemy elements have been tried and convicted of torture and sentenced to lengthy prison terms since at least as far back as the Spanish-American War (when, for instance, Major Edwin Glenn was handed a ten-year sentence for waterboarding a terror suspect in the Philippines). Perhaps one of the most renowned cases was one involving one of America’s toughest presidents ever, a man whose stunning political career was preceded by a brilliant military history, in which he reached the stature of folk hero, not only among the common people, but also among his military colleagues: namely, Theodore Roosevelt. It was Rough Rider Teddy who, as President, ordered the court martial of a US general for permitting his men to employ waterboarding in interrogating prisoners on the island of Samar. The subsequent court of the officer’s peers evidently wanted to send a message to President Roosevelt – like the one so often sent to the American people by Mr. Bush and Mr. O’Reilly – to the effect that extraordinary circumstances sometimes called for extraordinary measures, so they only concluded that the general had been overzealous in his duties. But as commander-in-chief, President Roosevelt cast aside the court martial’s verdict and drummed the general out of the Army.

A Little Bit Pregnant?

There are issues in the life of a nation that permit no shades of grey, and when it comes to rule of law and civil and human rights, there is simply no such thing as “sort of”. Exceptions of convenience with regard to individual rights are tantamount to being “a little bit pregnant”. When it comes to upholding the law and the Bill of Rights, you do it or you don't. There's no in-between. Permitting a country's political leaders to take on powers that belong to Justice, especially in as far as they affect the rights of every individual to due process of law, is an invitation to tyranny.

“Bending” the tenets of due process and rule of law to suit whatever historical stage a country may be going through – as the Bush Administration has done in Guantanamo and elsewhere – is a dangerous precedent, one that we who have long researched and reported on authoritarian regimes know all too well. Far too many dictators elsewhere in the world have awarded themselves sweeping power “to protect democracy against external and internal attack.” And although Americans tend to think that a dictatorship would be impossible in the United States, the Bush Administration has given us a glimpse of just how far authoritarianism can advance just by permitting the Executive Branch to take a bit more “latitude” all the time.

Whoever ends up in the White House next year would do well to focus on getting the country back on the straight and narrow with regard to truly defending democracy and human rights, instead of giving lip service to both while clearly violating them in the name of executive power.