The Washington Post has an excellent op-ed today on the Guantanamo prison, and one section highlights to me what the U.S. Government has become:

“Ali Shah Mousovi is standing at attention at the far end of the room, his leg chained to the floor. His expression is wary, but when he sees me in my traditional embroidered shawl from Peshawar, he breaks into a smile. Later, he’ll tell me that I resemble his younger sister, and that for a split second he mistook me for her.

I introduce myself and Peter Ryan, a Philadelphia lawyer for whom I’m interpreting. I hand Mousovi a Starbucks chai, the closest thing to Afghan tea I’ve been able to find on the base. Then I open up boxes of pizza, cookies and baklava, but he doesn’t reach for anything. Instead, in true Afghan fashion, he urges us to share the food we have brought for him.

Mousovi is a physician from the Afghan city of Gardez, where he was arrested by U.S. troops 2 1/2 years ago. He tells us that he had returned to Afghanistan in August 2003, after 12 years of exile in Iran, to help rebuild his wathan , his homeland. He believes that someone turned him in to U.S. forces just to collect up to $25,000 being offered to anyone who gave up a Talib or al-Qaeda member.

As I translate from Pashto, Mousovi hesitantly describes life since his arrest. Transported to Bagram air base near Kabul in eastern Afghanistan, he was thrown — blindfolded, hooded and gagged — into a 3 1/2 -by-7-foot shed. He says he was beaten regularly by Americans in civilian clothing, deprived of sleep by tape-recordings of sirens that blared day and night. He describes being dragged around by a rope, subjected to extremes of heat and cold. He says he barely slept for an entire month.

He doesn’t know why he was brought to Guantanamo Bay. He had hoped he would be freed at his military hearing in December 2004. Instead, he was accused of associating with the Taliban and of funneling money to anti-coalition insurgents. When he asked for evidence, he was told it was classified. And so he sits in prison, far from his wife and three children. More than anyone, he misses his 11-year-old daughter, Hajar. When he talks about her, his eyes fill with tears and his head droops.”

These abuses have gone on under the Bush Administration, but the culture did not begin with George W. Instead, it is a natural progression of a state that becomes all-powerful, and a “citizenry” that is taught to revere anything that comes from Washington.

Perhaps Ali Shah Mousovi can take heart in knowing that U.S. authorities do not treat Americans any better. We live today under a government that suspects all of us to be terrorists, at least when we travel, and lives in fear that someone is going to crash a one-engine Cessna into the Capitol at any minute.

I’m not sure what we should call the USA, but perhaps the United States of Fear is a good place to start.