Just days after exposing torture during the Bush administration, the Obama administration is curtailing the use of the word “torture.” As calls for the prosecution of those who violated national and international laws have been rejected, the Obama administration has chosen the path of euphemisms. Now “torture” is called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Torture is an explosive issue, but it cannot be buried without a resolution. However, it now appears this is what Barack Obama has in mind.
First, let us understand that international law is not just about torture, but also the ill-treatment of prisoners. Nearly every international document regarding torture, and the United States is a signatory to most, lay torture and ill-treatment side-by-side. In the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, the document seeks to insure a means “to prevent torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Torture is only the most extreme abuse. The international community roundly condemns acts much less extreme as illegal and immoral.
Taking that into consideration, waterboarding, involving simulated drowning, or walling, slamming someone’s head against a wall, clearly violate those prohibitions.
To claim that CIA and other government agents were only following orders is to ignore a hideous deed. Nazi soldiers who operated the gas chambers of the Holocaust were only following orders. Participants of the Spanish Inquisition were only following orders. Those who tortured John McCain and his fellow POW’s in North Vietnam were only following orders. The henchman of Elizabethan times employed gruesome torture, but only followed orders. During World War II, the Japanese disobeyed all international codes of decency by torturing Chinese, Americans, British, Koreans and others – all by simply following orders.
Nevertheless, torture apologists point out that the torturers in these cases were not upholding a system of democracy, freedom and justice. Supposedly, that is what American torturers were defending. Yet, these great values are the antithesis of the American way. No less a patriot than George Washington expressed the wrongness of torture. After the battle of Princeton, Washington put 211 Hessian privates under the watch of an officer with this order: “Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren…. Provide everything necessary for them on the road.”
As the Revolutionary War developed, our Founding Fathers demanded a higher moral ground for the country they envisioned. They believed their actions must be consistent with the government they wished to found. Fair treatment of an enemy was a cornerstone of that vision.
If Washington felt it necessary to uphold human rights before a Geneva Convention was ever formulated and before the United States government was created, then why do the agents of the most powerful nation of the world fear that a dispersed band of religious extremists poses a threat that takes precedence over any other conflict in American history. Why has torture taken precedence over the basic values of being an American?
It is ironic that in the protection of our lives and property, we are willing to set aside our values and honor. Yet, when American patriots like John McCain were tortured, they endured abuse on their lives to protect their valued and honor.
It simply is not possible to hold as heroes both a tortured John McCain and a CIA agent waterboarding an al-Qaeda terrorist.
Either national and international law was broken and we must pursue justice against all who condoned it, or the values that Washington and his contemporaries promoted are dead.
What happened in the last few years with torture is very un-American. There must be some reprimand for the government agents who tortured and those who ordered it, namely George Bush, Dick Cheney and other White House advisors.
How can the order to torture be less than the break-in at the Watergate Hotel or sexual escapade with an intern in the Oval Office?
It simply isn’t.
The willful order to violate the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment against “cruel and unusual punishments” cannot be sidestepped by the legal juggling act that the Bush administration tried.
Waterboarding and walling are cruel and unusual punishments. It doesn’t matter if it was on the American mainland or offshore military bases. Are we only Americans when we are stateside?
For Barack Obama to ignore some process of justice to play out is weakness. It is a deplorable lack of faith in American justice.
I am not saying that Bush, Cheney and the CIA agents who abused their power should be imprisoned for years, but they should be confronted with their deeds and forced to admit their errors or persuade the nation that walling a prisoner is the American way.
Other nations, such as South Africa, have had truth commissions to uncover nightmares in their past. It is time for an American truth commission as well.
Lyndon Johnson knew that victory in Vietnam rested less on American military might than changing the way the Vietnamese thought. As Johnson said:
“Ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds of the people who actually live out there. By helping to bring them hope and electricity you are also striking a very important blow for the cause of freedom throughout the world.”
Unfortunately, Johnson failed to pursue what he said and he failed. That same mistake is being repeated again. This lesson must not be ignored now so that it must be relearned by a later generation of leaders.
Victory against the extremism of Muslim terrorists is not achievable by waterboarding. Those extremists and their allies will see it as persecution and seek solace in their hardened religious views. This war is a long struggle that will take many years and can only be won by winning the “hearts and minds” of our opponents with the ideals of democracy, liberty and justice.
After all, a “hearts and minds” strategy worked with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after World War II. We must not forget our successes and repeat our mistakes.
Ignore torture now, and this stain will scar American ideals. Ignore torture now, and what has happened once will become much easier to repeat in the future. That is not the American way. However, it is the way to losing our American values.
However, this is not an issue of coddling terrorists. It’s about presumption of innocence and civilized behavior. In the modern, civilized world, we hold to the notion that punishment is meted out after a fair trial. However one wants to justify or deny waterboarding, it is painful, usually severely painful. It is punishment inflicted on people who are suspected of withholding information, but people who have not been convicted of a crime.
Proponents of torture like to create an extreme scenario to justify its use. They ask, “What if a self-confessed terrorist planted a nuclear bomb in New York City, and we only had a short time to locate it and save millions?”






