Torture, torture and more torture - Part I
I think I need a bumpersticker that says: "I was against torture before being against torture was cool."
Of late, the media has been abuzz with talks of this heinous act and how our government was actively a party in it. I've been through a wide range of emotions on this issue: fear, disgust, outrage, seething anger, annoyance. It's been such a roller coaster that I had to take a step back and collect my thoughts.
The person who has been my friend the longest, mystickneon recently told me that he didn't want to insult me but he felt that I was a nonreligious zealot.
Zealot: n
1.
a. One who is zealous, especially excessively so.
b. A fanatically committed person.
Zealous: adj
Filled with or motivated by zeal; fervent
Zeal: n
Enthusiastic devotion to a cause, ideal, or goal and tireless diligence in it's furtherance.
Have I mentioned that he's known me a while? I didn't take it as an insult then, or now even after having looked it up just to make sure I had the definition right in my head. I often do that before talking about something just so I'm not talking out my ass and using words improperly. Yes, without reservation or equivocation. I am a nonreligious zealot about certain issues. Just as I lean towards the right on some issues (the death penalty, gun control, actual fiscal responsibility, national defense, the law) and on the left on some issues (gun control, actual fiscal responsibility, national defense, the law, civil rights, the Constitution) there are certain issues on which I will find myself screaming into the maelstrom. I brook no dissent. I accept no compromise. I approve of no justification. I endorse no excuse. In some cases I cannot fathom why everyone else isn't just as passionate about a particular issue as I am.
Unfortunately this zealotry has become known to others and in some case proceeds me. People have read more into things I have said about which I am not zealous, thinking that I am somehow berating them or deliberately arguing with them.
Another friend node_nine once said "The fuck you talking about? You get into arguments with your damned breakfast cereal."
I can neither confirm nor deny the event in question. However, what is true that if you push a button on an issue I am in fact passionate about it's rather hard to find the off switch or the volume control. I believe this stems from years of keeping my mouth shut in order to keep the peace in a given relationship (romantic or otherwise) to the point of ignoring my own beliefs, desires and wants. Eventually there was a backlash and on occasion it can be rather like a torrent. But I'm working on that, honest. =)
One of those issues that I am probably most zealous about is torture. The reasoning is very simple. If the torture of one person can be excused then the torture of any person can be excused. I suppose this is enlightened self interest but, I really don't want to be tortured. I really don't want my daughter tortured. I really don't want anyone I've ever met tortured. Call it enhanced interrogation or 'fraternity pranks' (dunno what fucking university those assholes went to) but there is absolutely NO place in this country for torture. Period. Full stop. Anyone who ordered it, acted upon it, actually performed it, or tried to justify it it broke both United States law as well as international law and should be arrested, put on trial and if found guilty put in prison. This applies just as much to John Q. CIA Spook as it does to Government Subcontractors as it does to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and even Anton Scalia themselves.
You want something more than just my own enlightened self interest to justify banning torture? Ok, here's a few things:
Just as we did not allow the Nazis to get away with the "I was only following orders" defense we cannot allow the rank and file members of the CIA or worse yet those companies who got government contracts to conduct torture to walk away free. Their actions, even if under direct orders from the President, were of their own. They could have filed formal protests, refused to follow orders or even resigned or retired rather than committ these heinous crimes. Even those airlines who transported prisoners to be tortured in other countries deserve some sort of penalty to ensure that this never happens again. Today it might be the 'evil Arabs' but tomorrow it could well be Liberals or Teabaggers.
If we do not draw a line in the sand here and now then we are in fact no better than the North Koreans or Chinese or any other government that has abused people to ensure it's own continued security. We have stained the soul of this nation through these practices and to leave that stain unchallenged is and even bigger stain.
Leaving this unresolved issue sitting around will only serve to make us all suffer later when some President worse than Bush comes along and attempts to do the same thing. While President Obama may well be intending to 'move foward' the fact remains that evil doesn't rest and if we do not learn from this historical lesson we will repeat it.
Of late, the media has been abuzz with talks of this heinous act and how our government was actively a party in it. I've been through a wide range of emotions on this issue: fear, disgust, outrage, seething anger, annoyance. It's been such a roller coaster that I had to take a step back and collect my thoughts.
The person who has been my friend the longest, mystickneon recently told me that he didn't want to insult me but he felt that I was a nonreligious zealot.
Zealot: n
1.
a. One who is zealous, especially excessively so.
b. A fanatically committed person.
Zealous: adj
Filled with or motivated by zeal; fervent
Zeal: n
Enthusiastic devotion to a cause, ideal, or goal and tireless diligence in it's furtherance.
Have I mentioned that he's known me a while? I didn't take it as an insult then, or now even after having looked it up just to make sure I had the definition right in my head. I often do that before talking about something just so I'm not talking out my ass and using words improperly. Yes, without reservation or equivocation. I am a nonreligious zealot about certain issues. Just as I lean towards the right on some issues (the death penalty, gun control, actual fiscal responsibility, national defense, the law) and on the left on some issues (gun control, actual fiscal responsibility, national defense, the law, civil rights, the Constitution) there are certain issues on which I will find myself screaming into the maelstrom. I brook no dissent. I accept no compromise. I approve of no justification. I endorse no excuse. In some cases I cannot fathom why everyone else isn't just as passionate about a particular issue as I am.
Unfortunately this zealotry has become known to others and in some case proceeds me. People have read more into things I have said about which I am not zealous, thinking that I am somehow berating them or deliberately arguing with them.
Another friend node_nine once said "The fuck you talking about? You get into arguments with your damned breakfast cereal."
I can neither confirm nor deny the event in question. However, what is true that if you push a button on an issue I am in fact passionate about it's rather hard to find the off switch or the volume control. I believe this stems from years of keeping my mouth shut in order to keep the peace in a given relationship (romantic or otherwise) to the point of ignoring my own beliefs, desires and wants. Eventually there was a backlash and on occasion it can be rather like a torrent. But I'm working on that, honest. =)
One of those issues that I am probably most zealous about is torture. The reasoning is very simple. If the torture of one person can be excused then the torture of any person can be excused. I suppose this is enlightened self interest but, I really don't want to be tortured. I really don't want my daughter tortured. I really don't want anyone I've ever met tortured. Call it enhanced interrogation or 'fraternity pranks' (dunno what fucking university those assholes went to) but there is absolutely NO place in this country for torture. Period. Full stop. Anyone who ordered it, acted upon it, actually performed it, or tried to justify it it broke both United States law as well as international law and should be arrested, put on trial and if found guilty put in prison. This applies just as much to John Q. CIA Spook as it does to Government Subcontractors as it does to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and even Anton Scalia themselves.
You want something more than just my own enlightened self interest to justify banning torture? Ok, here's a few things:
- Torture doesn't work.
Whatever Dick Cheney would have us believe, for every time he's been on Faux News Channel we've had five people who've actually DONE interrogations or are involved with the legal aspect of trials who have stepped up and told us how they do not work. Think about it: You're strapped to a board. You're manacled hands and feet. You've got a rag over your face. Three guys in black hoods threatening to drown your ass if you don't tell them what they want to know. Something. Anything. Your blood's CO2 level rises as they pour more and more water over your face. It seeps into your nose and mouth as you struggle to breath. You begin to panic. What do you do?
You do the same thing that John McCain did: Tell them whatever the fuck they want to know to get them to stop torturing you. Even if you have to make shit up to make them do it. Even if you have to sell out your grandmother as a Jew to the Nazis. Even if you have to tell them to do it to Julia.
Now we discover that some of our terror detainees were waterboarded over a hundred and eighty times in a month. Was this because, as Rachel Maddow posed last night, the torture didn't work the first 183 times they'd used it that month? Was it because the 183 times previous the guy didn't believe that what the guys were saying was true?
Ask yourself now, and answer honestly. If you were being waterboarded six times a day, every day. What would you do to make it stop?
And the screwed up thing is that we don't even have to go solely based on your subjective thought experiment. People who have conducted the interrogations such as Matthew Alexander and CIA interrogator Bob Baer have outright stated that they got more reliable, credible information out of people by treating them as human beings than they ever got out of torturing them. One such person appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and said that over 75% of everything they got turned out to be complete fabrications solely for the purpose of stopping the torture.
Duh.
Or just think what happened to John McCain during Viet Nam. Was he really a black pirate as he was forced to declare? That he committed crimes against women and children. A much as I dislike the man, his policies, his attitude, his questionable actions in the military and in Congress (By his own book) and as much as I don't believe he would make a good President I am willing to bet that those claims were not true. Just a hunch. Then why did he say them?
Because he wanted the damned torture to stop.
So, indeed, lets go with Dick Cheney's suggestion and declassify the supposed instances where torture 'worked'. But instead of just stopping with confirmation bias - lets release everything. We can redact specific identities if it's going to endanger US security. But I think it's time we confess the sins that we allowed our government to commit in our names. It's funny how Dick only comes forward suggesting this after he begins to worry about the potential for his own arrest and detention. Let's see precisely how efficacious it was, Dick. Then we can compare that to the 755 inmates at Gitmo out of which only a dozen or so were actually dangerous terrorists. Once we have an idea to the full extent of what we're dealing with and how much wasted time, resources, money and lives we invested in this program then we can have a conversation about all the innocent lives you destroyed along the way.
Call me silly, but i'm more likely to listen to CIA and Air Force interrogators who have themselves conducted interrogations and see how they don't work as opposed to listening to a man who lied for eight years straight and tried to declare himself his own seperate branch of government.
- Torture wastes resources.
Now that we've established that torture doesn't work you have to question: well what happens when it doesn't work. The answer is simple, it wastes resources. Think about it a bit. What happens when a teenager calls up 9/11 and says that IMA Weiner is breaking into his house? What happens when a McCain calls up the emergency line to demand that they do something about the traffic jam he's sitting in? You're wasting time, money and manpower. Every time a false report gets filed, police have to investigate it anyway. That's time that could be spent investigating real crimes. What happens if during the 10 seconds the teen is on the phone someone who is in danger can't get through and ends up dead.
As a result of all of this 'information' our CIA, NSA, FBI, Police and even military are runnign around chasing wild geese instead of taking on real terrorists who wish us actual harm. There are only so many assets to go around and only so much money to devote to them. You want to know why Osama Bin Ladin is stil alive and at large? Part of it is because some shepherd from Afghanistan turned in by his neighbor for the $20,000 bounty six years ago made a wild guess to get his torturer to let him breath and now we've gotta send people over to Brooklyn or Kabul or Dubai to investigate his 'tip'. While that intelligence asset is wasting his time chasing phantoms - real terrorists are moving around in the shadows.
An example of this was how Abu Zubaydah told our Grand Inquisitors that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq which anyone who had half a brain would know was complete bullshit. Saddam was a tyrant who didn't want anyone in power except himself and Al Qaeda was a group of religious zealots who wanted to destroy governments and replace them with their own people. Two ideas that are completely incompatable. Saddam was just as much an enemy to Al Qaeda as he was to us - more so perhaps because while Saddam was in absolutely no position to harm the US he was certainly in position to disrupt Al Qaeda operations in his own country. Of course, that didn't stop the Bush administration from using it to justify invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 costing us almost a trillion dollars, over four thousand soldiers and uncounted hundreds of thousands of innocent civillians in the process.
- Torture erodes our standing in the world as a nation.
Just like any country we as a society have long believed in the propaganda of our nation. We have patted ourselves on the back for our part in the last world war and helping to stop the spread of the Nazis - perhaps rightfully so. Evil is rarely so obvious to defeat and when it does become obvious it's up to the rest of us to slap it down.
For a long time time we enjoyed high standing in the world. Our soldiers had sacrificed themselves to liberate entire nations from the yoke of Nazi oppression. Not everyone liked us of course, though a lot of the reason behind that is because we just can't keep our noses out of other country's business. But many countries looked to us as an example.
This was most obvious to me immediately after 9/11 - when the whole world reached out to us to tell us how sorry they were that this had happened to us. Many offered aid, and many more offered support. Even countries we considered enemies, like Iran, were reaching out a hand to us as fellow human beings who had just suffered a tremendous loss.
But instead of accepting that support and dealing directly and swiftly with those that actually hurt us we made a lot of bad decisions. Decisions that were made directly at the top. We spent the next eight years or so lying about those decisions because we knew what we had done was not just because it might violation national security but because the people who performed and ordered torture knew that it was illegal.
This same outpouring of sympathy and support occured after the Bush exacerbated disaster that was Katrina. Again we even had nations that we considered enemies offering to help. Venezuela offered to send doctors and supplies to the area and even offered aid to the tune of a million dollars and we refused it only to let our own people drown. Even now years later, the nineth ward is still rubble and by thumbing our nose at the people who wanted to help us we are ensuring that offers of aid will not come in the future when we really need it.
The consequence of all this macho chestbeating bullshit and torture? American journalists who are under arrest in Iran and North Korea may well face torture as well and the response from those nations when we object (and we will) will be to laugh at us.
- Torture guarantees more torture.
Let us not forget that while soldiers die in conflict, it is usually civillians that bear the brunt of the suffering. The Geneva Conventions were enacted and adopted to do many things, one was to ensure the proper treatment of prisoners during times of war but also to enture the proper treatment of civillians.
By allowing our government to use 9/11 as a justification for torture policies we have done more than violate federal and international law and several different treaties. We have put forth the idea that as long as the government says it say, it is alright to torture. We have effectively guaranteed that more civillians will suffer in future conflicts. Additionally any conflict that our military faces in the future where our soldiers are captured they will undoubtedly face our own methods of 'interrogation' and much much worse.
And our enemies response will be a playground bully's laugher. We established a precedent where the head of state and commander of the military can disobey not only the laws of his nation but the laws of the international community and face no reprisal. The "America Defense" for justifying torture will return to haunt us eventually. This will be doublely so if we fail to prosecute the people who exacted these crimes.
- Torture only makes terrorism worse
Based on the reports of several people actively involved in the US torture program including one Air Force interrogator using a pseudonym of Matthew Alexander has stated that the only thing our torture program is actually good for is as an Al Qaeda recruitment tool as GOP Senator Kit Bond has admitted.
Think about it for a second. Say you're in a country that has little in the way of infrastructure. You're basically starving, and barely able to keep your family alive. You know that your nation is being attacked by a foreign power that deposed your government. However oppressive that government might have been, at least you weren't starving. You also believe that this invading power has a serious problem with your religion. Now you've got a guy coming along telling you how this nation is kidnapping your brothers and sisters and subjecting them for torture. You know that as a simple civilian you have no chance to strike back against these invaders occupying your homeland in any 'legitimate' way. Even putting on a uniform and marching off with a rifle isn't going to do anything. What do you do?
Between invading a country based on lies concocted by the heads of our government and the torture program we are effectively creating the best possible recruitment poster for the terrorists to use. Six years after the original invasion of the country we are still occupying the place. People are still dying by the dozens if not hundreds. As long as there is suffering and pain and a vast difference in military power between an occupying force and the civilians of a nation guerrilla tactics will continue. The tactics we now call terrorism have existed as long as humans have made war upon each other. This fact doesn't excuse the murder of innocent civilians by anyone.
But our policies have created an entire generation of Arabs who have every legitimate right to hate us and everything we supposedly stand for. That's something we need to realize right now.
- Torture breaks innocent people just as easily as the guilty.
As I said previously I'm reasonably sure, as much as I don't trust John McCain (the man who said 'Keating 5' should be carved on his headstone), I don't believe for a second that he was a black pirate. As to be expected, he believes that torture has no place in American society (even if I believe he could have done more to stop it from happening).
"The American people have been inoculated with too many John Wayne movies and other examples of unbreakable will and super human strength. It has been amply proved that every man has a breaking point."
The Code of Conduct and the Vietnam War, by John S McCain, Commander United States Navy
Every man has a breaking point. A point by which he will litterally dime out his own children to make the pain stop. He will tell an interrogator anything the interrogator wants to know even if it isn't actually true. Truth never even enters into the equation at all. Just pain.
So ask yourself the question of what happens (as did at Gitmo) when the interrogators lay hands on a completely innocent man. The torture begins and is prolonged by the fact that the victim doesn't actually know anything to tell the torturer. Because our detainees existed in a legal netherworld created solely by Bush and Cheney in direct contradiction to both the Constitution and Federal Law and because the interrogators think he's withholding information that innocent man will break and will be scarred mentally for the rest of his life.
- Torture is illegal.
One of the things that most irritates me about this whole issue is having to explain the fact that torture is illegal. This is vehemently denied by both the right wing in general and the Republican party specifically - mostly because they know if they don't deny it's illegality they will be the ones put in prison.
Waterboarding used to be a Crime - The Washington Post
In 1947 Japanese officer Yukio Asano was charged with war crimes and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for torturing John Henry Burton, of Los Angeles, using the a number of different methods including the 'water cure', what we know call waterboarding.
President Reagan's Department of Justice prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies in 1983 and convicted them with 10 years in prison for coercing confessions from prisoners using the same exact methods.
Prosecutions for this sort of thing continue back in our history as far as the US occupation of the Philipines after the Spanish American War in 1898.
The Eigth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
The US Code has an entire chapter on torture: Title 18, Chapter 113C which expressly forbids:
“torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
The UN Convention against Torture, of which we are a signatory, also expressly forbids torture.
It is illegal by the Third and Fourth Geneva conventions as well.
It has been decided by our Constitution, our laws, and our treaty obligations that torture like waterboarding is expressly illegal. We cannot attempt to prevent other nations from torture if we do it ourselves. If we know that waterboarding is torture and we know torture is illegal (even if we pass on the moral and ethical concerns) then it is our responsibility to prosecute it whether it is some third world tin pot dictator doing it - or if it is our own President.
- Torture is inadmissable in court.
Our court system does not allow the admission of hearsay evidence, nor does it allow evidence gained through coercive techniques such as torture. Rightfully so, since if we allow such things our society will devolve into an eternal game of 'he said she said' on every issue. You are guilty because someone says you are guilty even if they can have no possible knowledge of the crime of which you are accused.
One of the problems with the idea that torture produces actionable information is that even if we are able to arrest people and prove that they are guilty large portions of evidence may well be thrown out of court because it was obtained by illegal means. This will make the prosecutions of legitimate terrorists quite a lot harder and make the accidental prosecutions of innocent people much more common.
Just as we did not allow the Nazis to get away with the "I was only following orders" defense we cannot allow the rank and file members of the CIA or worse yet those companies who got government contracts to conduct torture to walk away free. Their actions, even if under direct orders from the President, were of their own. They could have filed formal protests, refused to follow orders or even resigned or retired rather than committ these heinous crimes. Even those airlines who transported prisoners to be tortured in other countries deserve some sort of penalty to ensure that this never happens again. Today it might be the 'evil Arabs' but tomorrow it could well be Liberals or Teabaggers.
If we do not draw a line in the sand here and now then we are in fact no better than the North Koreans or Chinese or any other government that has abused people to ensure it's own continued security. We have stained the soul of this nation through these practices and to leave that stain unchallenged is and even bigger stain.
Leaving this unresolved issue sitting around will only serve to make us all suffer later when some President worse than Bush comes along and attempts to do the same thing. While President Obama may well be intending to 'move foward' the fact remains that evil doesn't rest and if we do not learn from this historical lesson we will repeat it.