The truth about US and torture

“inter arma silent leges” - In times of war, the laws are silent.

Cicero

Five years ago this month, on the day the Abu Gharab photos were released, a friend stopped by my desk at the Christian Science Monitor. He saw that I was writing on the photos for that day’s version of The Daily Update on Terrorism and Security. “I can’t actually believe this happened,” he said to me. I turned and looked at him. I told him I could. He was shocked by my answer. “Americans don’t do that kind of thing,” he told me. I just smiled at him.

He was wrong. Americans absolutely do that kind of thing. Over the decades, we have tortured and abused people with the best (or worst) of them. Whether you’re talking about the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and now (as we know from the release of the torture documents today), Iraq and Afghanistan, US soldiers or agents of the government have carried out acts which under modern definitions can be called war crimes.

There is one important difference, however, that I will discuss a little bit later.

Take, for instance, Andersonville during the Civil War, a Confederate POW camp so foul that its commander was executed at war’s end, the only Confederate official to be tried and convicted of war crimes resulting from that “late unpleasantness.” Meanwhile, during the Spanish-American War, in particular during fighting in the Philippines, the atrocities being committed by American troops against the native population grew so intense that President McKinley blocked press reports from the region for fear it would harm his chances at reelection in 1900.

If you want to know about the kinds of brutal torture that we carried out in Vietnam, read this piece from former UPI correspondent Perry Deane Young on what he and his roommate, the late Sean Flynn, saw during their years there:

“The two pictures that I had saved show [from Flynn’s work] one Viet Cong prisoner strapped to an Asian version of the western cross; another one shows a VC suspect being strung upside down for his interrogation. These were routine procedures. In the manuscript for my Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, I had mentioned another popular method of attaching a crank telephone with wires to a man's testicles.”

Which brings us to the release today of four “torture” memos written by senior Bush administration officials. There was intense pressure on President Obama not to release the memos. But to his credit, he did, and although he did say that he would not seek to prosecute CIA staffers who tortured suspects “believing in good faith that they had legal authority to do what they did,” don’t be surprised if we find that a few of them didn’t act in good faith, especially those lawyers who wrote the memos. (John Yoo and Jay Bybee, are you listening?)

The memos show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in order to fight evil, we succumbed to it ourselves. As Cicero noted in the quote at the top, we basically suspended the laws we believe in, the ones that we like to tell the rest of the world makes us different from the bad guys, and instead we did things that run contrary to the ‘Judeo-Christian” ethic so many in the Bush administration liked to talk about.

And that also leads to another conclusion, one that I will give the floor to columnist/blogger Andrew Sullivan to make:

“I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed, or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross' debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect. I say "almost" because even Jay Bybee, in this unprofessional travesty of lawyering, stipulates that these techniques might be combined successively in any ways that could cumulatively become torture even in his absurd redefinition of the term. And yet the ICRC report shows, as one might imagine that outside these specious legalisms, such distinctions never hold in practice. And they didn't. Human beings were contorted into classic stress positions used by the Gestapo; they had towels tied around their necks in order to smash their bodies against walls; they were denied of all sleep for up to eleven days and nights at a time; they were stuck in tiny suffocating boxes; they were waterboarded just as the victims of the Khmer Rouge were waterboarded. And through all this, Bush and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.”

But we’re American. We don’t torture, right? We don’t do the things that we demand that other people be hunted down, captured and brought back for trial? Right.

In the end, the pure blind truth is that for all our fine words, when you come right down to it, there is very, very little difference between many of the people making the decisions on our side, and those making the decisions on the other side. Decisions that they then tell young men and women to carry out.

But there is that one difference I mentioned above, and it’s what I hope will save us once again. For every George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, or LBJ and Robert McNamara, or Nixon and Kissinger, there is a man or a woman in the US military or in a group like the ACLU or Human Rights Watch, who just won’t let them get away with it. Who fight and fight and fight until the truth comes out. And as much as Americans hate to have that mirror held up to their faces, and to see themselves reflected in that mirror, it is the one thing that brings us out of our brutality and reminds us why this nation was founded in the first place.

If there is anything that makes us different from the “bad guys,” it is this willingness to put our sins out in front of the world. It is a sign of the moral courage that others want to respect in us. And if we are to regain our place of respect with those we care about in the world, it’s a necessity to undertake.