Of all the scandals that beset us as Americans, there is one that history is likely to judge most harshly, namely, the official authorization of torture abuse by the current Bush administration. As the Abu Ghraib photos have shown with unforgettable horror, serious violations of international law have followed in its train.
Let us be clear that torture is not just one issue among others. It is a profound assault on the dignity of the human person as created by God. It is therefore inherently evil. It violates a person’s body, and terrorizes his mind, in order to destroy his will. The strongest of presumptions stands against it — not only legally and morally, but also, from a religious point of view, spiritually. At the same time, authorizing torture poses a direct threat to constitutional government. As Columbia law professor Jeremy Waldron has urged, the issue of torture is “archetypal.” It goes to the very heart of our civilization. Whether torture is permitted or prohibited is a question that separates tyranny and barbarism from the rule of law.
Recently the PBS program, “Frontline,” televised a report about how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Geoffrey Miller “Gitmoized” the interrogations of detainees in Iraq. The program included many interviews including the story of U.S. Army interrogator Spc. Tony Lagouranis (Ret.). The former military interrogator stated:
Well hypothermia was a widespread technique. I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about that, and I never saw anything in writing prohibiting it or making it illegal. But almost everyone was using it when they had a chance, when the weather permitted. Or some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn’t die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.
A lot of other, you know, not as common techniques, and certainly not sanctioned, was just beating people or burning them. Not within the prisons, usually. But when the units would go out into people’s homes and do these raids, they would just stay in the house and torture them. Because after the scandal, they couldn’t trust that, you know, the interrogators were going to do “as good a job,” in their words, as they wanted to.
Such shocking practices are now so widespread — ranging from Guantanamo, to numerous prisons and bases throughout Iraq, to Afghanistan — that the lie has been given to the “few bad apples” theory promulgated by the Bush administration. In a recent speech, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that top officials — up to and including the president — had in effect given a green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there,” Col. Wilkerson insisted, “unless you’ve condoned it.” As the testimony by Spc. Lagouranis suggests, this attitude has continued well after the Abu Ghraib revelations right down to the present day. And let it not be forgotten that the Department of Defense finally admitted to the Red Cross that “70-90 percent” of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were entirely innocent.
“In our contemporary world,” states Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First, “torture is like the slave trade or piracy was to people in the 1790s.” He continues: “Torture is a crime against mankind, against humanity. It’s something that has to be absolutely prohibited.” Posner’s organization is suing Secretary Rumsfeld over the prisoner abuse issue. But we are left with a troubling question: Why can’t our government make it clear, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that torture and any other inhumane treatment of prisoners is wrong, without exceptions, and that it will not be tolerated under any circumstances?
Yet our government has gone to great lengths to narrow the legal definition of torture in order to widen the permissibility of the degrading treatment. The administration’s torture memos, as developed mainly between 2002 and 2003, are now infamous. As Anthony Lewis wrote: “The memos read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to skirt the law and stay out of prison.” While some of the worst memos have now been repudiated, the climate of permissibility and uncertainty that they fostered still remains.
The administration is against torture, and yet it refuses to renounce, without equivocation, the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. In the authoritative language of international law — codified in the Geneva Conventions, the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Convention Against Torture, and other documents legally binding on our government — the ban against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is not separated from the ban against torture. The two proscriptions are one. The disturbing innovation of the administration has been to produce new documents that disrupt this unity. Other forms of abuse are distinguished from what counts as “torture” in order to make them permissible.
The policy that results is radically inconsistent. Officially, our government opposes torture and advocates a universal standard for human rights. At the same time, it has allowed ingenious new interrogation methods to be developed that violate these standards. They include stress positions, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, mock burials, induced hypothermia, sexual humiliation and desecration of religious objects. These practices, which should never be permitted, are no less traumatic than the infliction of excruciating pain. They degrade everyone involved — planners, perpetrators and victims.
The McCain amendment recently attached to the Defense Appropriations Bill attempts to bring this inconsistency to an end. Despite passing in the Senate by the overwhelming majority of 90-9, it was vigorously opposed by the administration. Moreover, it may not survive in conference with the House. If it does survive, the president has threatened to veto the entire appropriations bill. Why should the president be so adamant on this point? What in God’s name is happening to our country? What the government is authorized do to the few, it can eventually do to the many. A government that takes off its gloves, cautioned British statesman Edmund Burke, will not soon put them on again. “Criminal means, once tolerated,” he wrote, “are soon preferred.”
Worry about such methods is migrating across political and religious lines.
The public is increasingly uneasy about what we should have to sacrifice for our safety. In his letter to Sen. McCain, a young U.S. Army Captain, Ian Fishback, gave eloquent voice to these concerns. He described how, despite his dogged inquiries, for nearly a year and a half, he could get no clear answers from his superiors about the impermissibility of abuse. Having served in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and having stressed that he has personally witnessed the torture of detainees, Capt. Fishback posed what he called “the most important question that our generation will answer”:
Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is “America.”
Five steps must now be taken to clarify that our government has truly abolished torture.
§ Congress must remove the false partition placed between the military and intelligence services. In 2004 the Senate was right to pass, nearly unanimously, new restrictions for the Pentagon, the CIA and other intelligence services. But congressional leaders in both houses later buckled under White House pressure and scrapped the language governing intelligence services.
Whichever agency of our government may be resorting to torture and abuse — the military or the intelligence services — is of absolutely no significance. Trying to differentiate between them does nothing to insulate us from the absolute evil that is torture. Yet it is this very loophole that may now be codified into law. The White House is fighting for a gutted version of the McCain amendment that would permit torture by establishing an exemption for the CIA.
§ Second, Congress must outlaw “extraordinary rendition,” a euphemism for torture by proxy. Detainees are secretly transferred to countries where torture is practiced as a means of interrogation. Although made public only through shocking cases, such as those of Maher Arar, who was deported to Syria by the United States, and Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen who was sent to Egypt before being held at Guantanamo, it has become a mainstay counterterrorism tool.
Does it need to be said that “disappearing” people without any kind of due process is contrary to everything America stands for, not to mention our laws and treaties? The reasons for a detainee’s arrest and his guilt or innocence are irrelevant. No sound moral or legal argument can be made that enabling torture through rendition is permissible.
§ Third, Congress should forbid the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees as being tantamount to torture. It should mandate that degrading treatment is unacceptable in any form and under any circumstances. Leadership from the entire Congress would go a long way toward resolving the torture abuse crisis.
§ Fourth, Congress must abolish the secret prison system established around the world by U.S. intelligence agencies. Congress must ensure that every person in U.S. custody, regardless of whether through military or intelligence agencies, receive visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, in accordance with U.S. obligations under international law.
§ Finally, as called for by virtually every major human rights organization in the world, America needs a special investigative commission. Our reputation has been so badly damaged by Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib that no other remedy will do. The existing investigations are not enough because they have not been truly independent. Organizations such as the American Bar Association, Amnesty International and the highly respected International Commission of Jurists in Geneva have all insisted that an independent investigation is imperative.
Nothing less than the soul of our nation is at stake in the torture crisis. What does it profit us if we proclaim high moral values but fail to reject torture and abuse? What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed? A nation that rewards and protects those who promoted torture is approaching spiritual death.
I conclude with these words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
A time comes when silence is betrayal. [People] do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness so close around us. We are called upon to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.
George Hunsinger is the McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary (N.J.).
