Hey, guess what? The Bush administration tortured people! NEWS FLASH!! Oh, wait…most of us already knew this, didn’t we? The real question here is whether we are willing to admit that this happened. The primary question seems to be this: is waterboarding torture? Many Republicans seem to think not. Last night, Sean Hannity volunteered, in a disturbingly jocular fashion, to be waterboarded for charity. Keith Olbermann, never one to let that kind of invitation from Fox News sneak by, offered to pay $1,000 to a fund for the families of American service men and women for every second Mr. Hannity lasts while being waterboarded. I hope, admittedly in part for purely sadistic reasons, that Mr. Hannity takes him up on the offer.
Lest there be any confusion as to where I stand: Yes, I think waterboarding is torture. In fact, in these United States, the issue of whether waterboarding is or is not torture has never been quite as ambiguous as those on the right would like for us to think. During the Spanish-American War (1898), at least two U.S. Army officers were court-martialed for using “the water cure,” that which we now call waterboarding.
After World War II, during the war crimes tribunals in both Germany and Japan, testimony was offered stating that both the Gestapo and Japanese troops used waterboarding as a method of torture. One U.S. airman, subjected to waterboarding by his Japanese captors during the war, said in his testimony, “The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I'd get my breath, then they'd start over again… I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.”
During the Vietnam War, the Washington Post published a photo of American servicemen and one South Vietnamese soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese POW. One of those servicemen was court-martialed and discharged from the service because of his use of torture.
Finally, in the early 1980s, a Texas sheriff and his deputies were tried and convicted of conspiracy to force confessions from prisoners. Their method of choice? You guessed it, waterboarding. For their crimes, the three deputies were sentenced to four years in prison and the sheriff to ten years. Still think America doesn’t consider waterboarding torture? Here’s the real doozy….
In the recently released report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Carl Levin, it was reported that much of the Bush torture program was based on reverse-engineering of the U.S. military’s SERE program. SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training is given to U.S. servicemen in all branches of the military who are at high risk of capture by enemy forces. Among the training they are given is training to resist torture tactics used to elicit false confessions to be used for propaganda purposes. If you guessed that those who go through SERE training are subjected to waterboarding, deemed by the folks who put together the SERE training as a potential torture method, give yourself a pat on the back. Obviously, the U.S. military views waterboarding as a form of torture, otherwise why subject servicemen to it in anticipation of its illegal use by enemy forces.
But here’s the bigger problem for the Bush administration: Look at the first two sentences of the last paragraph…go ahead. Take a look. The Bush torture policies were based on reverse-engineering of a U.S. military program designed to help servicemen resist torture techniques designed to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes. Ponder that for a moment, if you will. In what world where the United States stands for truth, justice, and the American way does this country base its interrogation policies on those used by communists to elicit FALSE confessions? When did we turn into the Soviet Union all of the sudden and how in God’s name do we make it stop?
For the last 8 years, we have listened to the endless chorus of Republicans telling us that they would keep this country safe by any means necessary—even “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The ever popular “ticking time bomb” scenario was put before the American people, and we were told that if an attack was imminent, surely we would want our government to do whatever was necessary to foil that attack. (There’s a logical fallacy here, too, but I’ll get back to that in a minute.) Yet, all the while, their methodology was based on reverse-engineering a program designed to prevent false confessions for propaganda purposes. Seriously?
Did the Bush administration want actionable intelligence or did they want propaganda to help sell the American people on a phony war based on false pretenses? And if the answer to that question is the latter, what does that say about this country? Throughout her history, America has been cast as a “City on a Hill.” This is what we at the Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor call civil religion. America is good. America does good. God bless America. Far be it for me to speak for the Almighty, but my guess is that God doesn’t bless this kind of action. If this country, this wonderful, flawed place that we all love and call home, acts in such a way, how can we purport to be a country of freedom and liberty and justice and respect for the rule of law?
The ramifications of this debate include forcing America to take a long, hard look at what this country stands for. Are we a nation of law and justice or have we allowed this awful war to turn us into a country no better than the evil dictatorships we have fought so tirelessly to defeat throughout our history? During Spring Break, while in Jerusalem, I went to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum, and only a day after taking a trip to Bethlehem. On the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, a section of the “separation fence” being built by Israel between the West Bank and Israel-proper is visible. While walking through Yad Vashem, the irony of what I was seeing memorialized and what I saw in reality was striking.
Yad Vashem includes several exhibits extolling the virtues of the martyrs of the various eastern European ghetto uprisings, the most famous of which was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. These admittedly courageous men and women who rose up against the Nazis were resisting an unjust and brutal occupation by an enemy who saw the Jews as less than them. 60 years later, the oppressed have become the oppressors and are facilitating the ghettoization of the Palestinians who, since the 1987 Intifada started (non-violently, I might add), have been resisting an unjust and brutal occupation by an enemy who sees the Palestinians as less than them.
In the same way, has the United States, victim of the horrific events of 9/11, become the victimizer, exacting revenge and eliciting phony confessions from terrorists in the name of national security? The unfortunate answer to this question is most likely yes. It is an uncomfortable and unenviable position that the United States finds itself in currently. How can we claim any kind of moral superiority, any kind of mantle as the standard bearers of freedom and democracy if we resort to the same kind of depravity and malice that we find in our enemies?
To make matters worse, despite former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s continued assertion that torture works, there is no evidence to support that claim. The plot most often pointed to by Bush officials is the “Library Tower” plot. The use of advanced interrogation techniques, they claim, stopped that attack. This is not the case, however. The evidence gathered against those who were thinking about an attack on the Los Angeles landmark was gathered by FBI interrogators using conventional interrogation methods. In fact, so concerned was FBI director Robert Mueller about the potential legal ramifications for his interrogators if they got too close to these “enhanced” interrogations, that he pulled his interrogators out of the business of interrogating terror suspects altogether. Mueller has since conveyed his doubts about administration assertions that torture has yielded actionable intelligence.
The continued insistence of Bush administration officials that in the “ticking time bomb” scenario I mentioned earlier is reason enough to torture if necessary ignores some basic facts, namely that NO ONE who interrogates for a living thinks that torture works. Then again, the Bush administration made it a habit to ignore the advice of people who actually knew what they were talking about, but I digress. Torture doesn’t provide actionable intelligence. It provides copious amounts of crap. People will say almost anything to make the torture stop. I can personally say that if I were being waterboarded, I would confess to having Osama bin Laden’s love child if that’s what it took to make it stop. So if it doesn’t provide actionable intelligence AND it goes against the character of this nation…wait. Why, exactly are we torturing again? False confessions. Propaganda. That’s all we’ve got, folks. Not safer, not more secure, definitely not seen in higher esteem in Muslim countries. That’s what torture got us. Our descent into Soviet-style tactics must see the light of day. Only then can we confront our identity crisis and move ahead, learning from our mistakes and returning to the straight and narrow…at least for a few days.
