Horrific torture report findings compromise core values of US

There is no question that these are dangerous times.

The United States and, for that matter, the entire Western world, is under attack by fundamentalist Muslims who have adopted terrorism as their method of operation. It should be remembered that they are no more representative of the 1 billion Muslims in the world than cross-burning Ku Klux Klan terrorists were representative of the majority of American Christians. But that fact does not lessen the havoc that they can wreak or the fear that their methods can instill.

And that very fear is as potentially dangerous to what America stands for as any act of war or terrorism.

Last week, the nation was given a 500-page insight into how far some agents of the U.S. government were willing to stray in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America from the values that this nation espouses. The Senate intelligence committee’s report on the CIA’s “harsh interrogation” methods should have horrified every American. Instead, there were far too many apologists in the Congress and the executive branch — present and past. Even as the summary report described unspeakably cruel treatment of foreign detainees, there were those who refused to acknowledge that these prisoners were tortured. Others continued to maintain that whatever was done was necessary or excusable. We’ll stipulate that what was done is not surprising, given the climate immediately following 9/11, but that doesn’t excuse it.

Taken in context, a lot of mistakes were made in the wake of 9/11. Congress rushed to pass a flawed Patriot Act. Military operations in Afghanistan aimed at Osama bin Laden took an inexplicable turn as the George W. Bush administration shifted its focus to a new war in Iraq. A decision was made that the United States had the right to detain people labeled “enemy combatants” for indefinite periods, without specific charges of any kind and thus with no procedure by which they could even claim innocence. And lawyers gave CIA operatives legal cover to torture detainees, without ever using the word torture.

THE REPORT’S FINDINGS

The Senate report focused on 119 cases in which torture was used to varying degrees. And 26 of those detainees — about 21 percent — not only didn’t have any information to provide, they turned out to have been innocent bystanders. Two of them had been U.S. operatives.

Among the interrogation methods described in the report were extreme cases of sleep deprivation, near-drowning of detainees through waterboarding, shackling detainees to bars and ceilings and forced feeding through the rectum. Anyone prepared to quibble over whether those methods constitute torture should ask themselves what we, as Americans, would say if our soldiers had been subject to such treatment? We don’t have to guess in the instance of waterboarding. When the Japanese waterboarded American prisoners during World War II, we treated it as a war crime. And that was before the 1949 Geneva Conventions, to which we are a signatory.

Regardless of the moral implications of torture, the report stated that none of what the CIA did produced valuable new intelligence. CIA directors past and present have challenged that claim, and at this point it appears that Americans who want to believe that torture works and is justified will side with the CIA. Those of the opposite inclination will accept the report’s conclusions.

We have to give considerable weight to the words of U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. In his eloquent and passionate address to the Senate, McCain, a Vietnam era POW, said: “I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.”

STAY TRUE TO PRINCIPLES

This nation was founded on the principle that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights. And while history records that many of the Founders did not extend those rights to native Americans who were being driven from their land or to Africans brought to these shores to toil as slaves, times have changed. We have evolved. As a nation, we have recognized our shortcomings and worked to overcome them. Today, our devotion to the basic principles on which this nation was founded should not end at our shores.

We must not let fear change our national character, and to the extent that it has, we must dedicate ourselves to re-establishing the principles that helped make this nation great.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, he who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither. That equation applies equally to those who would sacrifice their sense of humanity in the pursuit of what they envision as justice.