Deeply Tortured Logic

It’s a dark, dank chamber deep underground. Water drips from the walls, the stench of old and rotting fills the air. It is cold, very cold. The young man sitting in the chair, strapped down, naked and shivering for 72 hours, knows the exact location of a field artillery piece that has been pounding the military compound that surrounds this forbidding place. Exploding shells continue to kill, maim and devastate this facility. Without his information, dozens could die. The young man will not talk. He is slapped, but now it’s time to tilt that chair backwards, cover his face with a damp rag, and pour water over that rag as he chokes and gags, drowning for what seems an eternity. If he talks, lives will be saved.

No, I am not describing a CIA interrogation site holding down some hapless insurgent. The man in the chair in this fictional account is a corporal in the United States Marine Corps. His captors are the insurgents, and their interrogation techniques are consistent with what has been documented as acceptable “enhanced interrogation techniques” by U.S. White House counsel and even the Department of Justice, condoned and applied repeatedly – with disputes arising on the relative value of the information gleaned – by America’s Central Intelligence Agency. It is not, was not and never will be defined as “torture” in accordance with these legal opinions. So it seems that the insurgents above are simply applying techniques that we ourselves have sanctioned. It’s OK to waterboard captured Americans, huh?

What is taking place in the above scene is indeed consistent with accepted CIA practices, albeit rejected in the last few years by the Obama administration with support from Republicans like Senator John McCain (himself a torture victim during the Vietnam War… heknows exactly what “torture” means from intensive personal experience), and clearly labeled by most of the civilized world as a direct violation of the UN Convention Against Torture. It is a shameful period of our recent history, one that is capable of generating war crimes prosecutions of dozens of field operatives, their supervisors and the senior governmental officials – perhaps all the way to the top – who condoned the practices or simply chose to look the other way, knowing what was really happening.

That we used such techniques appears to be well-documented in that ugly and heavily redacted 525 page intelligence report on torture released by the Senate on December 9^th. That the report, which asserts that Congress and even the White House were lied to by the CIA, was prepared at the behest of a Democratic Committee Chairwoman and released in the waning days of a Democratic majority in the Senate and has caused a number of those across the aisle to condemn the accuracy of the entire tome, about 6,000 pages in all. “The Senate Intelligence Committee on [December 9^th] issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

“The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.” New York Times, December 9^th.

Former CIA administrators, who could face possible criminal prosecution under international law, were quick to point out that the CIA never “intentionally” misled its political bosses and that the information extracted through “enhanced interrogation” was indeed critical, a statement which seems diametrically opposite the report’s conclusion that torture produced at best unreliable results. The report even tells us that enhanced interrogation wasn’t even material to the attack that took out bin Laden.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who himself could face that same international criminal prosecution, also suggested that there was no misleading of anybody, that he and the administration knew everything that was happening and even authorized the now-illicit CIA activities: “‘What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,’ Cheney said. ‘I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.’” Huffington Post, December 10^th. That would seem to more of a confession than an explanation, but time will tell if any international agency acts on such statements.

Whatever the debate about the efficacy of these interrogation techniques, the fact is we have told the world that they are or at least were acceptable. We may have changed our mind in the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration, but to most of the world that does not move the moral needle much. If visions of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison are lost somewhere in the distance, if those nasty secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe have faded from memory, we have the current reminder of Gitmo where too many of these “detainees” were subjected to these clear acts of torture at some period of their captivity. Their cages, the forced feeding, and even their lovely orange jumpsuits are constant reminders of what we have done.

So when we see Americans and other westerners in orange jumpsuits, most of whom have been waterboarded by the Islamic State before being brutally executed, everything but that final beheading has followed a pattern too often applied by our own CIA. Think IS’ use of those orange jumpsuits is a mere coincidence? They’re throwing in our faces that the “guardians of democracy and freedom,” the champions of “human rights,” are seething hypocrites by exceptionally well-documented proof.

If we are ever to take the moral high ground again, assuming that is still remotely possible, we have to begin by tearing down our own human rights violations, from the now-banned permission to torture to our own prison systems and our own legal system that dispenses justice differently depending on race and income. I wonder how those with strong Christian beliefs in heaven and hell expect to find welcome at the pearly gates when their pattern of conduct here on earth has been to defile the very lives and environmental blessings given to them by God.

I’m Peter Dekom, and those who espouse higher moral principles should look in the mirror and be sure that they are not seeking an exemption from them.