Thank you, Senator John McCain, for setting the record straight on the use of torture. You who suffered horrific abuse in a Vietnam prison, and have access to CIA and defense department intelligence. It’s not the first time you’ve responded to advocates of torture who would abandon American principles and values. But your latest statement could not have been more timely.
From the moment of Osama bin Laden’s death at the swift hands of Navy SEALS May 1, defenders of torture have claimed our troops learned of his whereabouts from captives who were waterboarded , deprived of sleep, and humiliated sexually. You’ve made clear that isn’t true.
During your campaign for the White House in 2007, you told fellow citizens a person subjected to excruciating pain will say anything they believe torturers want to hear, and that those who torture debase themselves and fail to achieve their objective.
You repeated that statement in your Washington Post column May 12. And deftly blunted the allegation of former attorney general Michael Mukasey that bin Laden’s lieutenant, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, loosed a torrent of information while being tortured, including the nickname of bin Laden’s courier. You said that is false, noting that none of the detainees who were waterboarded provided the courier’s name, or bin Laden’s whereabouts. CIA Director Leon Panetta affirmed your statement.
Interrogation by the Geneva Accords elicits more reliable information than obtained through barbaric torture. “Enhanced interrogation” is torture’s sanitized label. Why is it so difficult for Members of Congress and military brass to call it by its name? From the Spanish Inquisition through the Third Reich’s brutality and Japan’s sadistic death marches and inhumane treatment of prisoners in World War II, torture has dehumanized mankind.
Consider what torture does to the torturers and our nation’s reputation. Few American can forget photos of smiling guards stacking naked prisoners in pyramids while they forced other captives to simulate sexual acts and crawl like animals with leashes around their necks Those photos, circulated around the world, deflated a lot of pious talk about American values.
Abu Ghraib was said to be an aberration, a stupid breach of human decency by a few low-level guards on the night shift. In fact, those atrocious abuses resulted from high-level permissiveness that gave license to poorly-trained personnel who created recruiting posters for Al-Qaeda. Justice department attorneys wrote memos to the president justifying torture, although the U.S. had officially proclaimed waterboarding torture during the Spanish-American War.
Select Members of Congress were briefed on “interrogation practices” in 2002, and few raised objections. Those who had second thoughts in 2007 when McCain spoke out had been silent for five years. The CIA, only belatedly embarrassed, destroyed videos of its interrogations in 2005. That their destruction was illegal was apparently of no concern.
McCain has no desire to prosecute military and civilian personnel engaged in renditions and torture who were given license, formally or informally in the past. But he does want the practice stopped. Now. First, because it is unnecessary and unproductive. Second, and more important, because it is a moral issue, not a utilitarian debate. “It is,” McCain says, “about who we are.”
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Carlton E. Spitzer
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