From the moment of Osama bin Laden’s death May 1, advocates of torture have claimed his hideaway in Pakistan was revealed by captives our interrogators waterboarded, deprived of sleep and humiliated sexually. But CIA and State Department analysts say information was pieced together over time from many sources.
Might some useful data have come from prisoners who were tortured? Yes. Would confirmation of that possibility justify use of torture? I posed that question to two local combat veterans, a clinical psychologist and a former chairman of the House Science Committee who entered Congress with John McCain in 1983.
“It may seem incongruous that I have killed people in battle but do not abide by the use of torture,” said Bob Frank, West Point 1965, who was wounded in Vietnam. “I hold that torture is immoral and that we undermine our nation’s values and forfeit our moral standing if we employ it. Its alleged effectiveness is beside the point. If that were the standard, so many of the choices we face as a nation could easily come down on the side of the ‘easier wrong’.”
Former Marine Frank Spillman served two combat tours in Vietnam and still receives counseling for post traumatic stress. He visited Vietnam as a tourist in 2008 with a fellow veteran, and again in 2010 with his wife, Joyce Wise, an elementary school teacher in Secretary, to try to erase horrific memories.
“Use of torture by our guys in Iraq amazed me. At Marine boot camp at Parris Island in 1966, we were drilled on the Geneva Conventions and told we’d be in severe trouble if we ignored them,” Spillman remembers. “During my visit to Vietnam in 2010 I learned that the French routinely tortured the Vietnamese from 1896 to 1954 in a prison called Ho Lo. You might say torture was a learned behavior, which the Vietnamese applied to American captives, including John McCain in that very same prison, known as Ha Noi Hilton.”
McCain suffered traumatic abuse in the Ha Noi Hilton, and has said many times that a person subjected to excruciating pain will say anything they believe torturers want to hear. He believes interrogations in accord with the Geneva Conventions elicit more reliable information.
Former congressman Sherwood Boehlert retired in 2007, at the close of the 106th Congress. “John McCain knows about torture from personal experience, while Don Rumsfeld and other former high level officials speculate about it,” Boehlert says. “What don’t they understand about our basic values and commitment to human decency?”
From the Spanish Inquisition through the Third Reich’s mass murder of its own citizens, to Japan’s sadistic prisoner death marches in World War II, torture has dehumanized and debased its users.
Few Americans can forget photos of smiling guards at Abu Ghraib Prison, 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 and provided a recruiting poster for terrorists.
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 depraved behavior by poorly-trained personnel.
That psychologists were retained by the defense department to design methods of torture has deeply troubled clinical psychologist Stephen Radis of Easton. “We should never have abandoned the Geneva Conventions and tried to justify torture,” he said. “I’d rather not argue about the productivity of torture techniques; to me it is cruel, inhumane, and can’t be condoned.”
Perhaps Senator John McCain summed it up best: “Torture is unnecessary and unproductive, and more important, it is a moral issue, not a utilitarian debate. It is about who we are as a people.”
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Carlton E. Spitzer
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