The American Commitment to Torture

Plenty of arguments are bandied about taking a stance against torture. John McCain says we shouldn't do it because it doesn't work and it opens the door to American soldiers being tortured. Another writer says Americans committing torture "drive(s) those undecideds into the arms of the enemy."

But the reason we should not torture is because it renders us hypocrites insofar as our laws are concerned and an aberration in the community of truly morally and ethically minded people. Torture is a crime against the innocent and the alleged guilty. And how many detainees have been found legally guilty before they were tortured? Torture victimizes whoever suffers it. To a much lesser extent it victimizes the individuals performing it institutionally as a duty. An institution that manages and euphemizes torture should be held accountable for crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.

Torture is wrong and doing it negates whatever claim we make about our values (life, liberty, law, and the pursuit of happiness, justice, etc).

I reject an argument against torture that pleads: torturing should not be done because it empowers an enemy. I reject McCain's argument that we shouldn't do it because the enemy will do it to us.

Torture should not be done because it is an abomination. Torturing betrays the notion of virtue in Western philosophy, Eastern thought, and in every relevant religious tradition. Furthermore, torture is illegal in the United States as our government has ratified the Geneva Conventions as law of our land.

As for the Republican debate, "we should have more Guantanamos," the rush to embrace torture was a candid shot of the unraveling of the grand old party. They can't cherish human suffering and expect to retain respectable footing in the human condition...even in America.

Amrit Singh at the Huffingpost writes about an Egyptian Christian, Sameh Khouzam who fled religious persecution in Egypt only to discover that the United States government is going to deport him -- even after a U.S. federal appeals court found that "it is more likely than not that he will be tortured." The government claims it is relying on "diplomatic assurances" from Egyptian officials that Sameh will not be tortured.

The Convention Against Torture was ratified as U.S. law in 1994. It prohibits the U.S. government from transferring a person "to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

We as Americans have allowed ourselves to be compromised as we commit to the Torture doctrine through indifference, ignorance, and blind acceptance that now, suddenly, torture is useful in the war on Terror.

Lessons in Suicide

While they lay rotting without prison straw…

Navy Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo suggests of the latest suicide at the detention camp, ""That's something we're obviously going to learn from and we will modify our procedure accordingly, if required, to prevent it from occurring again."

The Associated Press and Forbes magazine, failing to attribute their source when describing "Abdul Rahman Maadha al-Amry, as a Taliban foot soldier, say the Saudi man died at the U.S. military base in southeastern Cuba on May 30, 2007. Buzby's reaction is better than Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. She and other military officials called the 2006 suicides of three detainees "a tactic to further the jihadi cause" and a "good PR move to draw attention." It takes an exquisite measure of depravity to construe multiple suicides as a “good PR move.” Those men, two Saudis and a Yemeni, hanged themselves with sheets and clothing. According to the Department of Defense, one of the dead would have been transferred eventually to Saudi Arabia. Had the deceased been apprised of this flicker of hope? Did he have any reason in the world to believe his captors?

The journey of many of the Guantanamo detainees began after being rounded up by Afghan warlords. They profited on the sale of human beings to U.S. forces, the military paying for prisoners by the head. Four prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have taken their own lives. They lived their last days among those herded, tortured, and then kenneled at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba. One had arrived at Guantanamo as a teenager.

Did thoughts run through their heads in their mother language, “Give me liberty or give me death.” For those of us who reject newspeak, doublethink, and every other propaganda effort from the Bush administration, we call the prisoner’s acts simply suicides. Suicide is indicative of profound, morbid depression. The Tipton Three, former Guantanamo detainees, say a substantial number of prisoners are on anti-depressants. The Tipton Three also shed light on the haphazard methods of rounding up the terrorists. The warlords weren't conducting interviews. No, they were amassing human cattle to trade for cash.

During Alexander Solzhenitsyn imprisonment in the Gulags, his great epiphany was “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.” A lovely, magnificent, and ponderous notion.

The prisoners at Guantanamo, the four now dead, can offer us a few things in their passing. The human spirit has a breaking point. That point is: there are far worse things than death. Being stripped naked for spectacle (men from a culture of modesty); sexual humiliation, Lynndie England style, attack dogs lunging for exposed genitals and faces, arms and legs shackled to the floor for hours on end while crouching. Food depravation. The sensation of suffocating. The sensation of drowning. Hour upon hour upon hour of deafening music. Twenty hours of interrogations at the hands of the CIA, British Intelligence, and the like. Your Holy book urinated on by soldiers.

For the four, life at Guantanamo must have been no life at all. In spite of the seriousness and permanence of suicide, regardless that Islam considers suicide sinful, the four, trapped in American-sanctioned, intolerable, and inhumane conditions, voluntarily gave up their ghosts.

Perhaps, they felt their God would forgive, given the United States of America had taken from them lives that could be lived meaningfully. Maybe they thought God would not forgive and chose the lesser evil: an Islamic hell over an American one. Maybe they lost faith--torture, isolation, and despair can render one to a condition of hopelessness. After all, their attempts at a hunger strike were met with force-feeding with oversize tubes.

Remember Gandhi’s story and his hunger strikes? Communities, religions, and nations were moved. Guantanamo hunger strikes moved no one to action except oath-breaking medical professionals and a military operating from a handbook without ethics.

If only the four had--like Solzhenitsyn--been rotting on prison straw and could accumulate contraband like the Russian writer did…paper and pencils to document the experience--Instead the detainees were walled in steel and concrete, when they weren’t kenneled in the blistering elements.

Rear Admiral Harry Harris, once the commander of the Guantanamo Joint Task Force, characterized last year's suicides as an act of warfare waged against the U.S. military. I fully expect Harris has been promoted handsomely being so void of a conscience.

President Bush says of course, "We would like to end the Guantanamo--we'd like it to be empty." Doublethink. That’s as legitimate as the Washington Post outing CIA torture prison sites in Europe, then the CIA closing them down before Secretary Rice flies across the ocean and says there are no prison cites in Europe. Doublethink. President Bush and his lot have stacked lie upon lie to the extent, that no rational person can or should believe anything put forth by the administration or those they directly control.

The President, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the NSA, and FBI have trumped in the name of security, have asserted a contrived “unitary” theory of presidential power: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, The Fourth Amendment. These ideas have been abandoned, negated, and betrayed. This administration does not preserve liberties. They squander, exploit, and contradict them. They do not promote the general welfare. They promote corporations and wealthy people. They do not represent America.

Solzhenitsyn talks about the line of good and evil oscillating within hearts. Yet, this administration and its treacheries go unchecked by "we the people" who are supposed to be in charge. Token punishments are administered to the torturers pacifying the few who are outraged enough to demand change. The President’s lawyers who dismissed the congressionally ratified Geneva Conventions as passé is now U.S. Attorney General, the boss of Justice. ”Just Us” must be their interpretation. Alberto Gonzales, the man we learn also accosted his predecessor on his sick bed, trying to further the cause of illegal wiretapping/eavesdropping in America. And we musn't forget our legislators who banned torture only for the President to sign with a caveat excluding himself and those who would actually do the torturing.

Hearts are where they are.

Four deemed enemy combatants lost hope and killed themselves. We the People read the headlines and do nothing. Some of our own hope dies with those in Guantanamo. From the pages of history, Dr. Martin Luther King’s idea that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” yearns to prick a national conscience. Meanwhile, a calculated, soft-peddled tyranny congeals.

If Solzhenitsyn were to write an epitaph for the four in Guantanamo, what would the wise man say? The Russian writer was able to write secretly while he was jailed. He was positioned in the outer circles of the labor camps at times where his mind could be engaged. He had cancer; he was treated for it. An American attorney representing one detainee says her client went untreated for TB and Hepatitis B. To the four detainees suffering as they did under horrendous physical and psychological of our super-gulag…maybe it would be:

Their self-determined path to freedom, their escape from a hell “Made in America,” their ultimate affirmation of life and liberty, was to choose death. Those last moments of exercising autonomy might have been a glimpse of heaven.

First Amendment Superhero-- 20 April 2006

Able to exercise all her First Amendment rights in a single yawp! More powerful than the White House Press Corps combined! Able to leap barriers like Free Speech Zones! She’s Super American, Dr. Wang Wen Yi!

Now, I’m talking “old school” American, of course, of days when Americans didn’t manifest complacency and apathy on torture, unlawful wiretaps, prohibition of due process, executive powers run amok, FBI databases on vegan protestors and Quakers, extraordinary renditions, fixing intel to justify attacks on a nation, local sheriff databases on Mexicans, and those quaint Geneva Conventions. Remember the old school stuff? Life, Liberty, & the pursuit of Happiness as an ideal for the general population. “We the People” were in charge.

So, do mark April 20, 2006 on your calendars and remember that day! That’s the day when First Amendment Superhero Dr. Wang Wen Yi screamed, pleaded, and yawped her petition to the two presidents of the two most powerful nations on the planet. "President Bush, stop him from killing.” Him being President Hu--what a brazen and courageous exercise of petitioning the government to redress grievances. She took it straight to the top. Wow. Then as far as I can ascertain from different press accounts Dr. Wang said in Chinese that President Hu’s days are numbered. Now an American understanding of that could be construed as a threat or in a corporate way, you’re going to lose your job, punk. If you take it in strictly Buddhist terms, it’s innocuous. All of our days are numbered; death is just as much a part of life as birth. I suspect Dr. Wang, being intelligent, intended the triple-entendre.

And as Dr. Wang did all that she did, she was also a bonafide member of the press corps that day, representing the Epoch Times. Freedom of the Press! The Epoch Times is a privately owned news organization based in New York. They appear to be singularly devoted to raising world wide awareness about the human rights injustices in China, particularly the suppression, oppression, and abuses of certain religious groups like Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong (who are a sect of Buddhists). They write desperately on the inhumane treatment of Chinese prisoners. There is a petition to the UN to investigate. China is accused of a suspicious knack for producing human organ matches for transplants at a never-before-seen speeds. The Epoch Times writes China is harvesting organs from their prisoners: Falun Gong practioners are preferred among the crop of human prisoners. I know it sounds like science fiction, but aren’t we all horrified if it’s true. At least I mean those of us all who view Abu Ghraib as something along the lines of criminal and abominible.

Back to Dr. Wang. She broke protocol acting on her Freedom-of-Speech impulse, but she was defending the American notion, at least once American notion, that there aren’t suppose to be laws that get you jailed and literally gutted because of your religion. She flaunted her Freedom of Religion.

Dr. Wang, in one brief moment exercised all of her First Amendment Rights, and my God, for me, it was inspiring. Find a place on the internet to watch her again. This is what it looks like today in America to exercise all of those rights at once…a desperate, determined, screaming, spasmic yawp before you’re arrested, cuffed, and hauled off to jail.

The mainstream press, exercising its freedom called her a “heckler,” called the episode, “a blemish” on the pageantry and ceremonial stuff. I saw a member of the press corps attempt to physically silence Dr. Wang’s free speech episode by putting his hands over her mouth. Then some secret service wench tried to cover Dr. Wang’s mouth. For me, it was magnificently symbolic of my own efforts as a journalist. In my news organization in the South it’s unseemly to point out the, shall we say, discrepancies (and out right lies) of politicians, unless of course they are liberal liars. Those are fair game.

In a brief statement I saw on CNN’s website, I saw Dr. Wang invoke Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Curiosity and sentimentality getting the best of me, I went back and perused the little book. Here are some pertinent gems:

“Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

“Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

In good conscience, I submit, Americans will do well to reacquaint themselves with Thoreau. Instead of being heralded for her courage and her adherence to the some of the best ideas offered by Thoreau, like Thoreau, Dr. Wang was arrested. Dr. Wang now finds herself charged with harassing, intimidating and threatening President Hu. And she is banned from the nation’s capital. Can you imagine! Banned from Washington. She faces six months in jail and a $5,000 fine, if convicted.

Maybe she hasn’t heard that we now have “Free Speech Zones,” which suspiciously sounds like a law established abridging the freedoms of speech and assembly. Also, since, Dr. Wang is a naturalized citizen; she’s probably familiar her textbook First Amendment Rights (the old school stuff), but not the caveats now in place, to keep President Bush at a certain level of comfort as he does whatever he wants…cuz, otherwise, the terrorists will win.

Yet, don’t let it be said that Bush didn’t give President Hu proper lip-service to freedoms of assembly, speech and religion. Bush wants that for Chinese people and Iraqis, just not Americans. Certainly, not for Dr. Wang with her being banned from Washington…at this juncture.
Another man jailed for civil disobedience and trying to exercise free speech and the freedom of assembly to undo unjust conditions was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. Wang is keeps good company in spirit. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Not to ascribe convictions to Dr. Wang, but what else could have moved her to take on Presidents Bush and Hu. And in the case of the accusation against China, the injustice of harvesting the organs of political/religious prisoners. Geesh. I read in the Epoch Times, it’s done without consent by those being excuted. It’s a vivisection as the harvesting begins. It ends, of course, as a state execution, and the evidence goes up in smoke in Chinese State Crematoriums. Hong Kong is a big market for the kidneys, and there’s a warning that patients better sign up for transplant operations right away because the cost is going up in July 2006. Too much press is making the business trickier. There’s overhead to pay for sneakiness.

It all makes me think twice about this portable phone on my desk marked made in China. And these pipe cleaners, a bone dish, an ashtray, a paperweight, a pen holder, fingernail clippers, my purse, a picture frame, all marked made in China. We give our money to this nation hand over fist because they make a lot of handy crap. Just what are we doing? No wonder Wang Wen Yi, M.D. is so distraught. Business and enterprising are in the front seats now; for the rest of humanity, it’s the back of the bus.

Gandhi reminds me, “To forgive and accept injustice is cowardice.” So, I am indicted as for just accepting injustice going about my business being angry, and hurt about the situation in the world, in my own country. Blah, blah, blah, I’m just an insigniciant news person in a very red state.

Today, I’ll take my cues from Thoreau: “Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”

I want the kind of government that will let Dr. Wang’s First Amendment rights override her arrest. I want the kind of “We the People” that will be outraged by China’s grave oppression of human rights and laud Dr. Wang’s heroicism in standing up to two extremely powerful world rulers. I want a government that inspires virtue, justice, and the value of preserving human dignity. Wouldn’t that be grand?