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Of course America tortures. And you already know about it.
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I.
In a way, I had kind of hoped that the topic of "enhanced interrogation techniques" would simply go away. It does not appear that that will be the case.
It's not that I feel the issue is particularly complicated in and of itself. Merriam-Webster defines torture as;
Noun.
1a) anguish of body or mind: agony b) something that causes agony or pain
2) the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.
3) Distortion or overrefining of a meaning or argument.
To put it glibly, the problem with the entire debate is that in seeking to discuss the second definition, people usually employ the third resulting, at least in my case, in the first.
Dealing with the issue at hand. Any definition of enhanced interrogation is begging to be exploited in theory, whether or not you want to quibble that any particular practice causes "intense" pain or merely the more mild kind. If coercion isn't intense it's obviously not going to work against someone who wants to resist it; to have any claim at results at all requires pushing people to a breaking point.
The Bush administration's working definition of torture could have, for instance, allowed beatings with a rubber hose, or forcing a prisoner to eat feces, or exposure to (generally) non-lethal viruses. It apparently allows you to choke your subject, which is all that waterboarding amounts to, combined with certain psychological effects to trigger a deep-seated near death response by simulating drowning.
So I'm willing to say that waterboarding is torture for the purpose of debate, sure. If it's not legally under the definition of torture, then that definition is poorly written and needs to be fixed. If it is, and the Bush legal department used legalese juggling to get around it, then investigations are fine. If the Speaker of the House knew about it, she should be investigated.
This is all fine in theory.
Except... except...
None of it actually matters.
II.
Torture already exists in America in forms far more severe than a mere choking or sleep deprivation, and it has a name and a face.
Meet Maher Arar;
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen, husband, and father of two. He moved to Canada at the age of 17, along with his parents, from Syria, in order to avoid being pressed into military service for a corrupt and despotic government, which only a few years before had murdered tens of thousands of it's own citizens at the Massacre of Hama. He graduated from McGill University, which is usually rated as Canada's top college, and earned a Master's at the University of Quebec. His wife, Monia Mazigh, is an academic who earned her doctorate from McGill, of Tunisian descent, who kept her own name and is active in leftward-leaning political circles.
I only mention this background to give you some sort of scope on the problem. This is the story of a couple who came from immigrant roots and became comfortably upper class, upstanding members of their community.
I want you to pay careful attention to the next sentence;
In 2002, Maher Arar was kidnapped by the CIA and sent to Syria, where he spent the next year being tortured.
I'm going to repeat that, because it's important;
In 2002, the government of the United States of America, each representative of whom is sworn to uphold the Constitution, sent a man, without benefit of trial or judicial review, to a foreign country to be tortured for charges unknown and on evidence undisclosed.
A year later, due primarily to the petitioning of the Canadian government by his wife, Maher Arar was finally released. Although he signed several confessions under duress, no actual new or useful information was ever coerced, and a subsequent investigation by Canadian sources found no links between Arar and any militant, terrorist, or extremist groups.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the RCMP, Canada's FBI, essentially) was monitoring Arar on suspicions of Islamist sympathies prior to this, mostly due to associations with an associate of a man believed to be an associate of Osama bin Laden, and passed on inaccurate information to American security forces describing Arar as an Islamist extremist "capable of being linked to al Qaeda". This was not the description that the RCMP's own records use and may have been a mistake.
Put that again; an innocent man may have spent a year undergoing extreme torture because of a clerical error.
The American government hasn't so much as apologized, much less offered a coherent reason why they kidnapped a foreign citizen (of one of our closest allies, no less) and sent him to be tortured, which is generally the type of thing that cheeses us off when people do it to our citizens.
I could probably rant for an hour or more about the grave injustice that was done to Mr. Arar, but I mention this specific case only for context. All the other details of his story can be found at the website started by his wife, over on this link.
Maher Arar was most assuredly innocent. Most of those that America has sent to... as former CIA agent Robert Baer charmingly puts it;
If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear- never to see them again- you send them to Egypt.
But most of these men were not innocent. They were terrorists. But they were tortured. And America was a considerable, knowing and willing partner in sending citizens of allied countries to this fate in violation of both international law, and, much more importantly, our Constitution, which states quite plainly nothing about status of citizenship or accusation but simply that the government of the United States of America shall not torture, period, end of sentence next paragraph.
Alright. So let's say we're convinced. The next obvious question goes something like this:
"Holy cow! I didn't think about that! So Bush did use torture, on at least one innocent man no less, and totally demolished the Constitution! That's great news for the Democrats! Why don't they focus on the guy being beaten everyday, electrocuted and pissed on by rats in a 3x6 cell for a year?"
Ahhh. Ahhhhhhhhhhh.
And isn't that a story worth the telling.
III.
It turns out that, unlike practices like waterboarding, henceforth referred to as "borderline torture", the practice of extraordinary rendition, henceforth referred to as "kidnapping people so our friends can torture them at our say so" was not an invention of the Bush administration.
Reagan used rendition- the kidnapping of foreign nationals- several times in the 80's, but he had the silly idea of trying them in American courts for crimes against America, as in the case of Fawaz Younis.
No, the genius who first decided that, instead of dealing with these international criminals in an independent judiciary with actual legal procedure, it would be easier to just start sending people to our less savory allies to torture 'em for information has a name and a face, too.
Some choice excerpts from the extraordinary testimony of former CIA agent Michael Scheuer before the subcommittee of international organizations, human rights, and oversight;
Mr. Scheuer: The Rendition Program was initiated because President Clinton
and Messrs. Lake, Berger and Clarke requested that the CIA begin
to attack and dismantle al-Qaeda. These men made it clear from
the first that they did not want to bring those captured to the
United States or to hold them in U.S. custody.President Clinton and his national security team directed the
CIA to take each captured al-Qaeda leader to the country which
had an outstanding legal process for him. This was a hard-and-fast
rule which greatly restricted CIA’s ability to confront al-Qaeda because
we could only focus on al-Qaeda leaders who were wanted
somewhere for a legal process. As a result, many al-Qaeda fighters
we knew of and who were dangerous to America could not be captured.
CIA warned the President and his National Security Council that
the U.S. State Department had and would identify the countries to
which the captured fighters were being delivered as human rights
abusers.In response, President Clinton and his team asked if CIA could
get each receiving country to guarantee that it would treat a person
according to its own laws. This was no problem, and we did so.I have read and been told that Mr. Clinton, Mr. Berger and Mr.
Clarke have said, since 9/11, that they insisted that each receiving
country treat the rendered person it received according to U.S.
legal standards. To the best of my memory, that is a lie.
Mr. Scheuer, by the way, is not a nice man. One of the more interesting parts of his testimony is a candid insistence that despite the knowledge that we were contributing to a policy of torture, he didn't care as long as it got rid of the terrorist in question. He correctly identifies the primary source of Arab/Muslim anger towards America as being our support of dictatorships and despotic governments in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but doesn't find any connection between the CIA's habits of extraordinary rendition and the occasional assassination of heads of state and that same anger, and further (although not in this testimony) has come to the baffling conclusion that because of this people like Osama bin Laden are not terrorists but resistance fighters.
Mr. SCHEUER. I don’t care what happens to the people who are
targeted and rendered. We wouldn’t be operating against them unless
they were enemies of the United States.
Mr. DELAHUNT. What about those that clearly eventually were
determined to be innocent?
Mr. SCHEUER. Mistakes are made, sir.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Mistakes are made.
Mr. SCHEUER. And if you can prove that there was not due diligence
in designing the target package or assembling the information
that caused that operation to go forward, then you have a case
against someone. Otherwise, it is a mistake.
Mr. DELAHUNT. It is just a mistake.
Mr. SCHEUER. Yes, sir. They are not Americans. I really don’t
care.
He later defends the Arar case quite simply by stating that if he wasn't guilty we wouldn't have arrested him, and isn't that a nauseatingly dystopian little bit of Heaven.
In his defense he correctly notes that it would've been easier to simply treat suspected terrorists as POWs, but notes that, again, this was not the decision the Clinton administration chose to make. He is also correct to later in the same hearing point out the hypocrisy of democratic and European attacks on extradition that only began after Bush took office and that make no attempt to cast their eyes backwards, for Bush merely expanded the use of a policy that was created under the previous administration.
So then, we can see clearly why, after this hearing over two years ago, democrats in the House retreated from the issue to regroup and crackdown on the waterboarding complaint instead, and why Obama hasn't tackled the issue of actual torture rather than the tantamount variety;
Because if we pursued every policy by which America condoned and aided in the use of torture, we'd have to investigate everyone that served on the Hill for the past fifteen years.
And if there's one thing that garners strong bipartisan support amongst those in power, it's not holding accountable those in power.
Obama is willing to accept this hypocrisy because, simply put, doing otherwise would cost him half of his cabinet.
My opinion? I grow tired of forgiveness. Nobody forgives the grocery worker who gets caught driving home from the bar. Nobody forgives the dentist that misfiles their taxes. Nobody forgives the teenage girls that send nude photos of themselves to each other on Facebook, or the janitor that gets caught with ten ounces of weed. Nobody forgives the kid that brings a knife to school or downloads the latest Britney Spears album, or the prostitute on the street. Every election cycle we trot out new slogans about "zero tolerance" on everything from drugs to violence to hate crimes to pornography to loud music, and the public laps it up as if every major crime rate hasn't been declining for decades (which they have).
But, somehow, everytime a politician does something wrong, now's not the time for looking back and we have to move forward. We forgive those that accept bribes or that condone torture. We forgive those that don't pay their taxes or that lie under oath. We forgive those that let thousands of American troops die because they didn't do the research, and we forgive those that lie to the American people and run on a compaign pledge they never intend to honor.
Frankly, when it comes to applying the law to those in power, I consider forgiveness to be a highly overrated virtue. I'm all for investigating the use of torture, even (read: especially) if it means depopulating half of the Hill.
IV.
I'd like to now address a couple of the arguments I anticipate listening to, having already heard them ad nauseum;
1) "The Constitution is not designed to protect non-American citizens".
The Constitution, being a legal document, does not use words freely and with little thought. The word "citizen" is used several times in the Constitution, but only in reference to election qualifications, to run or to vote or to serve. The Bill of Rights makes no use at all of the word "citizen", but references "any person" or some variant on several occasions. Moreover, several make no reference to any body of humans at all but directly circumscribe the powers of the government; the eighth amendment is one of these.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis; The exception proves the rule in cases not excepted. The eight amendment does not explicitly list a right of citizens but a power that neither the Federal government nor the states may exercise.
2) "The eighth amendment shouldn't apply in times of war"
This is wrong on the face of it. Several amendments, again, make reference to legal methods or circumstances that may waive those rights. The eighth amendment, above, does not provide any exceptions; in fact, it's the shortest amendment in the Constitution and quite to the point.
Any argument that supposes that the Constitution was written at a time of peace by men who had only known prosperity can be dispelled by history; for most of it's early life America was called the Great Experiment precisely because the uncertain nature of it's future. In a time of tenuous borders, surrounded by territory held by hostile old world powers and confederations of (rightfully) pissed off natives, after a war in which around a third of the population supported the enemy, the Constitution was written to put strict fetters on America's government that could very fairly be said to endanger American security in the short term. I'll concede the effectiveness argument just because it doesn't matter. Suppose torture is effective. It's still in violation of the Constitution and for a very good reason.
Many, perhaps most of the founding fathers were more or less followers of Deism; the belief that God is, to use a metaphor, the designer of the game of life. Being perfect, as well as possibly omnipresent in space and time (whatever you take that to mean), God not only doesn't interfere in his creation, but essentially can't; interference implies a correction, and a correction implies a mistake. A mistake implies imperfection which doesn't imply God at all.
The primary distinction between deism and atheism, besides the whole belief in a creator thing, is the idea that the Universe is, well, intelligently designed; things tend to happen for a reason. Free will may exist but consequences tend to reward good behavior and punish bad in a vacuum. People have the choice to murder or steal or lie, but in nature's law as designed by nature's God, these actions lead to negative consequences, both external and internal.
Being thus more Godly men than we can say of most of those that have served as leaders and legislators for the past couple decades, the founders adopted certain principles in the Constitution not simply because it was the moral thing to do, but because of the belief that nature's law and nature's God rewards liberty and virtue, and hates cruelty and avarice. Godliness and morality are not burdens, but great advantages; the moral highground is aptly named such and abandoned only by fools- a fact that the founding fathers knew all too well from personal experience, having watched as the power of Britain over the colonies evaporated in the face of their defacto denouncement of many of it's finer principles in the common law and rights of citizens- a great asset lost from an abandonment of principles with nothing more than short term gain as their end.
A man is not benefitted if he should gain the entire world and lose his soul.
Or, as George Washington put it in his farewell address;
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?
Promote then... good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it - It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it ? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue ? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?
That last question of our first and greatest commander in chief was not answered in his day. It does not look like it has been successfully and finally answered since, although we can take as some consolation that we have gone farther down that road than any other country in the history of mankind.
And that's at least some small comfort.
And that's about all I have to say about that.
V.
I leave you with a link to e-merl.com, the highly eccentric and proudly profane works of Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, apropos to which;
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