The justification some Americans offer in support of torturing prisoners in the war on terror is that considering the 9-11 hijackings and the suicide bombings by radical Islamists all over the world, it is critical to know where and when the next attack will occur. It would be nice to know that, granted.
The problem is that it would be nice to know a lot of important things that are quite as real as those attacks. The question is whether the United States, as a matter of national policy, should tolerate torture as a method of obtaining the information.
I'd thought we'd rejected that as a matter of official policy, which means that we condemn other nations which use torture for any reason and prosecute our own people, official and civilian, who commit the crime of torture. In California where I practice criminal law, among other things we have the crime of Torture, penalty life in prison. Over the past summer I represented a young man charged with it, and beat it. He'd punched his girlfriend in a violent, drunken jealous rage. The injuries were bad. She lost five lower front teeth. She had two broken fingers for a previous drunken, violent rampage involving another girlfriend. His family loved him and saw that he was represented. The skin on the back of her scalp showed a two inch gash down to the skull. He'd been to prison before. Torture, charged the DA. Life. It appeared to the DA that my client must have inflicted first one kind of wound, then another and then another, in order to extract information from the girlfriend, as the argument had to do with "Who was that man I saw you talking to?" which she wouldn't, or couldn't, answer. She was intoxicated also and trying to sleep, when the words occurred.
Two other attorneys before me represented him on this without much success in dealing with the torture and mayhem, battery and prison prior alleged. I went out to the scene of the crime, the bedroom in his house, where the defendant's father had patched a hole the size of a softball in the plasterboard in the wall, over the bed, resulting from the altercation. I photographed it and turned it over to the DA along with this: The defendant didn't torture the girlfriend. He had hit her. Once. While she was seated on the bed, where the argument had occurred. The force of the blow drove her head into the wall behind the bed, breaking the wall. She'd put up her hand to defend against the blow. Her fingers came between the the fist and her teeth, absorbing enough of the blow to break both and crush the bone in one. When her head struck the plasterboard, the skin split. Battery, yes. Injuries, yes. Prior record, yes. but Torture, no. The DA dropped the torture and we negotiated the case as per normal, Torture being anything but normal.
So we prosecute torture in the states and in the federal system. It is a crime for which you can go to prison for life in California. We reject torture as a crime. Military people's worst nightmare is falling into the hands of an enemy who tortures. Gary Francis Powers, our U-2 spy pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 just before the Paris summit, parachuted to safety. He had been provided with a poison capsule that he was supposed to have taken to avoid being captured and tortured into revealing secrets of the spy program. He was eventually repatriated in a prisoner exchange for the Russian spy Rudolf Abel.
Sen. John McCain, who ran for president, was shot down over Hanoi and tortured for years.
We fight torture. We don't commit it. Or so we thought. Under the Bush Administration, leaving office in a week, we practiced torture, whether the president and his supporters admit it or not. We've created more enemies and other people displeased with our example, than we can imagine. I don't know whether we've forestalled any further attacks. Probably we've extracted bits and pieces of intelligence on the order of who is related to whom, and how, in Islamist lands, and who works with whom, and who is friends with whom, so that we can target them for assassination, another of our difficult issues, where we take them out from the air using unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, among other techniques including sharing information with allies, if we have any.
Torture is bad business. If we do it, so can the bad guys, our enemies. When they do it, we can decry them in world forums. When we do it, we reduce ourselves to their moral level. This is not something you want to do when professing to lead the world, morally, democratically, and in terms of our "soft power," our cultural force. Since 9-11, we've climbed down from our lofty perch into the mud of torture. It will take a long time to remove the taint, I'm afraid. Let's hope that sooon-to-be Pres. Obama sets a loftier tone, and means it. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice don't seem to have meant it.
Here's another article showing we can't be trusted:
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