I have exchanged e-mails with one of the local right wing talk radio disc jockeys in this very conservative agrarian town. Recently, he stated that he believed that waterboarding and sensory deprivation were not torture, that he was against torture, and that the founding fathers would support such extreme measures to protect the nation. This is my response.
I apologize for the length of this reply and I beg your indulgence in reading it. It is a subject on which I have particularly strong feelings and I felt that, in order to properly lay out my reasons, I had to explain fully.
I must take issue with your contention that our forefathers would endorse interrogation techniques such as waterboarding or sensory deprivation to save the Republic. I do not believe that they would do any such thing. In point of fact, I believe that they would be against any country that used such tactics and count them as their enemy, whether they had a hand in it’s beginning or not.
The words in our founding documents are quite plain. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These words are inclusive and pertain to every man, woman and child on the face of the earth.
These words form the basis of our legal thought and social perspective. From these beginnings are derived the American idea of justice, which includes the foundational concepts of due process, innocence until proven guilty and the right to confront your accusers.
The problem with torture is that if you deprive anyone, even your enemy, of these rights, you make the statement that they are less than human. If they are less than human, then the words in our founding documents hold no inherent meaning and are not applicable to anyone, us included. In other words, to torture invalidates the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
This concept of a universal humanity and an enduring justice was foremost in the thoughts of those who, after World War Two, refused to allow the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes against humanity to be treated as less than human. The Nuremberg Trials were the statement to the world of what democracy meant, of what democracy could do when put into action. It spoke of the ability of a just people to confront their enemies without fear, to provide a fair and public judgment of their guilt or innocence and to visit that justice which formed the basis of their society upon those who were found guilty.
For the Bush Administration to authorize a repeal of human rights in a country that is based upon the sanctity of human value was the height of hubris. They had no authority to do such, since our law and our country are founded on ideals that are the exact opposite.
The question of our legal foundations notwithstanding, there are other compelling reasons to oppose such tactics. Torture affects not only he who is tortured, but he who tortures as well. It twists the body of the recipient and the mind of the practitioner. The travesty at Abu Ghraib was a direct result of the Bush Administration’s abdication of their moral foundations and any psychological damage that was done to the young men and women of the armed forces who participated in such actions is unforgivable.
The administration’s record for their efforts is less than stellar. The case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi provides not only a graphic example of the results of such tactics, but a profound contrast with more humane methods.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was the chief of Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and knew Bin Laden personally. He was captured in Pakistan on December 19, 2001. When the FBI found out who he was, Agent Jack Cloonan, who was working the Richard Reid case, he of the ‘shoe bomber’ fame, dispatched two agents to interview him. He gave the agents, anti-terrorism expert Russel Fincher, as well as Marty Mahon, a New York City police detective working with the FBI, instructions to "handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York. Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the Bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it be a shining example of what we feel is right."
The two FBI agents interrogated al-Libi at Baghram Air Base. Their interrogation was genial and respectful of al-Libi’s rights, an approach that was a considerable surprise to the Al Qaeda member. The interrogators actively sought ways in which to connect with the terrorist, and were successful at finding personal connections which helped open his world to them. According to Jane Mayer in ‘The Dark Side’,
"al-Libi told the FBI duo enough about Reid to convince them that he’d make a devastating witness in any future trial against him. He also gave them many new details about how the training camps were run and how the Arabs had dominated. He was himself from Libya, and it emerged that he hadn’t actually liked Bin Laden, who had tried to force him to train only Al Qaeda fighters, not all Muslims, which was his preference. Most important, they claimed, al-Libi gave the agents specific, actionable intelligence- information that could save American lives... without coercion, al-Libi told the FBI team of an approved plot by Al Qaeda that was in the final state before execution, to blow up the U.S. embassy in Aden, Yemen. A source close to the interrogation maintained that this was corroborated, averting what would likely have been a deadly attack."
Amazingly, al-Libi wanted something simple from the agents in exchange for his willing cooperation.
"Word had reached him, even as far away as the caves of Afghanistan, that the United States had offered emigration help to some Al Qaeda informers and their families. He had a Syrian wife. He wanted for her, and her family, to be able to come to the United States. He was willing to be prosecuted himself if a deal could be struck."
Torture had played no part in the valuable information that was realized from the capture of al-Libi. Indeed, even his whereabouts were secured not by coercion, but by a huge payment to Pakistani agents in the field. In other words, good, solid police work. Torture did, however, have much to do with the false information he later gave to his captors, which he afterward recanted as fiction.
When the CIA took the case over, they removed al-Libi from under the noses of the FBI agents during an interview. He was strapped to a board, had his eyes and mouth covered with duct tape and was rolled out of the interrogation room to a rendition flight waiting for him.
Mayer went on to state that
"In 2004, after al-Libi was returned to the custody of the United States, he told the CIA that Egyptian officials had threatened him with "a long list of methods that could be used against him which were extreme." He said the Egyptians pressed him in particular to admit to knowing about ties between Al Qaeda and Sadddam Hussein in Iraq. This pressure occurred in the crucial months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq."
He stated that he was physically and psychologically brutalized into fabricating what he thought his captors wanted to hear. This false testimony, obtained under torture, formed part of the underpinning to convince the American people to authorize war powers.
This history points up that the strength of the American position is its moral commitment to the rights of man, even if those men are your enemy. It was not coercion that produced any valuable intelligence, but the promise of what America stood for that brought this terrorist to the point that he was willing to cooperate. This has held true throughout America’s history. A story persists from World War Two that a Japanese prisoner was so shocked by his humane treatment at the hands of the American army that he acted as guide for an American air raid on several prominent Japanese positions he was aware of in order to help shorten the war. It is certainly true that, given a choice of whom to surrender to, Axis troops were much more willing to turn themselves over to Americans.
All reports gathered so far regarding the data realized from the Bush torture program point to a similar situation. Under torture, subjects do not give accurate information. In addition, by all reports, information that has been claimed by the Bush administration to have resulted from this program has been found to be information that the United States already possessed through other sources.
As far as waterboarding and sensory deprivation are concerned, imagine if your daughter or son were arrested for questioning. If these things are not things that you would want them to endure, then it is torture. Your argument may be that your family is innocent and therefore, not deserving of any such treatment, while terrorists are guilty. This is true. However, the reality is that there have been found a good number of detainees who have been held for years without contact with their families whatsoever who are guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, who are, indeed, innocent of any wrongdoing. If we would not subject a guilty man to an unfair trial, how do we justify subjecting innocent people to torture?
In addition, a policy of torture undermines any attempt at justice that may be made in the future. The Bush administration has had to release without prosecution many people who had been held, for fear that the details of their incarceration would not only embarrass the administration, but would render their prosecution futile. This means that the Bush administrations approach to using torture as a policy instrument has actually helped free men who are a danger to this country.
There are many things which I will happily debate and be happy to admit when a better idea is proposed. I have discussed some of such with you and been enlightened by the exchanges. However, while I respect your right to hold your opinion regarding this subject, it is one on which I cannot and will not compromise. The reason is that the inherent value of man is a basic part of the fabric of our Constitution, and we are tasked by our status as Americans to ‘preserve and protect’ not only this document, but the living ideas that it embodies, and to do so with our lives if necessary. Torture denies this basic premise and, therefore, denies the basic foundation that this country was built on. For that reason, I don’t believe that your assertion would hold up. Our founding fathers would reject this policy as surely as they rejected the idea that any monarchy has an inherent right to rule and they would reject summarily any country that espoused it as a policy tool.
I believe strongly that there is no middle ground on this. A man cannot serve two masters, nor can he live by two diametrically opposed philosophies. We can be a country that believes in the rights of man and the rule of law, or we can be a country that believes in the expediency of coercing information from people who may be willing to harm it, but we can’t be both.