More on Torture

As I predicted in my articles: Dick Cheney: Dr. Strangelove Meets The Sting and Torture and the Agent Jack Bauer Dictum, the torture issue has become front and center in the news – and will remain so for some time to come.

Although President Obama and many in Washington would like to see this issue quickly go away, I do not believe the Justice Department or the Obama administration has a choice in this matter – either legally or politically.

Legally speaking, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have an obligation to enforce the law. Since the evidence shows that both national and international laws concerning torture were broken in serious and deliberate ways, an investigation is mandatory as is prosecution of those responsible.

Although Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama are correct in their assertion that lower-level individuals operating within the scope of justice department memos that provided a legal justification for torture (in a very tortured way) should not be prosecuted, it is clear from the evidence released that many of the people involved went well beyond the scope of these memos.

For example, it was recently reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a one month period. Aside from the fact that this goes well beyond even the phony guidelines provided, it suggests the technique’s effectiveness is, at best, limited.

More disturbingly, there is some evidence that torture took place even before the justice department memos were issued. If true, that would mean there wasn’t even a pretense for the legality of using these techniques.

The debate took a disturbing turn yesterday when Liz Cheney, daughter of the former Vice President, went on television to defend her father. Her defense was that:

"The tactics are not torture… The memos laid out the extent of exactly how far we could go before it would become torture, because it was important we not cross that line into torture."

This argument is an Orwellian one: change history to say that torture is not torture.

The problem with this “reasoning” is that her father is too intelligent to have relied on such legal memorandum in good faith. As someone with legal training, let me assure you that there is always an argument that can be made – and these lawyers were told to create a legal justification that Bush administration officials could hide behind.

Nobody involved really believed the conduct was legal – they simply wanted some cover in the event that their secret torture program got out.

Even a casual review of the memorandum shows that they ignored U.S. case law on the subject (not to mention international law) including a case under the Reagan administration where a Texas sheriff and his deputies were successfully prosecuted and jailed (ten years for the Sheriff and four years for the deputies) for waterboarding prisoners for the purpose of obtaining confessions.

And the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – a far more objective source than Dick Cheney – and the appointed judge of what constitutes torture – has said that the Bush administration programs constituted torture and were violations of the United Nations' Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.

It is also worth noting that the leaked Red Cross report details other techniques that were used such as shackling prisoners to the ceiling for days at a time and depriving them of solid food. Are these also not torture?

If another country ever used these techniques against an American citizen, would we also say it wasn’t torture?

The brutally honest truth of the matter is that we must decide as a Nation what kind of a country we want to be. Do we want to be a nation where “might makes right” – where laws are only things we need to respect if they are in our self interest? Or do we want to be more than that? I would argue that most Americans view our country as more than that.

And when I say most Americans, I mean Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. I don’t think this should be a partisan debate. Torture is wrong – and the United States does not torture!