Truth Commission or Torture Procecution

by Tex Norman⁽⁷⁸⁾

Torture, and waterboarding in particular, is filling time and space throughout the print and electronic media, and many of our elected officials are outraged. I have listened to their indignation, but I just dont get it. Are these elected people shocked by the torture, or by the fact that now we have actual memos that prove that what we knew was going on was actually going on.

The Bush administration, and this nation, has a hard choice to make. I mean, it is not hard to decide about using torture if we believe torture is immoral, illegal, and ineffective. And it is not hard to pick if you believe torture is legal, moral, but ineffective. But if torture is immoral, illegal, but effective, well, that is decider hell.

Some may wish to argue the point, but torture is ineffective. If you inflict enough pain on someone you will get answers, but the answers will be unreliable . Torture is a little like a guessing game. If the first answer doesnt satisfy the interrogators, the victim will try a different answer. Eventually, the victim of torture will hit upon an answer that slows or stops the torture, and they know that this is the answer the torturers want, so this is the answer they are going to get. If the torturer asks if Iraq was behind 9-11 and the victim says no, and the torture continues, they know that the answer that stops the pain is something else. If the torture continues with a NO answer then the next time you try a YES answer. How reliable do you think such an interrogation going to be?

If we all agreed that torture is immoral but it is also effective , should we still squirm over making our decision? Is it ever ok to do something bad because it will get us what we want? Using this logic the poor people should rob liquor stores and convenient stores because while it is wrong to rob, it does resolve that pesky no money problem. Killing the clerk may be immoral, but it is still a very effective way to commit a crime without any of those bothersome witnesses to testify against you. Slavery was very good for the Southern cotton industry, but does that advantage make it easy to support human slavery?

Sadly, the ole decider, President Bush, did not seem to go through hell to make his decision abut torture. Bush directed his legal subordinates to draft opinions that torture was not torture, and definitely not illegal. Then Bush apparently failed to care about morality in his torture decision making process, or he was just too dumb for the thought to occur to him. Finally, Bush didnt care if torture was naughty and ineffective. The president and his subordinates were told, repeatedly, that torture was unreliable, and therefore ineffective. This was want an accident. This was not group think where people just gradually move further and further from their moral center. Bush and his cohorts KNEW torture (renamed enhanced interrogation techniques) was immoral, illegal, and ineffective and yet they picked to do it anyway.

I could be wrong, I am probably wrong; I hope Im wrong, but at least a big part of me believes that the Bush administration wanted to use torture because they wanted false information. Not just any ole false information. Bush and his thugs wanted information that linked Iraq to the 9-11 attack. Bush needed justification for the Iraq war and any justification, even justification created by the desperate mind of a tortured detainee was better than nothing. Everyone who has investigated the link between Iraq and 9-11 has found that there was no link, b ut Bush wanted to invade Iraq and Bush needed something to support his unwarranted illegal invasion of another country. If the answer you want is a false answer then torture is the perfect means of obtaining that false answer. Torture has the added benefit of making weak leaders feel tough and powerful. If you can torture without getting in trouble, then you can do anything you damn well please. It doesn't get more powerful than that.

Since the torture memos, and the legal opinions were requested by Bush BEFORE we had people to inflict torture upon, it seems clear that getting the truth was never the goal. If you think the government tried interrogating our terrorist enemies, and when they sneered at us and refused to talk, we felt compelled to resort to harsher enhanced interrogation techniques, well, you would be wrong.

It is laughable to see the pundits and politicians wringing their hands and making shocked faces at cameras as they express their surprise and disgust over the now undeniable fact that the United States has been using torture on our detainees. Who didnt know? I think torture is more like pornography than beauty. Beauty is subjective, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Torture is more like pornography as described by Justice Potter Stewart: WE KNOW IT WHEN WE SEE IT. (see Jacobellis v. Ohio , 378 U.S. 184 (1964)

It just isnt hard to SEE AND KNOW that if you tie a guy to a board, stick a cloth in his mouth, and cover his nose, and then pour water on the cloth cutting off air and flooding the nose and mouth with water that the person will struggle for air. If the interrogators continue to pour water and scream at the detainee until he passes out, and then you revive him and do it again, and again it looks like torture, is sounds like torture, it certain that it feels like torture. Then if you inflict this practice on the same guy 183 times, it is just not a stretch to think the practice is torture.

We dont need a Truth Commission. We need Torture Procecution.

Article submitted Saturday, April 25, 2009 & read 1034 times.

Tex Norman is a social worker, currently working at the Oklahoma DHS Abuse and Neglect hotline. He interviews people reporting abuse and/or neglect of children and vulnerable adults and writes a narrative. The narratives (and demographics) are used to initiate investigations of the allegations. He says it is like writing 8 to 10 stories a day. In August 2012, he will have been married to Kathie for 40 years. He has a son Ryan who earned a PhD from Princeton and he is now a scientist doing research in molecular biology. Tex spends his free time working as an artist and writer. He has one art site, and a blog that might be of interest: http://tex-norman.artistwebsites.com/ and http://collagepoetrybytex.blogspot.com/

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