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by Paul
8. November 2007 11:12
Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, you probably hope, as do I, that every one of our troops comes home safely, not just alive, but free of any crippling mental or physical wounds. From Iraq and wherever else they are deployed.
If you’ve read any descriptions of the "interrogation technique" so innocently named "waterboarding," I doubt that you would want your son or daughter, brother or sister, wife or husband, to undergo such an experience. To say that it is not torture because it does no permanent damage is the height of hypocrisy.
Picture this: Your loved one is forced to take large volumes of water into his or her lungs, until death is imminent. The lungs are then voided and the victim is allowed to take in a quick, desperate gasp of air. The procedure is repeated over and over until that person you love says something that the perpetrator of this obscenity believes to be true and relevant. Repugnant? Of course. Torture? Unquestionably. I’ve been told by physicians that stress of that sort almost certainly will cause some permanent damage to the lungs, but even if that were not true, the mental agony and aftereffects are dreadful.
If a defendant could convince a judge that police interrogation included waterboarding, any statement obtained would not be permitted as evidence. If you subjected an animal to waterboarding, you might find yourself in prison. Do it to one of your children, and if your parental rights aren’t completely terminated, you’ll probably be limited to only supervised visitation. And rightly so.
Yet a ridiculous debate is going on as to whether waterboarding should be permitted in questioning terror suspects. Has the word "American" come to mean nothing? The debate should be closed, immediately, and waterboarding outlawed permanently. I won’t recommend that those Americans who have used, authorized, or defended it be tried as war criminals, but that’s what we’d be demanding in the wake of a war in which it was routinely used against our troops.
Yes, other political entities, including many hostile to the US, and some banana republic dictators whom we supported, have used methods such as this and worse. As Americans, we cannot choose them as role models.
Americans taken prisoner in combat are seldom treated with much concern for their comfort. There’s no justification for that, but you can bet your last dollar that how we treat prisoners is used as a rationalization for those abuses. Suppose the Iran hostage crisis were happening now, and we had been routinely subjecting Iranian citizens to experiences such as waterboarding. Do you believe for one minute that the American hostages would not have had much more horrible experiences than they recounted when repatriated? In a very real sense, what we do to prisoners, we’re indirectly doing to Americans taken prisoner in the future.
History shows that torture, no matter how nicely named or how persuasively justified, seldom produces true and useful information. During the black plague, some Jews were subjected to indescribable torment until they "confessed" that their people were causing the plague by poisoning the wells. That obviously wasn’t true: We know now that the disease was caused by a germ carried by fleas, transported by rats. The Inquisition found "heretics" all over the place by torturing the accused until they confessed. Some of the twisted minds that conducted the Inquisition sometimes got young women to confess to having sex with Satan, complete with a colorful description of his male member. Does anyone believe those supernatural dalliances actually took place?
The current administration justifies waterboarding as being necessary for our national safety. I’m sorry to say this, because no one wants to think our elected officials or the people they appoint are frankly evil, but that’s the kind of justification that has been given by people like Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein; not the kind of company we should keep. Or it’s claimed that we shouldn’t interfere with the operations of intelligence agencies. That’s hypocritical coming from an administration that blatantly ignored the best information those agencies uncovered, resulting in a pointless loss of thousands of American lives. Playing the 9/11 card rings hollow when we consider that more Americans have died in Iraq, where Al Qaeda had no support, than at the World Trade Center. It also rings hollow to claim that we mustn’t interfere with the decisions of our military leaders if they deem waterboarding to be justified, when administration officials callously ignored the pleas of top ranking military personnel and enforced policies that, in effect, created the very insurrection which continues to spill American blood.
They can’t have it both ways. Ignore the experts because of the president’s "gut feelings," but then caution us away from disagreeing with some of their techniques. We can’t have it both ways either. We can’t very well demand humane treatment for our troops, then perpetrate inhumane treatment on others in the interest of so-called national defense.
Enough is enough.
Paul Karsten Fauteck, Psy.D.
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