http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/12/opinion/edslaughter.phpBy Anne-Marie Slaughter Published: October 12, 2007
SHANGHAI, China:
Here we go again. That is my numbed but no longer disbelieving reaction to reports that even after Abu Ghraib and the official rejection of the "torture memo" penned by John Yoo that authorized any kind of force as long as it did not cause death or major organ failure, the Bush administration turned around and secretly authorized CIA interrogations using head-slapping, exposure to cold and water-boarding, even when used in combination.
And here come the semantics from a president who once prided himself on plain talk - "This government does not torture." No, because head-slapping, exposure to cold and convincing suspects that they are about to drown in a technique that even America's strongest soldiers cannot withstand for more than two minutes does not, in his view, constitute torture. Indeed, truly incredibly, according to one of the newly leaked opinions, these techniques do not even constitute "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
Solzhenitsyn's reports of the Soviet gulag in the 1970s did not feature the horrifically creative torture techniques practiced in places like Argentina and Chile during the dirty war. Most of what he talked about was being beaten and exposed to the frigid temperatures of Siberia. In those days we Americans did not dance around trying to decide whether such treatment constituted torture. We just knew it was wrong. And as has often been reported, many of the techniques our CIA agents are using now come from the ways we condition our soldiers to resist torture by lawless enemies if they are captured. We now seem to have no trouble accepting the moral equivalence of what they do to us and what we do to them. snip
I can argue why ruling out torture and humiliating and degrading treatment is strongly in American interests, how interrogation of this sort rarely works. I can explain how the damage it does to us in the world far outweighs any specific information that we get. Indeed, even if we get information that actually succeeds in stopping a particular attack today, we are breeding legions of new terrorists tomorrow. I can also point out how seriously we endanger our own soldiers when they are captured abroad. I can talk about how fundamentally we degrade ourselves, beginning with the men and women ordered to carry out such treatment and ending with our very identity as a nation.
As President Theodore Roosevelt said in his 1906 State of the Union address, "No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered."I can make those arguments. I believe them. But what I really want is an America that will simply stand up and say, as President George W. Bush did when he saw the Abu Ghraib photographs, that this is not who we are. It is time for a president who means it.
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