[Peace-discuss] On Torture and Being "Good Americans"

[Paul Patton]

*
On Torture and Being "Good Americans" *
  *by Fred Branfman*


*"Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a
prisoner in a bathtub."*
The History Place<http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-gestapo.htm>

*"The CIA officers say 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the
longest under waterboarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to
talk, with debatable results."*
—Brian Ross, ABC World News Tonight, November 18, 2005

*"When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of
detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers
as commander in chief…Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White
House and legal specialists said."*
—"Bush Could Bypass Torture Ban," Boston Globe

 As a teenager, I could not understand how the German people could claim to
be "good Germans," unaware of what the Nazis had done in their names. I
could understand if these ordinary German people had said they had known and
been horrified, but were afraid to speak up. But they would then be "weak or
fearful or indifferent Germans," not "good Germans." The idea that only the
Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust made no sense. Whatever the Germans
as a whole know about the concentration camps, they certainly knew about the
systematic mistreatment of Jews that had occurred before their very eyes,
and from which so many had profited. And if they were not really "good
Germans," what should or could they have done, given the reality of Nazi
tyranny?

The issue became personal for me in the summer of 1961, when I hitchhiked
through Europe with a lovely German woman named Inge. Still in love after an
idyllic summer, we visited Hyde Park the day before I was to return home. A
bearded, middle-aged concentration-camp survivor was angrily attacking the
German people for standing by and letting the Jews be slaughtered. I was
moved beyond words. Suddenly the woman I loved began yelling angrily at him,
screaming that the Germans did not know, that her father had just been a
soldier and was not responsible for the Holocaust.

Our relationship essentially ended then and there. I understood
intellectually that she was just defending her father and was neither an
anti-Semite nor an evil person. But there it was. She on one side. The
survivor on the other. A gulf between them. Whatever my head said, my heart
knew that the world is divided into evil-doers, their victims, and those
like Inge who do not want to know. And that I had no choice but to stand
with the victims.

I never dreamed at that moment that I, as an American, would a few years
later face this same question as my government committed mass murder of
civilians in Indochina in violation of the Nuremberg Principles. Or that
more than four decades later I would still be struggling with what it means
to be a "good American" after learning that a group of U.S. leaders has
unilaterally seized the right to torture anyone it chooses without evidence
and in violation of international law, human decency, and the sacrifice of
the many Americans who have died fighting autocracy and totalitarianism.

*Bush Embraces Torture*

To ask what it means to be a "good American"is not to compare Bush to Hitler
or Republicans to Nazis. The question does not arise only when leaders
engage in mass murder on the scale of a Hitler or Stalin, which Bush has
not. It requires only that they engage in actions that are clearly evil,
which Bush has.

Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to
the human spirit, so morally bankrupt that even to debate it is a sign of
moral corruption. Native American genocide, slavery, totalitarianism, and
Jim Crow laws are evils so unspeakable that we cannot understand today how
anyone with a shred of decency could have once supported them. Today,
torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents
such an evil.

The issue has become urgent because Bush has chosen to demand the legal
right to torture anyone he wishes. When torture was revealed at Abu Ghraib,
the administration—falsely and shamelessly—attempted to shift its own
responsibility onto foot-soldiers like Lynndie England. Since then, however,
leaks have revealed that the CIA has tortured terrorist suspects all around
the world, using techniques like "waterboarding." In response, Senator John
McCain proposed an amendment, attached to the 2006 Defense bill, that would
ban torture.

Bush's first response to McCain's amendment was to threaten to veto the
Defense Bill if it passed. When it became clear that McCain's amendment
would pass by an overwhelming majority (it passed in by a 90-9 margin in the
end), Bush reversed course and said he would support the amendment. Yet when
he actually signed the bill, Bush added something called a "signing
statement" in which he reserved the right to do whatever he chooses as
Commander-in-Chief to "protect the American people from further terrorist
attacks." In short, even as he signed McCain's amendment, Bush let it be
known that he intends to ignore it as he sees fit.

Bush's demand is unprecedented. No leader in all human history, not even
Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, has publicly demanded the right to torture. All
others have behaved as Bush did before the amendment when he secretly
tortured on a scale unseen in American history even while saying he wasn't.
Forced into the open by the McCain amendment, however, Bush chose to openly
demand the legal right to torture. Most experts assume he will continue to
torture.

It is important to understand what this means. Bush justifies his right to
torture on the grounds of saving American lives in a global "war on
terrorism." Unlike previous wars, however, this war will never end. On the
contrary, Bush's bungling of the war on terror—including the increased
Muslim hatred of the United States that the practice of torture has
caused—makes it more likely that there will be another domestic 9/11,
leading in turn to more demands to torture. Bush's assertion of his right to
torture, therefore, would make torture a permanent and growing instrument of
U.S. state policy.

Also, by opposing the McCain amendment, Bush took direct responsibility for
the torture he and his administration have inflicted on countless suspects.
As you read these words, people are screaming in agony from Gestapo
techniques used in CIA and "allied" torture chambers around the world. Many
or even most of the victims are innocent. *The New Republic* has noted that
"Pentagon reports have acknowledged that up to 90 percent of the prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, many of whom were abused and tortured, were not guilty of
anything.... And Abu Ghraib produced a tiny fraction of the number of abuse,
torture, and murder cases that have been subsequently revealed."

Mr. Bush's statement that "we do not torture," even as he was threatening to
veto the entire Defense bill because it limited his right to torture, is a
dramatic example of how torture degrades the torturer even more than it does
his victims. And it is a disgraceful commentary on our nation that no major
church, business, or political leader, nor the fawning media personalities
who interview him and his officials, has expressed outrage at this
bald-faced lie. And one can barely mention an unspeakable Congress, which
ignored his lying about torture after spending two years impeaching his
predecessor for lying about sex.

The real question for us, however, is what this says not about President
Bush and our other leaders, but about ourselves. What are we, as citizens,
as human beings, willing to live with? Are we willing to live with a
President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and
Attorney-General who either engage in or rationalize torture in our names,
even as they shamelessly deny they are doing so?

If we are willing to live with this evil, the torture will continue. If not,
it can be brought to an end. Who are we?

*Becoming "Good Americans"*

We are in some ways more morally compromised than the "good Germans" of the
1930s. To begin with, we are far less able to claim we do not know. Our
daily newspapers regularly report new revelations of Bush administration
torture.

Second, by opposing torture, we face far less severe threats than did
Germans who tried to help Jews. Even the strong possibility that we could
become targets of illegal spying by this administration for protesting its
torture is far less frightening than the death or imprisonment faced by
Germans who helped Jews.

And, third, unlike the Germans, we cannot reasonably claim that it is futile
to oppose our leaders. Creating or joining an organized effort to prevent
torture can succeed because we possess one great advantage that human rights
advocates in Germany did not have: the public is with us. Most Americans
abhor torture and can understand the argument that it does not protect
American lives. This is why the McCain amendment enjoyed 90 percent
majorities in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, and why it is
possible to bring to power leaders who are not committed to torture.

If we can build a movement to limit and ultimately remove from power those
who torture, and thus endanger our lives, we will be achieving other
important goals as well.

We will be building support for international law, which is one of
humanity's few frail protections against far greater violence. If we can
implement international law against torture, perhaps we can extend it to
preventing the murder of civilians or aggressive war. We will be reaffirming
America's once-strong commitment to building the kind of new international
order that is required to reduce international terrorism, and fostering a
world in which U.S. leaders would once again be respected as fighters for
human decency rather than despised as threats to it.

We will bring the once-powerful but forgotten force of morality and
nonviolent action—for civil rights, for peace, for women's rights—back into
our politics. A false morality that claims to love Jesus while torturing and
killing in his name will be replaced by an authentic morality that seeks to
address the root-causes of terrorism and violence.

We will thus also join this renewed moral force with a practical strategy
that can actually protect us from terrorism. Torture is only the most
dramatic example of how Bush has endangered our lives by bungling the war on
terrorism. He has also dangerously neglected homeland security, alienated
world opinion, helped Al Qaeda grow in numbers and fervor, wasted vast
resources in Iraq in ways that increase terrorist ranks, failed to build an
effective democracy in Afghanistan, failed to bring peace to the Middle
East, and failed to address the poverty that fuels anti-American terrorism.
Ending torture is a necessary precondition to developing an effective
strategy that will actually protect rather than endanger Americans.

And we will strengthen democracy at home. Nothing is more un-American and
undemocratic than the idea that a small group of executive branch leaders
should be free to torture, kill, and spy at will. This idea is in fact
precisely what generations of Americans have died fighting against. Ending
Bush's use of torture will be the beginning of restoring an accountable and
democratic government to this nation.

*Conservative Totalitarianism*

Ending torture will have a major impact beyond torture itself for a simple
reason: as slavery was the linchpin to the entire pre-bellum Southern social
order, torture has become integral to today's conservative ideology.
Conservative ideology was once a coherent set of ideas built around limiting
state power over the individual. It has today degenerated into a rationale
for expanding executive power over the individual, including not only the
right to torture but the right to spy on citizens, wage aggressive war while
lying about it, prevent gay people from marrying, deny a woman the right to
an abortion, publish disguised government propaganda in the media, and even
deny us the right to die in peace if conservatives decree that we must live
as vegetables or in unendurable pain.

It is no coincidence that the executive's right to torture was defended not
ony by Bush and Cheney, but also by conservative ideologues at *The Weekly
Standard*, financed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and edited by William
Kristol, who published a cover story by Charles Krauthammer—widely admired
in conservative circles—which declared that "we must all be prepared to
torture" to save American lives. Or that the *The National Review* opined
that "if McCain's amendment becomes law ... we will then be able to apply
only methods formulated to deal with conventional soldiers in a different
sort of conflict than the one that faces us now. This is folly."

Today's conservative movement has been reduced to a set of impulses, above
all a totalitarian impulse to support the expansion of autocratic power it
was founded to restrain. Since its ideological blinders prevent it from
developing sensible measures to reduce terrorism, it has turned to
justifying only those policies that expand executive power and seek to rule
through coercion, threats, and violence.

Whatever a movement to abolish torture will achieve for society, it is clear
what participating in it means for each of us as individuals. It means above
all that our children and grandchildren will not remember us with shame,
that they will not one day have to try to justify to our victims our failure
to oppose the torture being conducted in our names, and that the term "good
Americans" will mean just that, and not become an excuse for fear or
indifference.

When we fight to end torture we are not only fighting for human decency,
international law, democracy, and freedom. We are fighting for ourselves.

*Fred Branfman is a writer and long-time political activist. His email
address is fredbranfman at aol.com and his website is www.trulyalive.org. He is
writing a book entitled Facing Death at Any Age.*

(c) 2006 Los Angeles Times
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