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ON TORTURE & BEING ‘GOOD AMERICANS’
BY FRED BRANFMAN
“Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near
drownings o f a prisoner in a bathtub.”
~ THE HIS TOR Y PLACE
“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.
-BR IAN ROSS. ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, 11/18/2005
“When President Bush signed the bill outlawing 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', THE 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 said they had known and been horrified,
but were afraid to speak up. But then they would 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 knew 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 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 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 the world was
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 govern
ment 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 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 many Americans who have died fighting autocracy
and totalitarianism.
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 mons
trous, 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 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 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.
VAN DÜSEN BEVERA6ES
ASTORIA, OREGON
325-2362
TIMBRINTON
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, how
ever, 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% 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.”
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 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 inter
view Bush 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 and Attorney General who either engage in or ration
alize torture in our names, even as they shamelessly deny they
are doing so?
If we are willing to live with this evil, torture will continue.
If we do not, it can be brought to an end. Who are we?
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 frighten
ing than 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% 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 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 pre
condition 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.
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 ideals 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 the executive’s right to torture was
defended not only 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 conser
vative circles) which declared that “we must all be prepared to
torture" to save American lives. Or that The National Review
opined that “if McCain’s amendment becomes law...we will then
be able to apply only methods formulated to deal with convent
ional 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 torture being
conducted in our names, and that the term “good Americans” will
mean just that and not be 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.
He is writing a book entitled Facing Death at Any Age. He wrote
this article for Tikkun.
Cannon Beach, O regon
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