Daily Republic, The Other Side April 23, 2009

US should be above using torture

By Kelvin Wade | | April 23, 2009 14:10

In the 1988 movie 'Mississippi Burning,' a fictionalized account of the investigation into the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964, one of the conspirators is kidnapped and bound to a chair in a shack by a torture specialist hired by the FBI. The specialist pulls out a Dixie cup and a razor blade and implies he's going to castrate the suspect if he doesn't talk. The suspect spills the beans.

Torture works. Humans have a breaking point. But what happens when a suspect tells everything he/she knows but the torturers want to know more?

That's how you end up waterboarding two terrorist suspects 266 times like our government did. And that's how the CIA ends up chasing false leads all over the globe.

Gen. Michael Hayden, head of the CIA under President Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, defended the harsh interrogations the previous administration used, saying they gleaned valuable information. Indeed, President Obama's intelligence director Dennis Blair wrote in a memo, 'High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaida organization that was attacking this country.'

But whether the interrogations worked isn't the point. It's the debate the defenders want to have but that's not the issue. The question is, was it right?

Iraq didn't have suicide bombings under Saddam Hussein. There were no successful assassination attempts on Saddam. There was no visible public dissent. Why? A dossier released by the British government some years ago detailed Saddam's methods. He'd drill into and sometimes cut off the hands of political dissidents, have women raped with bottles, apply electric shocks to the genitals, have the soles of the feet beaten repeatedly, hold mock executions and hang people by their wrists with their arms tied behind their backs.

The torture methods Saddam Hussein used worked. He presided over a more stable Iraq than we've seen the last six years. Was he right to employ those tactics?

Totalitarianism works. If police could search everyone's person, vehicle and home any time they chose, we'd live in a safer society. If we could employ these harsh interrogation techniques with criminals, we'd solve more crimes. If punishments for various infractions were meted out against an individual's entire family like Saddam did, we'd have a much more law-abiding society.

But would you want to live in that society?

The U.S. is signatory to the Geneva Convention, the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We also have our own laws against torture. How can we condemn barbaric regimes if we do what they do? Does every country get to use their lawyers to come up with their own definitions of torture?

Does the pain and discomfort 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, experienced being waterboarded bother me? No. It's not about them. It's about us. We don't torture. We're not a wild-eyed death cult stuck in centuries past. We're the leader of the free world.

If we're willing to break the law, turn our back on our principles, and behave like our enemies, then what are we fighting for? Peace.

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Apparently, Fox News' Shepherd Smith agrees with me. Caution: Strong language. Click HERE.

Click HERE to visit the DR's Other Side blog where I try to find some common ground with the tea party folks.

Finally, for a little relief after these weighty topics, click HERE to read the Wading In blog on my Beagles' obsession with pancakes.