Following the Senate report on torture released last week, I decided to take a look back at what I wrote on this subject in June of 2005, almost 10 years ago. I changed the headline and added an updated ending.
Is there a line you will not cross? Beyond which you will not tolerate something being done in your name?
We have become a nation that tolerates torture.
Americans have a day to celebrate Independence, a day for Thanksgiving, and a day of Remembrance (Memorial Day).Â
We also need a national day of atonement.
Jews have a Day of Atonement. They call it “Yom Kippur,” and it is the holiest day of the year. That’s just what this country needs — a day of humility and remorse, coming to our senses, realizing first and foremost that we have things to atone for. Things done in our name.
Things like torture.
We have never fully acknowledged, or atoned for, our treatment of Native Americans, slavery, McCarthyism, Vietnam, Kent State. Now add to the national wall of shame Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Is there a line beyond which you will not tolerate something being done in your name? If we can’t draw that line, who are we? What do we stand for? Besides our own survival, that is, no matter what it takes. Security first, morality only when we aren’t feeling threatened? Is that our new national motto?
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” say the apologists and rationalizers. “We’re just playing a little hardball with terrorists to get some intelligence, just breaking them down. We’re only using ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’ Don’t worry, we’re so righteous and God-fearing, we can handle it. It won’t get out of hand.”
A little torture is like a little cancer. It spreads. A little torture is like a little evil. It grows.
Instead of drawing a line, we’ve redefined torture. Our [2005] attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, the nation’s top law enforcement official, was, in his previous position, given the task of officially “redefining” torture after Sept. 11. Anything that doesn’t cause “major organ failure or death,” he wrote, was acceptable.
Is it OK with you if our government tortures prisoners in your name? If they use sexual humiliation, desecration of the Koran, physical and psychological abuse, with the occasional organ failure and death? If you remain silent, it is. “Silence gives consent,” said Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, calling it one of the bedrock principles of law.Â
Is it OK with you that hundreds of mostly innocent people were rounded up and sent to a prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (whose government we’re always condemning for human rights violations) without the protections of due process? Some have since been dumped in foreign countries, some are still at Gitmo almost four years later [make that 13 years later], and, according to Thomas Friedman, a moderately conservative columnist with the New York Times who originally supported the war in Iraq, at least 100 prisoners have died in what Amnesty International calls our “gulags.”
Don’t these qualify, at the very least, as human rights violations? Are they consistent with your understanding of American ideals?
Our silence gives consent to all of it. Are we the good guys or the bad guys? Are we allowed to act like the bad guys in certain situations — like whenever we feel threatened? Can you justify torture in “extraordinary circumstances”?Â
If you can justify torture under any circumstances, then you can justify pretty much anything.
We are now a nation that condones torture.
We are a nation that gives consent with our silence.
Ignorance and denial do not preserve our innocence. “Our government would never do anything to compromise our integrity.” So said all the “good Germans” in the 1930s and ’40s. As they said then, all it takes to allow evil to flourish is for good people to say nothing.
Silence gives consent.
Denial gives permission.
We have become a nation that practices torture.
Is that really OK with you? Don’t dodge the question, answer it. The nation’s very soul is at stake here.
We need a day every year where we face our wrongdoing.
We can call it the Dick Cheney Day of Atonement.