Republican candidates’ endorsement of torture shames America
At the Republican debate in New Hampshire , when Senator Ted Cruz was
asked whether waterboarding is torture, he replied that it is not. “Under
the law, torture is excruciating pain equivalent to losing organs and systems,”
he said. So waterboarding “does not meet the generally recognized definition of
torture.”
I am simply dumbfounded hearing Cruz’s opinion. If
waterboarding is no torture, what is?
Torture is wrong anywhere around the world, no matter who or
what creature is being tortured. It is illegal and should be kept that way
everywhere.
But politics is dirty, and the politicians have no morality, or so it seems these days. TheUSA
government, like many other criminal governments around the world, has used
tortures, horrific ones I must add, to inflict severe pains on their targets
and extract information, even though those coerced information may not be true.
Torture to its endorsers, and surely practitioners, is an acceptable savagery.
But politics is dirty, and the politicians have no morality, or so it seems these days. The
During the occupation of Afghanistan
and Iraq , the CIA and the US military
committed some of the worst forms of sadistic tortures, previously either
unknown or practiced
only by some of the worst tyrannical rulers in history. Prisoners were held since
2002 outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjected to
harrowing pressure tactics, which included beatings to the head; hours held
naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by
thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the
ultimate, waterboarding. Never in history had the US authorized such tactics prior to
Bush Jr.’s time.
Waterboarding is a form of water
torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and
breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the individual to
experience the sensation of drowning. [Waterboarding
can cause extreme pain, dry
drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries
including broken bones due to struggling against
restraints, lasting psychological damage, and death. Adverse physical
consequences can manifest themselves months after the event, while
psychological effects can last for years.]
Waterboarding constitutes war crime. However, it was widely
used during the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice era after “the torture memo” –
written by Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, serving in the Office of Legal
Counsel - was widely
accepted as a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics. According
to Dr. Yoo, who should more properly be called Dr. Torture, no interrogation
practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or
“even death.”
After Yoo left the Justice Department in late 2003, the new
head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, found Yoo’s
memos deeply flawed infuriating White House officials. In June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith
formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation. He then left
the Justice Department. Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted
on its Web site a new legal opinion with its opening: “Torture is abhorrent
both to American law and values and to international norms.”
Alberto R. Gonzales,
deeply loyal to Bush Jr. for championing his career from their days in Texas , was appointed attorney
general in February 2005. He soon issued an opinion that endorsed the
harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central
Intelligence Agency. It provided explicit authorization to barrage terror
suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics,
including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
It was no accident that under Bush’s presidency, Guantanamo Bay
prison in Cuba
became (and remains so under Obama) the Gulag of our time with its shameful
history of war crimes and torture where international law was simply ignored. Even
though the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners
who belonged to Al Qaeda, in July, after a month-long debate inside the
administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use
of what the administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques, which
allowed the C.I.A. again to holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas (e.g.,
Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe). Sadly, the executive order was
reviewed and approved by the Office of Legal Counsel.
It did not matter that after World War II the USA convicted,
and, in some cases, executed
Japanese soldiers for war crimes that included charges of waterboarding.
Even our US
soldiers could not ignore the long arm of the law during the Vietnam War. After The
Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the
waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier on Jan. 21, 1968, the
picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial
of the soldier.
Cases of waterboarding have occurred on the U.S. soil, as
well. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker along with three of his deputies were
all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for waterboarding
handcuffed prisoners.
Does waterboarding work? While President Bush and C.I.A.
officials insisted that the harsh and sadistic measures produced crucial
intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say
that less coercive methods are equally or more effective. When Michael Scheure
- a CIA agent who worked on national security issues related to Muslim
extremism from 1985 until his retirement in 2004 - was asked about the value of
‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques in gathering information, he replied it is
'none.' [He formed the CIA unit responsible for trying to capture Osama
bin Laden and headed it from December 1995 to June 1999.]
Similarly, nine leading interrogators and intelligence officials,
who issued a joint
statement in May of 2011 said, “The use of waterboarding and other
so-called ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques almost certainly prolonged the
hunt for Bin Laden and complicated the jobs of professional U.S. interrogators
who were trying to develop useful information.”
David Miliband, then United Kingdom Foreign Secretary, described waterboarding as torture on 19 July 2008, and stated "theUK
unreservedly condemns the use of torture". The United
Nations' Report of the Committee Against Torture: Thirty-fifth
Session of November 2006, stated that state parties should rescind any
interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, that constitutes torture or
cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
Even President Obama had to admit that the interrogation techniques in question are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to his the then Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards."
David Miliband, then United Kingdom Foreign Secretary, described waterboarding as torture on 19 July 2008, and stated "the
Even President Obama had to admit that the interrogation techniques in question are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to his the then Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards."
Who can deny that harsh interrogation techniques -
whether done by the US
and western governments or their despotic partners in the Muslim world - are a
major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and other groups? It may not be unreasonable
to see the connection between American abuse and torture of Muslim prisoners
with the savage beheading of hostages by the IS, the off-shoot of Zarqawi's
criminal terrorist group.
That is what torture does! It sets the justification that if
the US
government could do such a heinous crime then it is halal for others to follow the lead!
Senator McCain, a victim of torture himself during the Vietnam War, has opposed torture and so have many lawmakers in theUSA including Ted Cruz. During his
election campaign in 2008 McCain repeatedly said his audience
that interrogation techniques amounted to torture and gloried in calling
the CIA and its officers a "rogue institution." "There should be
little doubt from American history that we consider that as torture otherwise
we wouldn't have tried and convicted Japanese for doing that same thing to
Americans," McCain
said during a news conference in November 2007.
After the release of the Senate torture report in 2014, Cruz told the Heritage Foundation that “Torture is wrong. Unambiguously. Period. The end.” Cruz has said that “America
does not need torture to protect itself,” and last June, he voted for
an amendment sponsored by Sen. John McCain, which required that overseas
interrogations comply with regulations in the U.S. Army Field Manual. Twenty-two
Republican senators opposed the amendment, including rival presidential
candidate Marco Rubio of Florida .
Senator McCain, a victim of torture himself during the Vietnam War, has opposed torture and so have many lawmakers in the
After the release of the Senate torture report in 2014, Cruz told the Heritage Foundation that “Torture is wrong. Unambiguously. Period. The end.” Cruz has said that “
So, what can explain Cruz’s new position on torture? Cruz’s earlier
stand on torture put him at odds with many of his Republican colleagues who see
torture justifiable. According to a new Pew
Survey, a large majority of Republican voters — 73 percent — think torture
can be justified against people suspected of terrorism. It did not matter to
them that the UN and rights groups around the world consider torture as illegal
and unacceptable.
As I have noted many times, many of the hardcore Republicans
see themselves as Christian Zionists, the evangelicals, supporters of the War
Party, and the foot soldiers of the Armageddon. Sadly, they have forgotten what
James Madison famously said, "Of
all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded." "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual
warfare."
So, for an immoral
politician like Cruz it did not take too long to change his position and
reinvent himself. Cruz’s more limited endorsement of torture led GOP
front-runner Donald Trump, at
a rally on Monday (Feb. 8), to repeat an insult from the crowd, calling
Cruz a “pussy.”
Trump said that he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse
than waterboarding.”
I have never entertained any good opinion about casino-mogul
Trump who made a living through haram means
- e.g., casino incomes and by exploiting others. And he is not remorseful about
any of his exploits. He is rather quite proud of the fact that he does not pay
enough taxes that a billionaire like him ought to have paid. So, Trump's nasty
and unlawful remarks endorsing severe torture don't reveal anything new. He is
a shame to our humanity!
But for Ted Cruz who has a law degree from Harvard and had
previously served as a law clerk for William
Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States in
1996, the endorsement of torture is a major sin. What surprised me most is the
revelation that his father as a teenager was imprisoned and tortured by the Batista
Government for being loyal to Fidel Castro.
Cruz should have known better! But to expect anything good
from this bunch of Republican immoral politicians is foolish. That is what Cruz
reminded us once again.
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