Star Tribune's Nick Coleman's article: On torture, U.S. must clean house

[annm4peace]

May 30, 2010

Nick Coleman: On torture, U.S. must clean house

Nation won't regain moral leadership without fully renouncing the practice.

By NICK COLEMAN, Star Tribune

Last update: May 29, 2010 - 5:06 PM

As the summer barbecue season hits full swing, let me remind you that Tuesday will mark the coming of June, which is Torture Awareness Month.

Bummer, huh?

If you were not aware of Torture Awareness Month, you are among the vast majority of Americans. After years of debate during the Bush-Cheney administration when America used torture techniques like a banana republic, torture has almost disappeared from the public agenda.

This is natural: Countries that use torture have an inclination to forget as soon as possible.

"You don't want to admit to problems you don't want to deal with," says Dr. Steven Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and influential critic of the official use of torture and the complicity of physicians and psychologists in torture.

"'American Idol' seems to have soaked up the attention of all the serious journalists."

Public and media attention have waned, but torture has not gone away. President Obama has renounced the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects, but the United States remains noncompliant with important international standards governing the treatment of prisoners and inspection of prison conditions by human rights organizations. The bottom line is that our practices have improved but our reputation -- and moral leadership in the world -- continue to suffer.

The United States continues to hold terror suspects in secret prisons, and Miles alleges that some prison deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been reported. Under these circumstances, it is hard for America to lecture China, North Korea, Iran and other torturing countries to try to do better. We won't regain the moral high ground until Americans take an unflinching look at what was done in our name in the years between 2001 and 2008 and demand to know who was responsible.

A day of reckoning may be coming in Great Britain, where our allies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are debating how to establish a "truth commission" to investigate torture.

Miles says this kind of accounting, while painful, is necessary. Polls show Americans divided on the need for an investigation, and divided on the use of torture. But few treat the topic lightly anymore. Most of the snickering ended after conservative author Christopher Hitchens and a few right-wing radio jocks volunteered to undergo water-boarding and came up screaming, sputtering and calling it torture.

That was one small truth telling that might help bring about a larger truth finding. Who were the lawyers, the physicians, the politicians and the spies who decided that the United States could abandon its principles, its treaties and its morals to torture prisoners? What damage has the use of torture done to American values and prestige? How do we recover from a shameful episode in our history and return to our traditions?

June 26 has been set by the United Nations as an International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. One of the largest efforts to make Torture Awareness Month meaningful is being led by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (www.nrcat.org).

The group wants a nonpartisan commission to investigate the past use of torture, and is asking people of faith to support legislation formally granting the International Red Cross access to all detainees in U.S. custody. A letter to Congress supporting Red Cross access was signed last week by dozens of religious leaders, including Peg Chemberlin, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Churches, and Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

"Torture needs to be part of our national conversation," says Douglas A. Johnson, executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture, a Minnesota organization that has helped 18,000 victims recover from torture.

"Although our government has stepped away from torture, the risk of reviving it is great. We must regain a national consensus that recognizes that the best chance of becoming the ally of more people around the world -- the people who can join us in the fight against terrorism -- is by rejecting misguided calls to use torture."

Local observances of Torture Awareness Month will include daily vigils at noon in front of the federal courthouse in Minneapolis, a June 26 showing of the film "Torturing Democracy," and a June 27 forum on torture at Plymouth Congregational Church. (For more information, see www.worldwidewamm.org.)

"We're not over it," says Miles, the University bioethicist, says, speaking of the moral rot that accompanies the use of torture. "... It may take 15 or 20 years, but we are in a large civil rights movement to abolish torture. We can't have a civil society until we end torture."



Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University. He can be reached at [e-mail].

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"ARE YOU AWARE that the statute of limitations applicable to the Federal Torture Statute is eight years? We began what Major General Antonio Taguba called our "systematic regime of torture" eight years ago."