The Torture Report: Criminals of War

This week, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the 528-page executive summary of a six-thousand page report on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) detention and interrogation program. This report is renders a graphic, damning account of how the United States betrayed its principles, and serves as a cautionary tale for the future.

The report details how the United States, during the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, systematically tortured detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere. The report, among other determinations, found that: the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation," an insidious euphemism for torture, "was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees;" the "interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others;" and the "conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others." Additionally, the report states that the CIA misled the Congress and the White House as to all of the aforementioned and more.

This report from the Senate Intelligence Committee was several years in the making. Proponents of release and declassification, most notably Sens. Mark Udall (D-CO), John McCain (R-AZ) and Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), fought obstacle after obstacle, roadblock after roadblock, toward making public the findings in this report. Opponents of declassification cited the possibility that our enemies will employ the report as motivation for attack(s) against the United States, in spite of our enemies' pattern indicating that they do not require any motivation to attack us. Other such opponents justify the use of torture as having netted valuable intelligence for us and against our enemies, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The vast majority of the opposition to this report and the release thereof has come from Republicans, yet one of the most prominent senators on the Republican side of the aisle happens to be a victim of torture himself. Sen. John McCain endured and survived five-plus years of torture as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, Vietnam, and therefore speaks from a unique position of experience and moral foundation. Sen. McCain is unable to lift his arms past chin-level because that is how his broken bones set themselves without medical treatment. I believe there is no more credible testimony to the immorality and inhumanity of torture to be heard in the U.S. Senate than that from Sen. McCain.

This is a devastating report, but a necessary one. We must be good enough as a nation to hold ourselves to the high standard to which we have always aspired, and to hold ourselves accountable when we fall short of said standard. To be clear, the standard to which we as the United States of America have always held ourselves is an unwavering adhesion to the ideal that we do not torture. We, as Americans, believe that everyone, even the most despicable in our midst, maintain the most basic human rights. WE DO NOT TORTURE. And yet, during the Bush Administration, we did exactly that. This fact should strike at the heart of our nation as a deep and unmitigated shame and embarrassment.

We forced our detainees to remain awake for over an entire week. We denied our detainees basic amenities such as a toilet, and forced them to essentially live amidst their own human waste. We induced hypothermia in our detainees. And, as has been widely documented, we frequently waterboarded our detainees, a practice widely condemned around the world as being tortuous.

Is this who we are? Is this what we do? Is this America? Vice President Dick Cheney has unequivocally indicated his lack of remorse, and has in fact stated he would do nothing differently were he still in office. President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague as war criminals; they violated Geneva Conventions against torture liberally and without reproach. But we know that the immediate past president and vice president will not be so charged. In lieu of this, it has been suggested that President Barack Obama issue pardons to the Bush Administration. This would not indicate to the country that what they perpetrated was not criminal, but instead that they must be pardoned in order for the country to move on.  Further, a pardon would imply that a crime was, in fact, committed, and that a pardon is necessary to absolve the perpetrators thereof. I believe this idea holds merit in the absence of any realistic probability that the Bush Administration will face charges.

We, as a nation, are better than the deplorable actions of the Bush Administration. We must be vigilant. We must enforce accountability on the part of our government in order that those who serve us never again shame us so grievously.