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The Washington Monthly
March 2008

NO MORE

No Torture. No Exceptions.

In most issues of the Washington Monthly, we favor articles that we hope will launch a debate. In this issue we seek to end one. The unifying message of the articles that follow is, simply, Stop. In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that
practiced torture. Astonishingly -- despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib -- we remain one. As we go to press, President George W. Bush stands poised
to veto a measure that would end all use of torture by the United States.
His move, we suspect, will provoke only limited outcry. What once was
shocking is now ordinary.

On paper, the list of practices declared legal by the Department of
Justice for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other locations has a somewhat bloodless quality -- sleep deprivation, stress positions,
forced standing, sensory deprivation, nudity, extremes of heat or cold.
But such bland terms mask great suffering. Sleep deprivation eventually
leads to hallucinations and psychosis. (Menachem Begin, former prime
minister of Israel, experienced sleep deprivation at the hands of the KGB
and would later assert that "anyone who has experienced this desire [to
sleep] knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.")
Stress positions entail ordeals such as being shackled by the wrists,
suspended from the ceiling, with arms spread out and feet barely touching
the ground. Forced standing, a technique often used in North Korean
prisons, involves remaining erect and completely still, producing an
excruciating combination of physical and psychological pain, as ankles
swell, blisters erupt on the skin, and, in time, kidneys break down.
Sensory deprivation -- being deprived of sight, sound, and touch -- can
produce psychotic symptoms in as little as twenty-four hours. The agony of
severe and prolonged exposure to temperature extremes and the humiliation
of forced nudity speak for themselves.

Then there is waterboarding, a form of mock execution by drowning, a
technique that has been used in so-called "black sites." In addition
to the physical pain and terror it induces, long-term psychological effects also haunt patients -- panic attacks, depression, and symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. It has long been prosecuted as a crime of war. In our view, it still should be.

Ideally, the election in November would put an end to this debate, but we fear it won't. John McCain, who for so long was one of the leading Republican opponents of the White House's policy on torture,
voted in February against making the CIA subject to the ban on "enhanced
interrogation." As for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while both have come out strongly against torture, they seldom discuss the subject
on the campaign trail. We fear that even a Democratic president might,
under pressure from elements of the national security bureaucracy, carve
out loopholes, possibly in secret, condoning some forms of torture.'

Lees verder: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0801.torture.html