This is what’s wrong with the torture debate

While lots of stories hurt my head, sometimes they’re useful because they help make a little microcosm for an entire realm of political debate. Such is the case of the torture debate, which can be encapsulated in this little exchange with a former Gitmo detainee testified about his treatment in Guantanamo Bay:

ROHRABACHER: You suggest that you were waterboarded in your captivity. Is that correct?

KURNAZ: No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called “water treatment.” There was a bucket of water.

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

As TP mentions, the administration has been very, very dodgy on “waterboarding”, claiming it was used thrice in the past. We’ve seen time and time again when anti-waterboarding bills were proposed only to be threatened with vetoes and the like.

A good book to read for anyone who wants to really, really get a handle on the situation with our torturing of detainees is the ACLU lawyer authored Administration of Torture. The first small chunk of the book stitched together a narrative of the administration feverishly working to find loopholes, exceptions, and ways around the laws limiting ways to “extract information” from prisoners. We’ve seen it publicly even when the distinction was made that, legally speaking, torture had to cause organ failure or permanent impairment of body function, and everything else is just gravy.

After all, why are our prisoners in Guantanamo Bay? They’re there because it’s off of American soil so they aren’t subject to our laws, but they’re also under our control. However, according to right-wing logic, since they aren’t representatives of a state government, they aren’t technically “enemy combatants” and aren’t protected by the Geneva Conventions either. Their plight has been crafted to slip them through every crack in the law that can be found.

This is, to put it mildly, why America’s reputation has been plunked in the crapper and the Bush Administration has no business representing our great nation. What we’re finding is a group of people who see the laws laid down not as guidepoints, but as legal mumbo-jumbo. They see them not as an illumination of the character of America, but obstacles that must be vaulted in order to achieve their personal objectives.

Focus has been placed on waterboarding specifically for far too long. It has shifted the debate away from its core, like a debate on how much heroin is required for an overdose when discussing a drug problem in a high school.

Waterboarding is just the most prolific example of a method of “interrogation” that the administration seems to have no qualms with using as liberally as they can get away with. Whether they waterboard every time is irrelevant. If it’s waterboarding, beatings to “non-vital” areas, stress positions for inhuman lengths of time, sleep deprivation, or extreme temperatures, it’s torture. Trying to argue why this or that isn’t really torture because it can’t kill you or it’s not as bad as something else is missing the point entirely.

The point is that we as Americans should not consider the physical and mental abuse of other human beings an acceptable action. For any reason. Period. This is why Bush’s big old crusade is happening in the first place, to shine the beacon of America’s light on the world. It simply cannot happen if, just outside where the light shines, our men and women are engaging in such behavior.

Bush’s administration is trying to argue semantics, trying to use the letter of the law to his advantage when he should be paying attention to the spirit of it. If I give you a list of things not to do to a prisoner, your goal should not be to find out the worst things to do that I did not include. This is what the bad guys in movies do; they find ways to enact horrors but claim innocence when caught.

Personally, I think America is better than that. It would be nice if we could stop being so mucked down in bullshit non-debates and start climbing back up to Sane Country.