Issues Page

We live in a time and culture in which genuine moral discourse is rapidly disappearing - swallowed up by partisanship, spin, politics and self-interest. By "moral discourse" I mean conversation between persons of good will about the rightness or wrongness of an action or policy, independent of all other considerations. By extension, Christian moral discourse would be conversation between Christian persons of good will about the rightness or wrongness of an action, independent of all considerations other than those deriving from our shared commitment to Jesus Christ. That applies to torture.

It has been a little over a year since I left the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but I still have trouble sleeping sometimes. On a recent restless night, I found a DVD entitled "United 93" beside the family television set. I had no idea what it was about, but I started watching. When I realized that it was about the hijacked American plane that had crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, I began to cry. It reminded me of a very simple question I had asked myself countless times during my 5 1/2 years in Guantanamo: When will humans start treating each other with respect, whatever our religion or color?

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation, according to U.S. military documents. Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March 2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than a hundred times over a two-week period.

A man with a black hood pours water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table: no, it's not Guantanamo Bay naval base, but New York's Coney Island amusement park. "Waterboard Thrill Ride" beckons a sign along with cartoon character "SpongeBob SquarePants" who appears tied down and exclaiming: "It don't Gitmo better!" The public can peek through window bars and feed a dollar into the slot to bring the robotic dolls into action, one more attraction in the beachfront amusement park in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Three previously classified administration memos obtained last week by the American Civil Liberties Union add to our understanding of how the Bush administration has dealt with torture. The documents are attempts to justify the unjustifiable and to keep those who ordered and carried out this dirty business from being prosecuted and jailed. The memos don't call it torture, of course. The documents refer euphemistically to "enhanced techniques" of interrogation. Changing the name doesn't change the act, however. One memo, written in 2004, specifically makes clear the administration's view that "the waterboard" is an acceptable way to extract information.

In March President Bush wrongly vetoed a law that would have banned any use of waterboarding. So while the CIA says it has not used waterboarding since 2003, it remains an option. Supporters euphemistically call it an "alternative interrogation technique" but by any reasonable definition it is a form of torture. How can restraining someone and then stimulating a gag reflex via suffocation from a water-soaked cloth be considered anything else? Nor is there evidence that waterboarding is effective at obtaining information, according to many interrogation experts. As with other torture, the desperate victims simply start saying whatever they believe the interrogators want to hear. Yet former Attorney General John Ashcroft apparently remains a fan.

The military judge overseeing the first war crimes trial against a terrorism suspect at Guantanamo Bay agreed Monday to bar some evidence against Osama bin Laden's former driver because it was obtained in "highly coercive environments and conditions." On the trial's opening day, Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred denied defense appeals to exclude other statements Salim Ahmed Hamdan made during interrogation by U.S. agents in Afghanistan as well as during his more than six years' imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The exclusion of evidence Allred considered coerced could set a standard for admissibility in other war crimes cases due before the tribunal in the coming months, including that of the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind.

In February, CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that waterboarding, long considered torture, had been used on three terrorist suspects. When questioned about this, a spokesperson for the Bush administration claimed that waterboarding is legal, and that the president could authorize its use. Sadly, the U.S. public's reaction to this and other revelations about the administration's scandalous justifications for the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" remains muted. Yet the evidence that the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, illegal under U.S. and international law, is "standard operating procedure" is incontrovertible.

A federal judge overseeing Guantanamo Bay lawsuits ordered the Bush administration to put other cases aside and give detainees their day in court. "The time has come to move these forward," Judge Thomas F. Hogan said Tuesday during the first hearing on whether detainees are being held lawfully. "Set aside every other case that's pending in the division and address this case first." The Justice Department has fought for years to keep civilian judges from reviewing evidence against terrorism suspects. But a Supreme Court ruling last month opened the courthouse doors to detainees.

"Islamic terrorists have constitutional rights," lamented one conservative blog, when the Supreme Court said Guantanamo inmates can challenge their detention in court. "These are enemy combatants," railed Sen. John McCain. The court, charged former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review, sided with foreigners "whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans." The operating assumption here is that the prisoners are terrorists who were captured while fighting a vicious war against the United States. But can the critics be sure? All they really know about the Guantanamo detainees is that they are Guantanamo detainees. To conclude that they are all bloodthirsty jihadists requires believing that the U.S. government is infallible.

On June 12, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court released a decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy holding, in Boumediene vs. Bush, that Guantanamo prisoners have the right to ask the federal courts to rule on the validity of their continued detention (many have been held for years, despite little evidence in some cases that they're truly "unlawful combatants.") The founders had a word for governments that respected rights only arbitrarily and selectively: tyranny. The signers of the declaration took rights seriously. They wrote, "For the support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." That wasn't mere rhetoric. Technically, the signers were all traitors, liable to be executed for treason. And they accepted that standing up for rights means taking some real risks.

This year, America doesn't deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement. For we have sinned. We have failed to pay attention. We've settled for lame excuses. We've spit on the memory of those who did that brave, brave thing in Philadelphia 232 years ago. The America those men founded should never torture a prisoner. The America they founded should never imprison people for years without charge or hearing. The America they founded should never ship prisoners to foreign lands, knowing their new jailers might torture them. Such abuses once were committed by the arrogant crowns of Europe, spawning rebellion. Today, our nation does such things in the name of our safety. Petrified, unwilling to take the risks that love of liberty demands, we close our eyes.

In reversing a military tribunal's determination that a Chinese detainee was an "enemy combatant," a federal appeals court criticized the government's evidence and compared its legal theories to a nonsensical 19th-century poem. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote yesterday that tribunals and courts must be able to assess whether evidence is reliable before determining the fate of detainees. The opinion could have broad implications for scores of other detainees classified as enemy combatants by Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The opinion is also likely to guide federal judges weighing evidence in up-coming hearings.

The former Air Force general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, helped quash dissent from across the U.S. military as the Bush administration first set up a brutal interrogation regime for terrorism suspects, according to newly public documents and testimony from an ongoing Senate probe. In late 2002, documents show, officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all complained that harsh interrogation tactics under consideration for use at the prison in Guantánamo Bay might be against the law. Myers, however, agreed to scuttle a plan for further legal review of the tactics.

Three Iraqis and a Jordanian filed federal lawsuits yesterday alleging they were tortured by US defense contractors while detained at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. The lawsuits allege that those arrested and taken to the prison were subjected to forced nudity, electrical shocks, mock executions, and other inhumane treatment. They seek payments high enough to compensate the detainees for their injuries, and to deter contractors from such conduct in the future.

The dignity and respect of the human person is the cornerstone of the U.S. bishops' new study guide on torture as a moral issue. The guide, titled "Torture: Torture Is a Moral Issue, a Catholic Study Guide," looks at church teaching as it relates to the use of torture by government authorities around the world and mixes in biblical passages that evoke Jesus' call to "love your enemies." Written by the Catholic Leadership Council within the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the guide was written for use by discussion groups and classes in Catholic settings as well as individuals, families and others interested in studying the issue. The guide was introduced June 23 in the midst of Torture Awareness Month as designated by religious, human rights and civil liberties organizations.

This was a sleepy Navy outpost before the United States began using it to hold prisoners in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks - and it may soon become one again. It is increasingly obvious that the days of this U.S. offshore prison are numbered. The Bush administration's main rationale for holding terrorism suspects without trial vanished when the Supreme Court ruled on June 12 that they have certain legal rights. Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have both called for the detention center to be shut. But whoever becomes the new president will have to figure out what to do with those left at Guantanamo - roughly 270 at present.

A bipartisan coalition of elder statesmen, military and national security honchos, and religious leaders is calling on the president to return to pre-9/11 standards for the treatment of prisoners. An executive order to ban torture is essential, they say, to improve national security, shore up alliances in the war on terror, and recommit to American values. But will President Bush pay attention? For the politically savvy folks involved, it's not a strong expectation. Yet they say the stakes are too high not to move forward now and build public support and momentum. "I'm not sure the outgoing administration is going to issue an executive order," Dr. Nye adds. "But I think a new president, whether McCain or Obama, would be willing to consider it."

Although the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has blackened the image of US power around the world, the issue has garnered only passing attention so far in the presidential race. But the problem will not go away. Last week, the Cambridge-based group Physicians for Human Rights reported on the physical and psychological damage suffered by 11 detainees. On Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that the military had improperly designated a Muslim man from China as an enemy combatant. The decision followed a Supreme Court ruling June 12, which restored the habeas corpus rights the Bush administration and Congress had taken from Guantanamo prisoners. The two court decisions and the human rights report are a withering rebuke of President Bush's policies.

A bipartisan group of 200 former government officials, retired generals and religious leaders plans to issue a statement on Wednesday calling for a presidential order to outlaw some interrogation and detention practices used by the Bush administration over the last six years. The executive order they seek would commit the government to using only interrogation methods that the United States would find acceptable if used by another country against American soldiers or civilians. It would also outlaw secret detentions, used since 2001 by the Central Intelligence Agency, and prohibit the transfer of prisoners to countries that use torture or cruel treatment.