Torture

On July 18, Ahmed Zaid Zuhair, a detainee in Camp 6 of the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, wrote to his legal team in the US, terminating all written communication. He claimed that two guards had harassed him the previous night: one threatening to kill him and quarter his body; the other threatening to cut off his ears and nose. One guard then read through his legal correspondence, confiscating several documents. It's impossible to verify Zuhair's charges. The US military says it won't comment on specific allegations in a district court case. But Zuhair's decision to halt communication with his legal team highlights the ongoing challenge of defending inmates at Guantanamo.

The week of Sept. 11, 2008, I had the privilege of hosting a national summit on torture at Mercer University in Atlanta. In this column I want to reflect on what the torture summit meant to me and where our movement will go from here. The combination of military, legal, national security, and religious speakers have convinced me that the practice of torture by the United States marks the first major American scandal of the 21st century. It is a governmental scandal, necessitating investigations, accountability and policy change for at least the next several years. But it is also a religious scandal, involving the compromised loyalties of a majority of American evangelicals.

A new survey suggests the very Americans who claim to follow the Bible most assiduously don't consult it when forming their views about torture and government policy. The poll of 600 Southern white evangelicals was released Sept. 11 in Atlanta in connection with a national religious summit on torture. It shows not only are white evangelical Southerners more likely than the general populace to believe torture is sometimes or often justified, but also that they are far more likely-to tweak a phrase from Proverbs-to "lean on their own understanding" regarding the subject. While a recent Pew survey showed 48 percent of the general public believes torture sometimes or often is justified in order to obtain information from suspected terrorists, the new poll shows 57 percent of white Southern evangelicals hold that belief.

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.