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The Unitarian Church of All Souls • 1157 Lexington Avenue • New York, NY 10021 email: peacetaskforcenyc@yahoo.com
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| U.S.-SPONSORED TORTURE, PRISONERS’ RIGHTS,
AND SURVIVOR CARE (Panel Discussion)
On Wednesday evening, October 15, 2008, the Peace and Justice Task Force and the Adult Education Committee co-sponsored a panel on the expansion, since the 2001 World Trade Center attack, of executive power to exercise torture and deny certain prisoners rights long established under international law. Two of the panelists were physicians who had appeared at an earlier event this fall: Dr. Stephen Xenaxis, a psychiatrist and retired brigadier-general in the U. S. Army; and Dr. Allen Keller, associate professor of medicine and director of the Torture Survivors Program at Bellevue/NYU. The other panelists were lawyers: Jonathan Hayfetz, J.D., of New York University’s Brennan Center for Social Justice; and Gita Gutierrez, J.D., of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Dr. Xenakis has found “very troubling” – as both a physician and an army officer -- the United States’s current use of torture. And, of its use and other extreme measures, Physicians for Human Rights have stated: “There is no doubt that the current administration has committed war crimes.” The claim that torture is justified because “this is a war like no other war” is untrue. Every war is lethal and is fought to the death. Nothing done to us as a country justifies torture: it violates our standards of human decency. In 2005, recognizing that doctors are implicated in its use, Dr. Xenakis wrote in the Washington Post that the Hippocratic oath trumps military obedience. About fifty retired generals and administrators, who want to see a return to traditional means of gathering information from prisoners, agree on four principles: Torture is un-American and was long ago opposed by George Washington. Torture is not an effective means of getting information out of anyone, although it is all too effective in undermining a person’s trust; it is used for propaganda. Torture is unnecessary. Finally, torture is damaging – not only to the tortured but to the torturer and the United States itself. By substituting the image of a hooded man for that of the Statue of Liberty, we endanger ourselves. Gita Gutierrez, who deals with detention and torture in Guantánamo and the CIA, spoke of that prison. Since its opening on January 11, 2002, the government has detained there about 800 men and boys from forty different countries; they were picked up all over the world, including places of peace; of these, 55 percent were noncombatants. They ranged from ten to eighty years old, although many of the kids were shipped out before lawyers got there. Guantánamo is, said Ms Gutierrez, a legal turning point in our legal system and the tip of the iceberg of the prison system we’ve built. In respect to our practices of torture and indefinite detention, she has tried to get other countries to bring war crimes accusations against Bush’s government. These prisoners have not been treated as prisoners-of-war and or in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Instead, they have been subjected to severe physical and psychological harm, such as is used to dehumanize inmates in our federal prison system: months-long isolation, threats from dogs, physical stresses and sexual and religious humiliation, sleep deprivation for days – all attested to by government documents. This program ended when it was discovered and made public by Alberto J. Mora, at the time General Council for the U.S. Navy. Jonathan Hayfetz followed up this report to say that Guantánamo was designed to put the system outside the law. Throughout the prison’s history, the government has resisted any meaningful process for the detainees. Indeed, it constitutes a system of torture and infinite detention, a system that extends across the globe; and even if it is closed, he believes that aspects of its policies may remain. He discussed how the Center for Constitutional Rights initially challenged the administration’s plan to deprive the detainees of the right to habeas corpus, that legal safeguard that has been in force for four hundred years and was voted directly into the Constitution. This effort was ultimately successful in 2006 with the Supreme Court’s rejection, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, of the administration’s attempt to deprive the detainees of these rights. In Dr. Allen Keller’s experience with its victims, torture has significant and long-range health consequences, both physical and psychological. He has treated over 3,000 Muslim women and children from many countries for many forms of abuse. There is no way you can do waterboarding, he said, in a controlled manner. It and other techniques of enhanced interrogation, the government’s euphemism for torture, are horrifying. Torture is, he said, a moral issue as well as a health issue. Although torture is rationalized as necessary to maintain order and stability, the moral disengagement it involves undermines our health as a nation. He, too, said that it has made the world more dangerous. As for what we can do, remember what brave Alberto Mora said, “The debate isn’t only how to protect this country. It’s how to protect our values.” Attend such events as this one and tell other people about the issue. Educate yourself and support those working on it. Show films. Write or visit your Congressional representative and senators. |