Our Government Tortured A Man They Knew Was Innocent

I’ve had a hard time understanding why the American people have largely disconnected from our government’s torture policies and practices during the Bush Administration (some of which continue to this day under Obama, but that’s for another post). Perhaps it’s because it can be difficult to believe that leaders in our own country would explicitly order something so vile. Or maybe it’s because people have accepted the un-American argument perpetuated by Dick Cheney and others that torture was either effective or necessary, and therefore morally justified. Many people including myself have argued that those kinds of arguments are inhumane and demonstrably false.

I came across two articles over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog and absolutely had to share them with you. I’d like to point out that Sullivan is a conservative in pursuit of justice for the Bush administration’s offenses, so his torture posts (based on government documents and investigative reporting) cannot be dismissed as merely partisan. I’m asking each person who sees this to read both brief articles.

As to who we tortured, in this case, it was a man known to be innocent- Fouad al-Rabiah:

“It was the Court’s quotation of something an interrogator said to al-Rabiah during his interrogation.  The interrogator told al-Rabiah:

There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.

…This was an agent of the United States saying this.”

Sullivan begins to answer the question “why did we torture”:

The permanent danger of torture through human history is that it can be used by the torturers to manufacture or “create” evidence through confession. In fact, this has always been the prime function of torture: not to discover something that the torturers did not know beforehand, but to force a victim to tell the torturers what they were already convinced was true…And so when Rumsfeld and Cheney And Bush repeated that all the inmates at Guantanamo Bay were “the worst of the worst”, they were merely telling us what they were intent on proving…This is how totalitarian regimes justify themselves: by inventing enemies and proving their guilt through torture…Mercifully, America under Bush and Cheney was not a totalitarian regime…It had an executive branch that embraced the ethic of tyranny in warfare, and a legislative branch so supine it was a toothless adjunct, but it retained a judiciary that began, too late, of course, to push back against the hermetically sealed war-and-torture cycle.

Click here to read Sullivan’s first part in this important series, and here to read the conclusion.

I do understand how overwhelming these kinds of issues can be, because we watch as politicians and parties in positions of power are unable to legislate change, and wonder about our own chances as one small voice. But it’s no different from voting; if everyone adopts a mentality of helplessness, then democracy is in real trouble. This is still our government, as it has been since the beginning. We do not belong to it but rather it to us. When government departs from the framework that it has sworn to uphold, then the obligation to demand a correction falls on people like you and me.

As for what you can do to ask for accountability and investigations into these abhorrent policies- write your elected officials at the federal level, and sign an online petition or two. Or if you believe that I’ve got this all wrong, tell me why.