To the Editor:

 

Another June as Torture Awareness Month has arrived, while the Bush-Cheney administration finalizes secret new rules for interrogating detainees. Conservative Andrew Sullivan, writing for the Atlantic, sums up the results of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" applied since 2001:

 

”Freezing prisoners to near-death, repeated beatings, long forced-standing, waterboarding, cold showers in air-conditioned rooms, stress positions..., withholding of medicine and leaving wounded or sick prisoners alone in cells for days on end—all these have occurred at US detention camps under the command of President George W. Bush. Over a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions. The Pentagon itself has conceded homicide by torture in multiple cases."

 

As the New York Times reports, "Experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable." Some also happen to constitute the treatment we trained our forces to expect and resist if they became prisoners of the Communists. It was regarded as torture. The Senate Armed Services Committee is investigating how these methods came to be reverse-engineered for use on our detainees at Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, and in Afghanistan and Iraq. (New York Times)  We fought World Wars I and II, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War on the unquestioned principle that we were not torturers and that such crude methods produce poor intelligence. One of the psychiatrists who had worked with the government to prepare our personnel asks, “How did something used as an example of what an unethical government would do become something we do?” (New York Times) 

 

It's past time for Congress to rein in—since the Democrats don't have the courage to impeach—a team that our own intelligence experts acknowledge has on balance only fueled terrorism.

 

Amnesty International, the ACLU, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and others will hold a DC rally and lobbying Day of Action to Restore Law and Justice on June 26—details at www.AmnestyBucksMont.org. If you can't join us for the trip, sign the petition and call on Congress to support the restoration of habeas corpus, the repair of the Military Commissions Act, and an end to torture.

 

Barbara Glassman

Plumsteadville, PA