This Country Can Be America, or It Can Be a Country that Tortures. It Cannot Be Both

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

17 June 15

This country can be America, or it can be a country that tortures. It cannot be both.

n case you missed it in the blare of all those candidates and their announcements, it's been a big couple of weeks for news about torture, which is something that the United States doesn't do, except when it does, and then only when it's necessary, because then it's not torture because John Yoo. And freedom.

Yesterday, the United States Senate passed a bill banning torture. (Didn't George Washington pretty much do that 200-odd years ago? Didn't we sign a treaty agreeing not to torture? Shut up.) Of course, 21 Republican senators—none of whom was John McCain, who really is sort of the go-to senator, at least on this issue—voted to leave the torture option open for future presidents.

Should the McCain-Feinstein amendment be made law, however, it will be harder for future administrations to repeat the actions of the Bush administration, which used controversial legal opinions to justify torturing detainees. The amendment would also turn into law a second component of the Obama order, which requires the Red Cross to have access to detainees in US custody, bringing America into line with the Geneva convention.

(Out on the campaign trail, foreign-policy whiz kid and Choice of a New Generation Marco Rubio strapped himself securely to the ol' waterboard: "I would have voted no on this amendment. I do not support telegraphing to the enemy what interrogation techniques we will or won't use, and denying future commanders in chief and intelligence officials important tools for protecting the American people and the U.S. homeland." Alas for the nation he hopes to lead, Rubio courageously skipped the vote.)

So, if you're keeping score at home, that's 21 United States senators, all from one political party, including the Senate Majority Leader and his Majority whip, who voted to continue the practice of torture by the government of the United States. Presumably, they will all run on this issue the next time they come up for re-election.

Earlier, though, thanks to Spencer Ackerman, we learned of another way the practice of torture undermines our values and deforms our laws. It seems that there were doctors who oversaw the "enhanced interrogations" with which the embattled silent heroes of the CIA had so much fun. (OK, every damn one of them should have his or her license pulled immediately, but that's another argument.) Part of that job was to see how much damage could be done to a detainee before the torture became counterproductive, or the detainee became dead, whichever came first. In this, the CIA and its pet medical staff may well have broken the laws forbidding human experimentation.

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency's director to "approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research". The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency's history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.CIA director George Tenet approved abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, designed by CIA contractor psychologists. He further instructed the agency's health personnel to oversee the brutal interrogations – the beginning of years of controversy, still ongoing, about US torture as a violation of medical ethics.

I dunno. Maybe Alan Dershowitz can come up with a plan for the government to get "human experimentation warrants" to make it all OK.

This country can be America, or it can be a country that tortures. It cannot be both, and it looks brutal and foolish when it tries to be. You can draw your inspiration from George Washington, or from Josef Mengele. Your choice. Twenty-one Republican senators lined up with the latter on Tuesday.