Torture in the World's Finest Nation

It’s America’s birthday; today we commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that document in which our Founding Fathers committed high treason against the British Empire. If caught, these brave men would have been “hanged by the neck until dead” for their crimes. Because of their bravery in the face of a world empire’s destructions of basic liberties, we remember how over the seven years following the signing of the Declaration, we slowly defended the United States against British oppression and gained independence. Today we are 232 years old. Today we are the world’s most vibrant democracy, the oldest democracy. India may be the largest; Israel may be the only in the face of a sea of oppressive regimes in the Middle East. We may be an America that prides itself on superlatives, but most importantly, when we celebrate being the oldest “experiment in democracy,” we can be proud of our record of freedom and liberty.

America is one of the finest nations on earth. We need to act like it. The Bush Administration has done its damndest to end our clean record. A New York Times article revealed the following: "The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of 'coercive management techniques' for possible use on prisoners, including 'sleep deprivation,' 'prolonged constraint,' and 'exposure.'

"What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners."

This is incredibly disturbing. America, as Senator McCain has championed, is the land that fights against foreign brutality. We rallied against Soviet oppression, we were furious at the Soviet gulags, we were appalled by Nazi treatment of noncombatants (as well as Prisoners of War), we fought against vicious Viet Cong rebels who tortured prisoners, but we lose our morality and moral high ground when we resort to the evil techniques of our enemies.

I need to make challah for Shabbos. That takes something like four hours, so it's time to get started. More on torture later.


Torture in the World's Finest Nation by Samuel Weintraub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.