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By Shepherd Bliss
I try not to think about torture. Then I read the following: Vice-President Dick Cheney apparently defends it, a U.S. soldier who objects to interrogation techniques commits suicide, articles with titles like “Torture’s Not So Bad, If It’s Done for a War Worth Fighting,” and Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet was recently arrested and charged with torture.
Feelings about close friends tortured over thirty years ago in Chile rush in. Unfortunately, my experiences with U.S.-supported torture have been quite direct and specific.
To most people, torture is just an idea, probably abstract and distant. Not to me. Hearing the word, I feel, rather than think. I remember…a sharp pain rises in my stomach.
Cheney recently admitted on radio that the U.S. engages in
water-boarding. “Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn’t
regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it,” an Oct.
26 McClatchy News Service article reports.
In water-boarding “a prisoner is secured with his feet above his head
and has water poured on a cloth over his face. It has been specifically
widely condemned as torture,” an Oct. 28 San Francisco Chronicle
article reveals. A military veteran friend with direct experience
divulged to me that water-boarding induces a terrifying sense that one
is drowning. It is only one of the many techniques that the CIA
apparently employs and tries to cover by the use of words such as
“coercion” and “aggressive interrogating tactics.”
Over thirty years ago, after being ordained a Methodist minister, I was
assigned to Chile. My ministry there started well, given the
hopefulness of Chileans for their popular and democratically-elected
President Salvador Allende. My good American friend Frank Terrugi also
came to Chile to work. I started a relationship with a young woman who
was, like me, a member of a military family.
Then came Sept. 11--the date in l973 that the U.S. supported Allende’s
overthrow by the dictator Gen. Pinochet. Frank was tortured so badly
that the coffin could not be opened at his funeral in Chicago. My
girlfriend was also tortured, and survived. Their tortures stopped my
life.
More than 30 years later, that torture still holds a firm grip on me.
However, as with much torture, it failed. Instead of reducing my
commitments to genuine liberty, freedom, and democracy, it enhanced
them. Torture is immoral, cruel, ineffective and deeply damaging to
whomever it touches, including associated survivors and the torturers.
For example, when you join the U.S. military, you do not expect to be
ordered to torture. If you follow those orders, you are forever
damaged.
U.S. SOLDIER COMMITS SUICIDE
The editor of the authoritative trade publication “Editor and
Publisher,” Greg Mitchell, wrote on article on Nov. 1 entitled
“Revealed: U.S. Soldier Killed Herself After Objecting to Interrogation
Techniques.” He tells the story of U.S. Army specialist Alyssa
Peterson, 27. She died on Sept. 15, 2003, by “non-hostile weapons
discharge,” according to the military.
Her story lay dormant until longtime radio and newspaper reporter Ken
Elston decided to probe further in 2005. On Oct. 31 he reported the
following on her hometown radio station KNAU in Flagstaff, Arizona:
“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners.
She refused to participate after only two nights. Army spokespersons
for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques
Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now
been destroyed.”
Elston reports on interviews with her colleagues, “The reactions to the
suicide were that she was having a difficult time separating her
personal feelings from her professional duties.” Peterson was a devout
Mormon. She is described by a friend as being “genuine, sincere,
sweet…a wonderful person.”
It is bad enough that the Bush administration is putting the bodies of
our military personnel in harm’s way. It is worse that some are being
order to apparently engage in war crimes, thus damaging their souls.
I hope that Peterson’s story gets out further. It is an example of how
torture deeply harms those tortured, their family members and friends,
and those ordered to torture.
TORTURE AS MORE THAN AN ABSTRACT IDEA
For me, torture is more than merely an abstract idea or a vague
metaphor. Its reality is not just in some distant place or time, but
exists as a feeling in my body. The tortures of my friends traumatized
my nervous system, creating a scar. I go through periods of not
thinking about it. Upon reading about torture, I remember.
Others may argue abstractly about whether water-boarding is really
torture and whether torture is ever justified. But those touched
directly by torture are likely to feel its terrors when hearing about
water-boarding. I can feel and even hear the victim’s terror.
I continue to follow the oath that I took in 1966 when I was
commissioned a U.S. Army officer to defend our country and our
Constitution. The main threats to our people today seem to come from
the Bush administration itself.
One of the worst things about the U.S.’s illegal and immoral war in
Iraq is how it has stained our military tradition. I do not always
agree with American foreign policy, but I support a civilian-led
military to defend our country. Many people in the services and
veterans feel ashamed of the continuing actions of our military in
Iraq, which bring dishonor to our country, especially when it involves
torture.
Chile’s Gen. Pinochet has been charged in numerous European and Latin
American courts with abuse during his brutal regime. On Oct. 27 he was
arrested and indicted in Chile on torture charges. The apparent
architect of the Sept. 11 coup in Chile, Henry Kissinger, also has been
wanted for years by judges in Europe and Latin America to stand trial
for war crimes. Kissinger is now an advisor to Pres. Bush.
Terrorism in any form is terrible. Its worst form is when it is
sanctioned by the state with its substantial resources. The long and
brutal power of the U.S. state reached Chile in the l973 coup to kill,
maim, and torture thousands of people. Though that may seem long ago
and far away, that abuse continues to live in the bodies of those of us
who survived that time and place.
“TORTURE’S NOT SO BAD”
“Torture’s Not So Bad…” by columnist Joel Stein in a recent Los Angeles
Times may have been meant ironically to make his point “What is it
we’re doing over there?” But his column was in bad taste—an abstract
use of the word “torture” as an idea and metaphor, without any sense of
how painful such uses can be to those actually touched by torture.
Stein does not appear to understand torture and may not have had any
direct experience with it. He should stop re-triggering those of us who
have had experience with the trauma of torture.
Stein wants us to “stop distracting ourselves with discussions about
how we conduct this war.” Those discussions are important, not only
with respect to this war, but for recent and future wars. We still have
veterans dying from Agent Orange from Vietnam. We have soldiers
returning from this war with sicknesses caused by the use of weapons
with depleted uranium. Who knows what horrors will be visited upon
soldiers by their own government in the next wars. Stein should stop
distracting us from discussing the larger issues that modern warfare
raises.
I would not be able to put these words down on paper without my
decade-long participation in the Veterans Writing Group, lead by Maxine
Hong Kingston. We recently published our first book “Veterans of War,
Veterans of Peace,”
www.vowvop.org, edited by Kingston.
Listening to the stories of other vets and telling my own has not been
easy. Kingston encourages us to “go into the dark of forgotten things”
and then “write the unspeakable.” I still have a long ways to go to be
able to properly describe my deepest feelings about torture.
Have you ever been tortured? Probably not. (I hope not.) However, you
may have used the word to convey what the dictionary describes as
“severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion” and as
“mental anguish.” Before you use the word “torture” again to describe
some pain, please study U.S. “aggressive interrogation tactics”
currently being used in Iraq and taught to the Latin American military
at the School of the Americas. Better yet, speak to some of the Chilean
and other victims of such torture.
Torture has been illegal in the U.S. and is prohibited by international
law. Unfortunately, it still occurs. Some of the 21st century masters
of torture, it seems, are Americans. Torture used to be considered
Un-American and should once again be considered Un-American.
But as my friend Jack Winkle of Sebastopol, CA. recently wrote,
“Now we Americans have someone in the White House sanctioning torture.
We are a changed society and I suspect we will not like where it ends.
My worst guess is some variation of Auschwitz or Pinochet coming home
to roost.”
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written by HiveRadical, November 08, 2006
written by Missionary's Kid, November 09, 2006
My father was kidnaped and tortured in Recife Brazil in the fall of 1974. I was 13 and living in Atlanta. Not only to I live with the memories of those awful days of waiting, I live with the anger at indiferent clasmates, and at one particular teacher - a CIVICS teacher, who defended the Brazilian army's use of torture. Before my father was even released.
I joined the US Army 21 years ago because American citizenship meant something. The our family (preachers all) managed to get many senators and representatives to bug the state department. I took my oath seriously.
I was in the army for 3 years, and have worked for the Army as a civilian ever since.
What this administration has done goes beyond horrifying me. My friend, a retired Navy captain has made me promise to wait until the next presidential election before quiting. But legalizing torture, sedudcing the men and women in our armed forces into becoming torturers has made me feel deep (horror? shame? grief?) about my nation and my army.
That this young woman could not be corrupted, or seduced into torturing means she was a remarkably strong person. The loss of a coragous person with such a strong moral center is an incalculable loss to the army and to this nation. I grieve, but at the same time see hope. Where there is one, there are more.
P.S. The army had plenty of ways of getting her out of there and still using her skills. When they want to they can just shuffle you off somewhere else, it raises fewer eyebrows.
Since she served an LDS mission one imagines that she was at least somewhat conversant in the tenets of the faith.
The reason for the discrepancy is that in terms of severity of infringement/sin suicide ranks significantly higher than following the orders of a superior officer in the military in wartime. Basically our faith, at least as I've learned it over the several decades of my life, holds suicide as a generally damning act that would be significantly worse than executing what some may consider torture under the dictates of the military of the sovreign government in times of war.
I don't know what if anything this changes. It certainly creates more questions than answers. Certainly suicide is not something that those in the LDS faith are immune to. But it is a fact that it is significantly more frowned upon than just about anything one can do while serving in the military.
The only other scenarios I can imagine are either the coverup of a homicide or a murder. I'm not trigger happy when invoking conspiratorial hypotheticals, but this has some seriously questionable claims to anyone with any real familiarity with the claimed justification for the woman's suicide.