Basura: Torture issue enough to reject Trump’s candidacy

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”  —
 G.K. Chesterton

The United States has long voiced support for international law and human rights. These espoused values foster peace, security and rule of law. Such concepts enhance the spread of democracy.

But during the George W. Bush Administration, the use of torture did great damage to the way the U.S. is viewed. And it made our country less, not more, secure. When we think of Reagan’s description of our country as “a shining city on a hill,” when we hear chants of “U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A.,” when we see the American flag, or consider the U.S. Constitution, do we think of the horrors perpetrated in our country’s name during the Bush years? Are we proud that Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Legal Adviser John Yoo can’t travel to France, Germany, Switzerland or Spain without risking detention and prosecution?

Do we want to return to torture? Trump says yes. Clinton says no.

Abu Gharaib and Guantanamo have been well documented as sites of U.S. torture. Examples included waterboarding – the forcing of detainees to inhale water – confinement to boxes the size of coffins, sleep deprivation for four days, shackling in painful positions. Unsanctioned, but carried out, tortures included sodomizing detainees, threatening to sexually abuse the relatives of detainees, and freezing to death a detainee chained naked to a cold floor overnight.

Federal Order 13491 bans the use of torture by the U.S. government. This came after the end of the Bush years. Torture is no longer sanctioned by the U.S. But we now have a Republican candidate, one who seeks the election to the presidency of the United States, who says he would reinstate torture, and he would look for torture methods “a lot worse than waterboarding. It wouldn’t bother me even a little bit.” He said this in the Republican candidate’s debate, and he emerged as the nominee of the Republican Party.

I’ll leave it to ethicists and theologians to comment on the morality of torture – at least for now. But why would we want to employ a method that is ineffective, and harmful to our national interests?
General Stanley McCrystal said in a 2013 interview, “The thing that hurt us more than anything else in the war was Abu Ghraib. The Iraqi people felt it was proof positive that the Americans were doing exactly what Saddam Hussein had done, and that it was proof everything bad they thought about Americans was true.”

China’s state news agency asked, “How long can the US pretend to be a champion of human rights?” after the release of the “2014 Senate Report on Torture”.

While providing our enemies with ammunition in the form of argument that we were bad actors, we concurrently harmed relationships with our allies. The Dutch joined us as allies in Afghanistan – but only after assurances that we were no longer using torture. The British released an enemy combatant in Basra, Iraq, because they did not have detention facilities, and did not trust U.S. forces to treat the detainee humanely. Several countries cited our use of torture as cause for diminished relationships, and decreased cooperation, including Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, Ireland, and Finland. India’s Chief Minister Modi, following U.S. reaction to the Hindu/Muslin riots, said the U.S. “was guilty of horrific human rights violations and thus has no moral basis to speak of such matters.”

As has been well known to the FBI for some time, and more recently by the CIA, rapport building techniques are more effective, and yield more dependable information. Senator John McCain, AZ (R), could speak to this from first-hand experience – having been tortured while a POW. Rapport building is humane, legal, and effective. What it fails to do is provide a measure of vengeance, which sometimes seems to override the desire to gain valuable intelligence.

Having been in combat, seen friends killed and wounded, I understand this mode of response. But understanding it as an emotional reaction does not make it right. Nor does it make it effective, much as it may be wished so.

There are many reasons to reject Trump’s candidacy. He’s uninformed, uncurious, ill-read, untruthful, and, as he showed with Trump University, grossly immoral. But his willingness to promote torture, as shown by his own words, is sufficient to me to back, without hesitation, Mrs. Clinton.