Torture is Never Acceptable

In a recent investigative piece in The New York Times, prison workers at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-ray described in detail how detainees were tortured in the Cuban detention center. One method involved prisoners being stripped to nothing but their underwear, tied to the floor and made to sit in a chair as interrogators subjected them to loud music, strobe lights and air conditioning turned on to maximum levels for up to 14 hours at a time.

The Defense Department’s response? That the military runs a “safe, humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terror.”

In truth, many critics have held that the roughly 600 Guantanamo inmates are low-level fighters who could not possibly be valuable sources of information. Moreover, studies have shown that torture is generally ineffective at gathering information from detainees.

But our objection to the use of torture is based mainly on our moral opposition to it. It is thoroughly inhumane and un-American. In its earliest days, our country established that cruel and unusual punishment was a violation of the rights of human beings. Let us not abandon that principle today. Though the Guantanamo inmates are not American citizens, we believe that they should still be entitled to the rights our national heritage claims are self-evident.

In response to a debate within the Bush administration over what interrogation techniques were acceptable, President Bush stated that prisoners at Guanatanamo should be treated “humanely and, to the extent appropriate with military necessity, in a manner consistent with” the Geneva Conventions. We disagree. We believe that prisoners should be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions, period.

A mandate for the humane treatment of prisoners should never be qualified, especially by vague phrases like “to the extent appropriate with military necessity.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, like Bush, used such characteristically vague language in a memorandum released in April 2003, in which he approved 24 techniques of interrogation. The memorandum states that prisoners may be interrogated in settings “that may be less comfortable” but do not “constitute a substantial change in environmental quality.” Such language is too vague to prevent inhumane methods of torture from being used, and we fear it is strategically so.

It is an outrage that torture has been so widespread under Rumsfeld’s watch. Rumsfeld and the Bush administration must take responsibility for the dehumanizing acts that have taken place at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and they must make sure that the use of torture has been completely and permanently stopped. As long as detainees’ rights are violated, we desecrate principles integral to our American identity—the same principles that we are supposed to be defending by waging a war on terror.