That Fist Misstep

It's always that first step that trips us up, that first footfall on the wrong path that leads to a place of no turning back.
Very smart people, liberal as well as conservative, have recently raised a very scary specter in their political commentary by hinting that Americans ought to start considering the possibility of torturing terrorist suspects to make them talk.

Well, not exactly torturing them -- just messing with their minds. Use a little sodium pentothal ("truth serum") or ratchet up the psychological pressure with a black room, loud noises and an endless spotlight, a la John le Carre. We could threaten their families. If push came to shove, we'd turn them over to some other government to do the real dirty work, maybe the Saudis, who routinely cut off hands and heads as punishment, or the Israelis, who have their own ways of extracting information.

Those pundits floating these trial balloons must never have looked into the eyes of someone who's been tortured. I have. It was a long time ago, in Vietnam. I was 25, an American journalist sitting in a South Vietnamese interrogation room in Saigon. The prisoner was perhaps 15, maybe a little older. She was skinny and stank of urine and mildew, her hands were bound, her filthy feet scarred, bloody and bare. Ragged gray-green tunic and pants covered the rest of her body. She was accused of being a Viet Cong spy.

Through an interpreter, she denied she was a communist and disavowed any allegiance to the Viet Cong. But she clearly hated her captors and, by extension, we Americans who were South Vietnam's allies.

When I asked her if she'd been mistreated she stared straight into my eyes and recited, in clinical detail, how her guards had electrically shocked her genitals, pulled out her hair, stuck hot metal under her toenails. Her chest was covered with small round burns -- "cigarettes," she explained.

Was every prisoner treated this way? No, she said, most had it worse.

I was outraged. How could Americans condone torture? Because, embassy officials explained to me, we have no control over our allies. I didn't believe that; my country, while espousing democratic principles, simply chose to look the other way.

I was impotent to help that young woman, and was heartsick as I watched her guards roughly jerk her from the chair and drag her back to her cell. Her last glance back at me over her shoulder was defiant, full of rage. Later, I tried to find out what happened to her and was told only that she was "gone."

Hundreds of suspects have been rounded up and jailed since Sept. 11. The FBI is less than forthcoming about what agents have learned from these arrests. But because Attorney General John Ashcroft keeps issuing vague, nonspecific warnings about future terrorist attacks, it's a pretty safe bet to say the suspects haven't revealed much about their network, Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda.
That uncooperativeness is no reason to change our laws to allow us to torture them. Advocating anything less than morally ethical interrogation would undermine the very values we are fighting to preserve. What about equal protection under the law? How can we pass legislation that singles out the bad guys but protects the good ones? Who gets to decide who's abused, and how it's done? Who has to live with the consequences? From the time they're in pre-school, we teach our children the Golden Rule. How can we raise our sons and daughters to respect our Constitution and perhaps fight and even die for it, and then ask them to violate it by committing immoral acts on another human being? Such behavior would make a mockery of all America says it stands for.
No torture. No way, no how, not in my land of the free and home of the brave. We must never take that first misstep down that dangerous road, for it will lead only to a dead end.


© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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