【09.10 The Atlantic】Dear President Bush

和解团结

【原帖地址】http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/bush-torture
【作者】Andrew Sullivan
【媒体】The Atlantic
【媒体译名】大西洋月刊
【出版日期】2009年10月
【说明】
这是Andrew Sullivan十月份在The Atlantic上给美国前总统布什的一篇公开信，要求布什对在关塔纳摩和伊拉克等地发生的虐囚和其他侵犯人权的事件负责。Andrew Sullivan在The Atlantic上的博客是http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com（要翻墙），维基百科上关于作者的介在http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan（不用翻墙）。因为这个文章较长，我将分四楼转载,转贴时候以一些词可能粘到一起了，大家读的时候需要留意。另外，这个文章本身和中国没关系，不过看到前几天的调查里有人提到希望看到一些西方社会内部的文化，政治方面的评论，应该说这个文章还是比较典型和出色的一个。

【原文】
【第一页】
      Americanswant, and need, to move on from the debate over torture in Iraq andAfghanistan and close this tragic chapter in our nation’s history.Prosecuting those responsible could tear apart a country at war.Instead, the best way to confront the crimes of the past is for the manwho authorized them to take full responsibility. An open letter toPresident George W. Bush. (Photo by Christopher Morris/VII)
      by Andrew Sullivan
   
   
Dear President Bush,We have never met,and so I hope you will forgive the personal nature of this letter. Iguess I should start by saying I supported your presidential campaignin 2000, as I did your father’s in 1988, and lauded your first effortsto wage war against jihadist terrorismin the wake of 9/11. Some of my praise of your leadership at the timeactually makes me blush in retrospect, but your September 20, 2001, address to Congressreally was one of the finest in modern times; your immediate grasp ofthe import of 9/11—a declaration of war—was correct; and your corejudgment—that religious fanaticism allied with weapons of massdestruction represents a unique and new threat to the West—was and isdead-on. I remain proud of my support for you in all this. No oneshould forget the pure evil of September 11; no one should doubt thecontinued determination of an enemy prepared to slaughter thousands incold blood in pursuit of heaven on Earth.

Of course, like most advocates of the Iraq War, I grew dismayed at what I saw as the mistakes that followed: the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora; the intelligence fiascoof Saddam’s nonexistent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; thefailure to prepare for an insurgency in Iraq; the reckless disbandmentof the Iraqi army; the painful slowness in adapting to drasticallyworsening conditions there in 2004–06; the negligence towardAfghanistan.

These were all serious errors; but they were of a kind often made inthe chaos of war. And even your toughest critics concede that,eventually, you adjusted tactics and strategy. You took your time, butyou evaded catastrophe in temporarily stabilizing Iraq. I also agreewith the guiding principle of the war you proclaimed from the start:that expanding democracy and human rights is indispensable in thelong-term fight against jihadism. And I believe, as you do, that aforeign policy that does not understand the universal yearning forindividual freedom and dignity is not a recognizably American foreignpolicy.

Yet it is precisely because of that belief that I lost faith in yourwar. In long wars of ideas, moral integrity is essential to winning,and framing the moral contrast between the West and its enemies asstarkly as possible is indispensable to victory, as it was in theSecond World War and the Cold War. But because of the way you chose totreat prisoners in American custody in wartime—a policy that degradedhuman beings with techniques typically deployed by brutaldictatorships—we lost this moral distinction early, and we have yet toregain it. That truth hangs over your legacy as a stain that has yet tobe removed. As more facts emerge, the stain could darken further. Youwould like us to move on. So would the current president. But we cannotunless we find a way to address that stain, to confront and remove it.

I have come to accept that it would be too damaging and polarizingto the American polity to launch legal prosecutions against you, anddeeply unfair to solely prosecute those acting on your orders or inyour name. President Obama’s decisionthus far to avoid such prosecutions is a pragmatic and bipartisan onein a time of war, as is your principled refusal to criticize himpublicly in his first months. But moving on without actuallyconfronting or addressing the very grave evidence of systematic abuseand torture under your administration poses profound future dangers. Itgives the impression that nothing immoral or illegal took place.Indeed, since leaving office, your own vice president has even braggedof these interrogation techniques; and many in your own party threatento reinstate such policies in the future. Their extreme rhetoric seemslikely to shape—to contaminate—history’s view of your presidency,indeed of the Bush name, and the world’s view of America. But mybiggest fear is this: in the event of a future attack on the UnitedStates, another president will feel tempted, or even politicallycompelled, to resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the samepolarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you nowbecause it is within your power—and only within your power—to preventthat from happening.

Don’t misunderstand me. The war was compromised, not by occasionalwar crimes, or bad snap decisions by soldiers acting under extremestress, or the usual, ghastly stuff that war is made of. All conflictsgenerate atrocities. Very few have been without sporadic abuse ofprisoners or battlefield errors. As long as these lapses areinvestigated and punished, the integrity of a just war can besustained.

But this war is different. It began with a memo from your officestating that—for the first time—American service members and CIAofficers need not adhere to the laws of warfare that have governedWestern and American war-making since before this country’s founding.The memo declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to capturedterror suspects but that all prisoners would be treated humanely unless“military necessity” required otherwise. This gaping “militarynecessity” loophole—formally opposed in a memoby the member of your Cabinet with the most military experience,Secretary of State Colin Powell—was the beginning of America’s descentinto the ranks of countries that systematically torture prisoners.
You insisted that prisoners be treated humanely whenever possible, but warswith legal loopholes for abuse and torture always quickly degenerate.In its full consequences, that memo, even if issued in good faith, hasdone more damage to the reputation of the United States than anythingsince Vietnam. The tolerance of torture and abuse has recruited moreterrorists than any al-Qaeda video, and has devastated morale andsupport at home. Your successor remains profoundly constrained even nowby this legacy—compelled to prevent the release of more photographicevidence of war crimes under your command because of the damage itcould still do to American soldiers in the field.

No, terror suspects did not deserve full prisoner-of-war status.That argument was always a red herring. Full POW rights—regular meals,exercise, and the rest—were not applicable to stateless terror suspectswho themselves had no uniform or adherence to Geneva. You were right tosee that as inappropriate, if not offensive. But what these suspectsdid deserve—simply because they are human beings—was protection frominhuman, degrading, abusive treatment or the infliction of “severemental or physical pain or suffering” in order to procure information.This is what Geneva’s Article 3says: whatever the nature of the combatant, in or out of uniform, andwhatever his own moral rules (or lack of them), he deserves basicrespect as a human being with human rights. This principle isnonnegotiable. It is the core principle of Western civilization.Resistance to the physical force of government, especially as thatforce is applied to people in custody, is the core reason Americaexists as an independent nation.

I believe that if you review the facts of your two terms of office,you will be forced to realize that, whatever your intentions, youundermined this fundamental American principle. You may not haveintended that to occur. But you were the commander in chief andpresident, and these were presidential-level decisions. Theresponsibility for all of this is yours—before the American people andbefore the court of history. And you need finally to own thesedecisions, to take full responsibility for them, to account for them,to explain them, and, yes, to apologize for their scope and brutality.
This was never about “bad apples.” It is no longer even faintlyplausible to argue that the mounds of identical documented abusesacross every theater of combat in the war as it was conducted afterJanuary 2002 were a function of a handful of reservists improvisingsadism on one night shift in one prison. The International Committee ofthe Red Cross, the Senate Armed Services Committee, dozens of reputablewell-sourced news stories and well-documented books, and the manyofficial reports on the subject have revealed a systematic pattern ofprisoner mistreatment in every theater of combat, by almost allbranches of the armed services, and in every major detention facilityin Iraq where interrogation took place. (Revealingly, there were veryfew abuses in what the Red Cross calls “regular internment facilities”in Iraq—meaning those where interrogation was not taking place.)

The Senate’s own unanimous bipartisan report,signed by your party’s 2008 nominee, John McCain, proves exhaustivelythat the abuse and torture documented in U.S. prisons were the resultsof policies you chose. The International Red Cross found youradministration guilty of treating prisoners in a manner thatconstituted torture, a war crime. Experts in the history of torture,such as the Reed College professor Darius Rejali, make very carefuldistinctions between the disparate acts of torture or abuse that takeplace in all wars and a bureaucratized top-down policy, wherebyidentical techniques are replicated across the globe in differentservices and under different commands, with some on-the-groundimprovisation as well. The history of prisoner mistreatment under yourcommand fits the second pattern, not the first.

The techniques these various sources describe are not comic-booksadism; they are not the gruesome medieval tortures of Saddam. In fact,they are coolly modern tortures, designed to leave no physical marksthat could be proffered as evidence against the regimes that use them.They have been used by democracies that want to get what they believeare the fruits of torture while avoiding all physical evidence of it.As the sloganin Iraq’s Camp Nama put it, “No blood, no foul.” But torture is notdefined in law or morality by the production of blood or by anyspecific technique—that would simply invite governments to devisetechniques other than those prohibited. Torture is defined by theimposition of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” to thepoint when a human being can bear it no longer and tells hisinterrogators something—true or untrue—to stop what cannot be endured.That’s torture, in plain English. It was the clear goal of the policyyou set in motion—and implemented with great determination across theworld in ships and secret sites, at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram inAfghanistan, throughout interrogation centers in Iraq.

At the same time, though, you expressed what seemed to me to begenuine public revulsion at the techniques you authorized. On June 26,2003, the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, you stated:  

I call on all governments to join with the United States and thecommunity of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, andprosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent othercruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak outagainst torture in all its forms and to make ending torture anessential part of their diplomacy.

You did not parse torture narrowly here. You were opposed to it in“all its forms.” You also called for barring “other cruel and unusualpunishment.” When four U.S. soldiers were captured early in the Iraq conflict, you stated:

I expect them to be treated, the POWs, I expect tobe treated humanely, just like we’re treating the prisoners that wehave captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisonerswill be treated as war criminals.

In 2004, after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, you told al-Hurra,the U.S.-sponsored Arabic television station, “This is not America.America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating peoplewith respect.” You went on to say: “The people of Iraq must understandthat I view those practices as abhorrent.”

Then how could you have authorized them? Maybe it was unclear to youat the time that most of the gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraibdepicted techniques that you and your defense secretary authorized.This is an explanation in some ways, even if it is not an excuse.Photos can jar us into recognition of reality when words fail. Most ofus hearing of “stress positions” or “long-time standing” or “harshtechniques” do not visualize what these actually are. They sound mildenough in the absence of further inquiry. Those photographs did us alla terrible favor in that respect: they removed any claim of deniabilityas to what these techniques mean. And yet you responded to Abu Ghraibby extending the techniques revealed there and codifying them in law,in the Military Commissions Act, for use by the CIA. Youradministration ordered up memos in your second term to perpetuate theseabuses. It is hard to escape the conclusion that you were dissemblingin your initial claim of abhorrence and shock; or were in denial; orwere not in control of your own administration.

I don’t believe you were lying. I believe you were genuinelyhorrified. But that means you now need to confront the denial thatallowed you somehow to ignore what you directly authorized andcommanded: using dogs to terrorize prisoners; stripping detainees nakedand hooding them; isolating people in windowless cells for weeks andeven months on end; freezing prisoners to near-death and reviving themand repeating the hypothermia; contorting prisoners into stresspositions that create unbearable pain in the muscles and joints;cramming prisoners into upright coffins in painful positions withminimal air; near-drowning, on a waterboard, of human beings—in one case 183 times—evenafter they have cooperated with interrogators. Those Abu Ghraibprisoners standing on boxes, bent over with their cuffed hands tiedbehind them to prison bars? You authorized that. The prisoner being led aroundby Lynndie England on a leash, like a dog? You authorized that, too,and enforced it in at least one case, that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, inGuantánamo Bay.

In defending these policies since you left office, you have insistedthat all of these techniques were legal. But one of the key lawyers whoprovided your legal defense, John Yoo, is on recordas saying that your inherent executive power allowed you to order thelegal crushing of an innocent child’s testicles if you believed that itcould get intelligence out of his father. Yoo also favored a definitionof torture that allowed literally anything to be done to a helplessprisoner short of causing death or the permanent loss of a major organ.The Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture offerblanket legal bans on anything that even looks like torture. Yoo set upa mirror image: a blanket legal permission to do anything abusive to aprisoner, hedged only by the need not to kill him. If that is yourdefense of the legality of torture, it is a profoundly weak one.

But leave the question of legality aside. Skilled lawyers can argueanything. Examine the moral and ethical question. Could any moralperson who saw the abuse of human beings at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, CampCropper, Camp Nama, and uncounted black sites across the globe and atsea believe it was in compliance with America’s “respect” and “law andfreedom”? As president, your job was not to delegate moralresponsibility for these acts, but to take moral responsibility forthem. You said a decade ago: “Once you put your hand on the Bible andswear in [to public office], you must set a high standard and beresponsible for your own actions.”

The point of this letter, Mr. President, is to beg you to finallytake responsibility for this stain on American honor and this burden ona war we must win. It is to plead with you to own what happened underyour command, and to reject categorically the phony legalisms, criminaldestruction of crucial evidence, and retrospective rationalizationsused to pretend that none of this happened. It happened. You once said,“I’m worried about a culture that says … ‘If you’ve got a problem blamesomebody else.’” I am asking you to stop blaming others for theconsequences of decisions you made.

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【第二页】   
Dear President Bush，What are you responsiblefor, exactly? Books have been written on this. But let’s take justthree of the more bland-sounding techniques you authorized and extendedand defended: “sleep deprivation” and “stress positions” and“temperature extremes.” As words and phrases, they can seem quitebanal, and I can understand how you could have authorized techniquesthat sound like things most college sophomores or law clerks regularlyendure. But in practice, they are brutal treatments designed to breakthe will and wash the brain of anyone subjected to them for a lengthy period.

Sleep deprivation was pioneered by the Inquisition; not only does itproduce hallucinations, which were useful for proving heresy, but italso increases physical sensitivity. As Darius Rejali, the historian oftorture, has noted, it “reduces a body’s tolerance for musculoskeletalpain, causing deep aches first in the lower part of the body, followedby similar pains in the upper body.” The combination of sleepdeprivation and stress positions leads to unbearable mental andphysical suffering. It was used by the Gestapo, by Franco’s securityservices, and even in the early part of the 20th century by Americanpolice. Use of sleep deprivation to procure confessions in domestic lawenforcement was actually barred by the Supreme Court in 1944 (Ashcraft v. Tennessee)after a suspect was kept awake for 36 hours. The Court compared histreatment to the “physical or mental torture” used by “certain foreignnations.” And yet you, Mr. President, more than a half-century later,authorized subjecting prisoners to this technique for up to 72 hours,or 40 hours if combined with standing in handcuff restraints. In 2002,troops in Afghanistan coined the term monstering to describe one interrogator’s war against a prisoner’s desperate need for sleep.  

We know of one very detailed log of such treatment, which was one ofthe most common forms of “enhanced interrogation” in the first years of“the program.” Mohammed al-Qahtani was kept awake for 20 hours a dayfor 48 of 54 consecutive days in Guantánamo Bay. That’s not the 36hours considered the equivalent of torture by the U.S. Supreme Court;that’s 960 hours when you add them all up. This deprivation is noteasily achieved. To keep someone who is this tired from falling asleeprequires constant physical intervention. It means blasting loud musiccontinuously in a cell; it means forcing an individual to stand up, andbeating or poking him if he falls or tries to rest; it means constantlight and sound; and it can lead quite quickly to medical problems andmental deterioration. During Qahtani’s interrogations, his refusal todrink and many days of sleep deprivation brought his heartbeat down todangerously low levels; but even after he was urgently hospitalized fora day for dehydration to prevent his death, sleep deprivationcontinued—and was continuously used even as he physically deteriorated.An early FBI reviewof the interrogation of Qahtani found that the cumulative treatment ledhim to exhibit “behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma(talking to non-existent people, reportedly hearing voices, crouchingin a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end).” If youbelieve “extreme psychological trauma” is the same as “severe mentalsuffering,” then you ordered the prolonged and brutal torture ofMohammed al-Qahtani.

That was indeed the conclusion of your appointee to determine thelegal status of Guantánamo detainees, Susan Crawford, who simply statedin dismissing all charges against Qahtani: “His treatment met the legaldefinition of torture.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin,who was subjected to sleep deprivation in one of Stalin’s gulags, wouldhave agreed with her assessment of the gravity of the primary torturetechnique. As Begin once wrote: “Anyone who has experienced this desireknows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.”

The British used sleep deprivation against IRA terror suspects inthe 1970s. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that although thisuse of sleep deprivation did not rise to torture, it nonethelessconstituted illegal “inhuman and degrading treatment,” in breach of theEuropean Convention on Human Rights. The reason it did notautomatically qualify as torture depended on the longevity of the sleepdeprivation. But 48 days and nights with no more than four hours’ sleepevery 24, combined with stress positions, hypothermia, and forcednudity, push these nuances over a line any decent person wouldacknowledge. Sleep deprivation alone has been shown to cause psychosis,disorientation, depression, and near-madness. The idea that thesetechniques, which were once used to procure false confessions ofwitchcraft or heresy, can actually generate actionable and accurate anddetailed intelligence is, to say the least, implausible.

But Qahtani was not the only prisoner subjected to sleepdeprivation; hundreds and perhaps thousands of others were too. Qahtaniwas a high-value prisoner; most others weren’t. Qahtani was underconstant medical monitoring; most others were not. Here’s a firsthandaccount of a sleep-deprivation regimen used at the notorious Camp Namain Iraq, a war zone where the Geneva Conventions were always supposedto apply. An Esquire reporter and a Human Rights Watchinvestigatordebriefed a trained interrogator, who had gone to Nama specifically toparticipate in the program, and gave him the pseudonym “Jeff”:

They could keep a prisoner on his feet for 20 hours, and although therules required them to allow each prisoner four hours of sleep everytwenty-four hours, nowhere did it say those four hours had to beconsecutive—so sometimes they’d wake the prisoners up every half hour.Eventually they’d just collapse. “This was a very demanding method forthe interrogators as well, because it required a lot of staff tomonitor the prisoner, and we’d have to stay awake, too,” Jeff says.“And it’s just impossible to interrogate someone when he’s in thatstate, collapsed on the ground. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Qahtani was also stripped naked. This technique, which youauthorized, was used by Americans in every theater of war. The nudity,again, does not sound that awful on the face of it. Western men areused to showering together in gyms and schools. But in the culturalcontext of extremely devout and modest Muslim men, being forced tostand naked in front of each other and especially in front of women isdehumanizing and humiliating. And it was designed to be. Craftingtechniques to exploit Muslim cultural attitudes or phobias waswidespread (the use of dogs fit this role as well), and involvedunethical use of psychologists and doctors. Much of the sexual abuse atAbu Ghraib was not standard operating procedure. But using Muslimprisoners’ sexual phobias, taboos, and religious prohibitions againstthem was common. Whether smearing fake menstrual blood on a prisoner’sface, or having a woman like Lynndie England mock the exposed genitalsof a terrified prisoner, sexual humiliations were not violations of thetechniques you authorized. They were the techniques youauthorized. And they depended for their effectiveness on the specificreligious and cultural beliefs of Muslims. So to wage a war designed toexpose the evil of the Taliban’s religious intolerance, we deliberatelymanipulated Islam into a means of abuse. In a war designed to provethat the West was not Islam’s enemy, we used Islam and Muslim cultureas tools to break down the psyches of prisoners suspected of terrorism.To save religious freedom, we abused it.

The forced nudity also sharpened the edges of temperature extremes,another ancient form of torture that appeals to governments that wantto torture but also to leave no physical scars, welts, or bruises. TheGestapo used what it called the “cold bath,” in which interrogatorswould take a prisoner’s body to a dangerously low temperature in anice-filled tub, then remove and revive the suspect, and then subjecthim to freezing again. This was what happened to Qahtani at GuantánamoBay—he was kept doused in water in a room air-conditioned to chill himuntil he was near-blue—but the technique crops up again and againacross the theaters of war. In 2005, you authorized the CIA to use the“cold cell” technique, in which a prisoner was kept in a cell at 50degrees and constantly covered with cold water. This was not anemergency measure for gathering information that could be used toprevent an imminent mass-casualty attack. It was a formal policy, to beintegrated into the American way of warfare and human rights.
Once you established the legitimacy of freezing prisoners, captorsinevitably improvised. An Army interrogator, Tony Lagouranis, described the technique as it evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan:  

We used hypothermia a lot. It was very cold up in Mosul at that time,so we—it was also raining a lot—so we would keep the prisoner outside,and they would have a polyester jumpsuit on and they would be wet andcold, and freezing. But we weren’t inducing hypothermia with ice waterlike the [Navy] SEALs were. But, you know, maybe the SEALswere doing it better than we were, because they were actually evencontrolling it with the [rectal] thermometer, but we weren’t doingthat.

Lagouranis did not witness the Navy SEALs’ technique himself. But the maintenance of cold cells at Gitmo, and elsewhere, shows how high up the authorization went.

Some of the torture was covered up. Among the death certificates issued for prisoners who died while being held for interrogation at Abu Ghraib,one cited by Dr. Steven Miles claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had diedof “cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his heart.”But Miles noted that the certificate failed to mention that the old manhad been stripped naked, continually soaked in cold water, and keptoutside in 40-degree cold for three days before cardiac arrest.

Here is a report,again from Camp Nama, where the ultimate commander was LieutenantGeneral Stanley McChrystal, now the U.S. commander of forces inAfghanistan:

[One prisoner] was stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed with thehose, with very cold hoses, in February. At night it was very cold.They sprayed the cold hose and he was completely naked in the mud, youknow, and everything. [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put nextto an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was putback in the mud and sprayed. This happened all night. Everybody knewabout it. People walked in, the sergeant major and so forth, everybodyknew what was going on, and I was just one of them, kind of walkingback and forth seeing [that] this is how they do things.

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   Dear President Bush, Extreme cold was complemented with extreme heat. Here is firsthand testimony from an FBI officer who visited Guantánamo Bay in its early days, before the FBI washed its hands of what was happening there:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detaineechained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair,food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves,and had been left there for 18–24 hours or more … On another occasion,the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature inthe unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almostunconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He hadapparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. Onanother occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, butextremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had beensince the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in thefetal position on the tile floor.

“Stress positions” can also sound relatively banal. When your firstdefense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, approved their use, including“long-time standing,” he wryly wrote on the memo: “However, I stand for8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?” The answer isthat the prisoner is usually shackled to a bolt in the floor with hishands cuffed behind him. Any attempt to rest or sit down is preventedby beating or prodding. Other stress positions include being forced tostand on a box, with your hands cuffed and attached to a bar behindyou; or being forced to kneel with cuffed hands behind your back; orforced to lean on a wall by your fingertips, with feet shackled to theground, so that supporting your weight eventually becomes an unbearablestrain. The same applies to many of the positions we saw in the AbuGhraib photos, where the body’s weight rests on one or two musclegroups that quickly become exhausted, creating great pain over longperiods of time.

Darius Rejali notes that long-time standing, for example, causes“the ankles and feet to swell to twice their size within twenty-fourhours. Moving becomes agonizing and large blisters develop. The heartrate increases, and some people faint. The kidneys eventually shutdown.” The photographs at Abu Ghraib show a variety of the positionsthat you authorized, Mr. President—hooded humans forced to balance onboxes, with their arms outstretched or tied to bars behind their back.

The one recorded death at Abu Ghraib was caused by just such astress position enhanced by beating. This kind of strain on the musclesand joints was what John McCain endured. He has never argued that itdidn’t constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Do you, Mr.President? In your endorsement speechfor McCain broadcast at the 2008 Republican Convention, in St. Paul,you referred merely to the “beatings and isolation” he endured. You didnot mean, did you, that if America treated prisoners the way theVietnamese had treated McCain, you would regard it, as your vicepresident has stated he regards it, as “in accordance with ourconstitutional practices and principles”? And if you did not believethe false confession McCain was forced to sign after enduring thismistreatment, why did you believe similar tales told by human beingsunder similar duress under your command—and tout them as evidence ofsuccess in the war?

I want to mention one other human being, an American, Jose Padilla.I do not doubt that Padilla had been a troubled youth and haddisturbing and dangerous contacts with radical Islamists. You wereright to detain him. But what was then done to him—after a charge(subsequently dropped) that he was intent on detonating a nuclear or“dirty” bomb in an American city—remains a matter of grave concern.This was a U.S. citizen, seized on American soil at O’Hare Airport andimprisoned for years without a day in court. He was sequestered in abrig and, his lawyers argued,

was tortured for nearly the entire three years and eight months of hisunlawful detention. The torture took myriad forms, each designed tocause pain, anguish, depression and, ultimately, the loss of will tolive. The base ingredient in Mr. Padilla’s torture was stark isolationfor a substantial portion of his captivity.

Among the techniques allegedly used on American soil against thisAmerican citizen were isolation (sometimes for weeks on end) for atotal of 1,307 days in a nine-by-seven-foot cell, sleep deprivationeffected by lights and loud music and noise, and sensory deprivation.He was goggled and earmuffed to maintain a total lack of spatialorientation, even when being treated for a tooth problem. He lost trackof days and nights and lived for years in a twilight zone of pain andfear. His lawyer Andrew Patel explained:

Mr. Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. Hewould be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in hiscell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyesand nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated,making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time. Mr. Padillawas denied even the smallest, and most personal shreds of human dignityby being deprived of showering for weeks at a time, yet having toendure forced grooming at the whim of his captors …

After four years in U.S. custody, Padilla was reduced to a physicaland mental shell of a human being. Here is Patel’s description of howPadilla appeared in his pretrial meetings:

During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eyemovements and contortions of his body. The contortions are particularlypoignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain whenhe has meetings with counsel.

Mr. President, if you heard of a citizen of Iran being treated this way by the Iranian government, what would you call it?

You argue that you authorized these dehumanizing and cruel policiesbecause you were determined to protect the nation from another terrorattack. This is a claim impossible for those of us without securityclearances to judge. Many have questioned it. No one has argued thatsuch policies prevented any catastrophic attack with weapons of massdestruction, the original justification for the extraordinary use oftorture by a country dedicated to human rights and the rule of law. Andwe have no way to determine whether any information gleaned by thesesessions could have been procured through traditional and legalAmerican interrogation methods. Nor do we know how many false trailsfrom false confessions wasted time and resources. We do know that crucial evidence Colin Powell usedat the UN to link Saddam and al-Qaeda came from a tortured suspect wholater recanted. We also know that hundreds of prisoners at GuantánamoBay were released by your administration because they had nointelligence value and had been detained by mistake. We know that a study of 132 prisoners at Gitmo conducted by National Journalfound that more than half were not even accused of terrorism againstthe United States, and only eight were accused of terror attacksoutside Afghanistan. The majority of the prisoners had been capturedoutside the field of battle, mostly by Pakistani authorities inPakistan. If this snapshot of those detained is in any way similar tothe broader picture, the abuse and torture of so many people onlydistantly related to the war against America undoubtedly generated manymore recruits and increased the danger to the West.

You have also claimed that defending the security of the UnitedStates was the paramount requirement of your oath of office. It wasn’t.The oath you took makes a critical distinction: “I do solemnly swearthat I will faithfully execute the office of President of the UnitedStates, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect anddefend the Constitution of the United States.” It is the Constitutionyou were sworn to defend, not the country. To abandon the Constitutionto save the country from jihadist terrorists was not your job. Yes, ofcourse your role as commander in chief required you to take nationalsecurity extremely seriously, but not at the expense of your core dutyto protect the Constitution and to sincerely respect—notopportunistically exploit—the rule of law.

And the core value of the Constitution, and of your own rhetoricalrecord, is freedom. Some civil liberties may need to be curtailedsomewhat in a new kind of war; almost no one, apart from doctrinairelibertarians, would disagree. Most people are prepared to compromise,as long as checks and balances are in place to keep governmentaccountable. But the deployment of torture and abuse of prisoners isnot within this framework. It is not so much an infringement offreedom, as the obliteration of freedom. Western freedom begins withthe right to protect one’s own body from government power. That’s whathabeas corpus means. What was done to Jose Padilla makes a mockery ofthat freedom and, in fact, establishes a precedent that, if left inplace, could destroy it. Because the war you declared has no geographicboundaries and no time limit, the power of the executive to detain andtorture without bringing charges—the power you introduced—is not just awar power. Because the war on terror is for all practical purposespermanent, the executive power to torture is a constitutional powerthat will become entrenched during peacetime.

When a human being is tortured, his body and mind are used asweapons to destroy his agency and will. The point of torture is torender a suspect helpless in the face of government power, to make hima vessel for whatever the government wants from him. It is the polaropposite of Western freedom—not a threat to freedom or an infringementof it, but its nemesis. If liberty is white, torture is black. Nosociety has remained free that has allowed its government to torturehuman beings. And no previous American president has imported the toolsof torture into the very heart of the American system of government asyou did. Every dissident in every foul tyranny on Earth, imprisoned andtortured by men and women far less scrupulous than you, now knowssomething he or she never knew before your presidency: America torturestoo. What this will do to the march of freedom you believe in is yetunknown. But my view is that by condoning torture, by allowing it totake place, and by your vice president’s continuing defense andchampioning of torture as compatible with American traditions, you havedone enormous damage to America’s role as a beacon of freedom and tothe rule of law.

Maybe you do not see the gravity of the precedent as I do. But Ibecame a conservative a long time ago in part because of the torturerecord of the Soviet Union and what I saw as the failure of the left toconfront it aggressively enough. I supported the Iraq War in partbecause I despise torture and felt that, whatever else happened,shutting down Saddam’s torture chambers could never be a bad thing. Butto have believed all this—sincerely, genuinely, deep in my heart andsoul—and then to see America, the America I love and have made my home,actually become a country that secretly tortured and dehumanized andabused people has been a wrenching and transformative experience. Ihope you can at least understand my concern and anger. I believe thatdeep down, you do understand, or else I would not even attempt such anappeal to you. But that is also why a public accounting of what youdid, what you understood you were doing, and what you now know andfeel, is so important.

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Dear President Bush, The other value youhave eloquently expressed as essential to your public life is faith. We share that faith, although I am a wayward Catholic and you a born-againevangelical. Our faith tells us that what you authorized is an absoluteevil. By absolute evil, I mean something that is never morally justified. I have no doubt that you believed you were doing your dutyin protecting the country, and every political leader in a dangerousworld has to make decisions that haunt the conscience. But even war,with all its murder and mayhem and abuse and trauma, can still, in ourChristian tradition, be deemed just, under certain circumstances. I amnot a pacifist by any means. Defending free countries from thearchitects of 9/11 is just; bringing some semblance of democracy toIraq was just; unseating the Taliban was just. Even those decisionsthat cost lives—of young Americans and countless Iraqis and Afghans—canbe morally defended by Christians, in good faith and clear conscience,as a last resort. In fact, fighting terrorism and jihadism is, in myview, an eminently just use of military power, if that use of power isconstantly subjected to scrutiny and reflection and revision.

But torture has no defense whatsoever in Christian morality. Thereare no circumstances in which it can be justified, let alone integratedas a formal program within a democratic government. The Catholiccatechism states, “Torture which uses physical or moral violence toextract confessions… is contrary to respect for the person and forhuman dignity.” Dignity is the critical word there. Even evilmen are human and redeemable. Our faith demands that, even inlegitimate punishment or interrogation, the dignity of prisoners mustbe respected. Our faith teaches that each of us—even Khalid SheikhMohammed—is made in the image of God. To violate that imago Deiby stripping and freezing him, by slamming him against a wall, orstrapping him to a board to nearly drown him again and again and again,to bombard him with noise and light until he loses his mind, to reducea human being to a mental and spiritual shell—nothing can justify thisfor a Christian. Nothing. To wield that power is to wield evil. Andsuch evil is almost always committed by those who believe they arepursuing good.

America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not becauseAmericans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because itsfounding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized theindelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. Itset up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches ofgovernment against each other and enshrined a free press so that evilcould be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men.The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture,or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moraland spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great adistortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam. Tobelieve that because the American government is better than Saddam andthe Taliban and al-Qaeda, Americans are somehow immune to the sametemptations of power that all flesh is heir to, is itself a deep anddangerous temptation. The power to torture is a case in point. Becausetorture can coerce truth, break a human being’s dignity, treat him asan expendable means rather than as a fragile end, it has a terriblepower to corrupt. Torture is the ultimate expression of the absolutepower of one individual over another; it destroys the souls of thosewho torture just as surely as it eviscerates the dignity of those whoare its victims. And because torture is so awful, it also oftenrequires a defensive embrace of it, a pride in it, an exaggeration ofits successes. And those so-called successes invariably lead to moretorture until we end up with the record of wanton and systematic abusethat occurred under your command.

I think you know this. You have rarely failed to describe absoluteevil when you’ve seen it. You are not known for Clintonian parsings ofmoral truths. I think you understand also because you are a man offaith. And I think this faith should guide you to a reconciliation withthe truth of the past, a reconciliation that this divided countryneeds, and that your successor and the men and women he commandsdeserve.

Over the past few years, I have gone from desperately trying to findout and expose this systematic abuse, to expressing enormous anger, tohoping for criminal prosecution of all the major figures. Now I feelprofound discomfort with all the options in front of us. To ignore theflagrant evidence of war crimes, reported by the Red Cross,is itself a violation of America’s treaty obligations. And yet toprosecute only those lower down the chain of command is purescapegoating. Your own former CIA officers and service members do notdeserve to take the fall for the policies they were told were legal andauthorized by their commander in chief. And yet to initiate prosecutionof those ultimately responsible for this pattern of criminality andabuse—namely you, your vice president, your defense secretary, and allthose involved in constructing the torture program—would also tear thisalready polarized society apart at a time when we are still at war.There is a reason the Obama administration has remained almostparalyzed in the face of this inheritance. Every option is awful; andyet, some action is necessary.

Only you can do what’s needed. Only you can move this countryforward by taking full responsibility for the past and supporting thecurrent president in his abolition of torture and abuse and in hisconduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The decisions you madewere complex; it may well be that you only subsequently grasped thefull import of the actions you took in good faith; that you were misledabout, or misunderstood, what “harsh interrogation” meant. Allpresidents are human, and taking responsibility does not meanself-flagellation.

The model is Ronald Reagan, who denied he had ever traded arms forhostages in Iran but eventually realized that that was indeed theconsequence of the actions he took, the men he appointed, and thepolicy he pursued. Reagan’s speech to the nation on this matter was, inmy view, his greatest, because it revealed humility and integrity.“First, let me say,” he told us in 1987,  

I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of myadministration. As angry as I may be about activities undertakenwithout my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. Asdisappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one whomust answer to the American people for this behavior … A few months agoI told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heartand my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and theevidence tell me it is not.

If you read the Red Cross report and the Senate Armed Services Committee report,I believe you will reach a similar conclusion about your own record onprisoner treatment. You may not have intended to torture people, butyou did; you may have wanted to protect the country within the law, butthat admirable desire too easily slid into your approval of actionsthat are indefensible, illegal, and deeply damaging to America’sreputation and honor. You were let down, as Reagan was. He tookresponsibility. You need to as well.

Demanding that you alone be held accountable and no one else bescapegoated would itself be an act of honor. It would draw a linebetween the past and the future in the same way that Lincoln’s defenseof his brief suspensions of habeas corpus conceded Congress’s soleright to remove this core constitutional provision, but defended hisaction as a necessary emergency measure because a mass rebellion “hadsubverted the whole of the laws.” You do not deserve to go down inhistory as the president who brought torture into the American systemand refused to take responsibility for it. It is also vital thattorture not become a partisan issue, that any future terror attack notbecome an opportunity for your party to reinstitute it or wield it as apolitical weapon against future presidents who are following the ruleof law. After the next attack, America will need unity—not a poisonousdivision over the issue of torture. You had that unity after 9/11. Yoursuccessors deserve the same support.

Demand, as Reagan did, a full accounting and report from anindependent body. Explain your evolving views. Defend your honor andyour family’s long record of public service. Blame no one else. Explainwhy you felt you had no choice or why you did not fully understand thebrutality of the methods you approved. The impact this would have onthe world—the example of a democratic society confronting its owncrimes, led by the man who authorized them—would itself help restorethis country’s reputation. And yours. It would unite rather thandivide.

In all this, think of the troops, the hundreds of thousands ofhonorable men and women, doing enormously difficult jobs in dangerousplaces, risking their lives to bring human rights to countries wherethey’ve never existed. They deserve to have this taint lifted fromtheir uniform. And only you can lift it, by assuming responsibility foreverything.I recall one such soldier, a young man in Iraq, Captain IanFishback, who witnessed routine abuse of prisoners and tried to get hiscommanders to stop it. They didn’t. He tried to get the attention ofhis superiors, up to the secretary of the Army. He failed. After 17months of effort, he finally wrote a letter to John McCain. This is part of what he wrote:

Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answersfrom my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatmentof detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a widerange of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones,murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion,hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. Iand troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in bothAfghanistan and Iraq. This is a tragedy. I can remember, as a cadet atWest Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit adishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden.It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in thisregard. That is in the past and there is nothing we can do about itnow. But, we can learn from our mistakes and ensure that this does nothappen again.

Captain Fishback then focused on what he called “the largerquestion, the most important question that this generation willanswer”:

Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorisminspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights.Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test ofour courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserveour ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rightswither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If weabandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then thoseideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fightingthan give up even the smallest part of the idea that is “America.”

Mr. President, what I am asking is that you exhibit the same candor,reflection, and honor as one of your own service members, a man stillserving his country in a uniform he is still proud of, but a uniformthat bears a stain of dishonor that only you can remove.

Mr. President, remove that stain, for your own sake as well as ours. You have one last charge to keep.