Tracey Barnett: US needs to face its moral hypocrisy

Tracey Barnett

Let's say I have the legal authority to strap you to a gurney the size of an ironing board and cover your face with a cloth. Your nose and mouth would then be flooded with a steady stream of water long enough that you fear blacking out before the gurney is finally tilted back up to allow you to gasp for air.

You are submitted to this 183 times in one month. That's over six simulated drownings a day. Or, your head could be bashed through a false wall repeatedly while your neck is put in a collar to avoid whiplash (called "walling"). Otherwise, I could try keeping you awake in a standing position for up to 11 days.

What do they call this in America today? Astoundingly, it depends who you ask. Ask the Wall Street Journal if that constitutes torture and their straight-faced answer in a recent editorial was, not if there are doctors monitoring it.

Ask conservative commentator, Peggy Noonan, who said recently that the four Torture Memos President Obama released against the objections of his CIA chief should have remained secret because, "some things just need to be mysterious".

Like a good perfume - or napalm in the morning?

Even today, Dick Cheney must be shredding George Orwell novels into his Weet-Bix in the name of "defending democracy". There he was on television again last week telling Americans torture was good for us, like cod liver oil.

Why the armchair bravado now? Inconveniently, the torture trail may have originated from his office. Lawyers Cheney authorised to devise this national disgrace may face Congressional investigation for bringing him the policy he wanted, if a Special Prosecutor is called.

The Dr Strangelove brigade is not amused. Former Bush advisor Karl Rove is calling it "retribution". The American Civil Liberties Union is calling it justice.

Obama would rather not hear the call at all. He wants all eyes to "look forward" to his plateful of policy. Fat chance. This one is bound to bite him from behind, especially when Spain announced this week it would prosecute perhaps six of Bush's torture policy makers for crimes against Spanish prisoners, a case that can be dropped if the Obama administration takes up the gauntlet domestically.

But this isn't Obama's ship to steer. The Executive branch cannot effectively police itself. It is the Justice Department's Attorney General, Eric Holder, who should be manning the tiller.

Steer on, because America still doesn't understand how it got here.

Today in all its Orwellian beauty, US commentators are still confounding us with, "Did it keep America safe?" - obliviously missing the point, seven years on. This isn't just about safety or retribution. It's about rebuilding a broken system that ignored its own ethics. It's about rebalancing distorted presidential power that created a moral meltdown in the name of 9/11 fear.

Somewhere America hasn't yet found, it all flipped. The US went from teaching its own soldiers how to defend against torture to manufacturing it.

US interrogators had been teaching SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] to American pilots in case of capture for decades. Their techniques were based on communist Chinese torture endured by US prisoners, methods as old as the Spanish Inquisition.

But from the moment Bush's politicised Justice Department lawyers cooked up legal justification in 2002 for the rough stuff probably already in place, a surprising thing happened.

The military wouldn't buy it. The Air Force refused to advocate it. The Army said, "it crosses the line of 'humane treatment'." The Navy said it violated federal law, and the FBI pulled its interrogation supervisors because "we don't do that".

When even CIA officers objected, they were forced to continue, overruled by higher-ups.

Those who know war understood the obvious. Torture isn't an effective weapon. When a man is in pain, he will say anything to stop it, including making up false information that sent US intelligence on wild goose chases for months.

When the American people weren't looking, we became our enemies. That sad truth cannot quietly slip away if America has any hope of never repeating this long moment of disgrace.

Getting torture approval was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm", a CIA official told the New York Times. Getting answers so the country can right its moral hypocrisy will need to be a hurricane of political will and earned absolution that America may not have the stomach for when their wallets are growing thin.

Jay Bybee, one of the Torture Memo authors, wrote the legal opinion that waterboarding wasn't torture because these "controlled acute episodes" didn't inflict physical pain and suffering, only fear. For this he was awarded a lifetime federal judgeship by George W. Bush to uphold the rights of the constitution for the rest of his days.

This is the shape of America's future if it does not open up its past.

www.traceybarnett.co.nz.

Tracey Barnett's column will in future appear fortnightly on Saturdays.