June is Torture Awareness Month because it commemorates the date of June 26, 1987, when
the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel in Human or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment went into effect.
This part of the Geneva Conventions was originally adopted by the General Assembly in 1975.
The universality of the concept of torture as cruel in human or degrading treatment or
punishment comes out of Article 5 of the Human Rights Convention adopted in 1948 under the
leadership of the United States led by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Tonight, our featured speaker is Elisa Massimono, President Massimino, President and CEO of
Human Rights First.
Elisa Massimino supervises a staff of 70 in New York and Washington, D.C. and is a world
leader in torture and human rights issues.
She has a distinguished record of human rights advocacy at the federal level and as a national
authority on human rights law and policy.
She has testified before Congress dozens of times and has written frequently for mainstream
publications and specialized journals.
In May 2008, 2009, and 2011, the influential Washington newspaper The Hill named her one
of the top public advocates in the country.
Established in 1978, Human Rights First works in the United States and abroad to promote
respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Ms. Massimino joined Human Rights First in 1991 and served as the organization's Washington
director for more than a decade before being named chief executive in September of 2008.
She holds a law degree from the University of Michigan, a master of arts and philosophy
from Johns Hopkins University and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Trinity University in
San Antonio, Texas.
She serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where she teaches human
rights advocacy and she's a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court.
We will kick off with a short panel and then immediately go into Alisa's lecture and then
Q&A.
Her topic is very broad, which will allow her to talk about a wide range of concerns
regarding torture.
Before the panel begins, I want to quickly introduce each panelist who will have three
minutes to set the stage by talking about areas related to torture of immediate concern
to them.
And I think my husband someplace, he's going to give an indication as to when everybody's
kind of running late.
Reverend Sam Atchison is president of the Trenton Ecumenical Area Ministry or team and
is also site director for an organization called Trenton Healing Communities.
Harold Fleming is a Quaker with a long history of civil liberties, involvement, and Jenna
Hussain is a member of the Hightestown East Windsor Interfaith Coalition for Peace and
Justice.
Discussing the issue of solitary confinement as it relates to incarceration here in the
United States is something to be very difficult for people to wrap their arms around.
So I'd like to give you just in just a few moments a picture of something that I've seen
to sort of set the stage.
On Christmas Day of 2005, New Jersey State Prison where I was then serving as the supervising
chaplain was essentially in lockdown mode, which meant that there was little to no inmate
movement.
And for me in terms of my capacity as not only supervising chaplain but also the pastor
of the Protestant church there at the prison, it meant that I would be unable to have worship
service on that Christmas morning.
And so what I decided to do, knowing this in advance, I had determined that I would take
a tour of the prison, greet some of the guys who were part of my congregation, go basically
from cell to cell in various cell blocks just to see how things were and just let the brothers
know that I was around.
I walked into the West compound, which is the oldest part of the prison, and was immediately
asked if I would go over to one left, which is a solitary confinement unit known universally
as the whole.
And I went into the hole, upon entering into the hole, I was greeted by two corrections
officers who had advised me that an inmate on one of the upper tiers had hanged himself.
One left, again the solitary confinement unit is in the oldest part of the prison and there
are four tiers.
There's the first level which is known as the flats and then there are tier two, tier
three, and tier four.
The gentleman who, the young man who had committed suicide, I believe he was either on tier two
or tier three.
As I walked around and began to talk, going from cell to cell, to the guys that were there
and you've got to understand the solitary confinement is what they, is a unit that they
call close custody.
And what that really means is that these are people who have violated institutional rules.
We have found guilty of violating institutional rules, have been sent to the hole and then
after serving a maximum of 30 days in a hole, we'll go into administrative segregation for
a predetermined period of time.
So in going around on the various tiers and speaking with these gentlemen, these are tough
and hardened criminal offenders.
These are men, New Jersey state prisons, the toughest institution in the state of New Jersey.
More than 50% of the inmates there are doing 30 to life of murder.
And yet even in the midst of the toughest group of men in the entire state, going cell
to cell, as they related the experience of what they heard and what they saw, and what
they heard was, what they heard was this young man crying out, asking for somebody to please
help him, asking for a corrections officer.
There were two corrections officers on the unit that are assigned to each unit, to each
cell block.
And they were crying out, crying out for someone to come help him.
And he cried out literally, I was told, for hours.
Have no idea exactly what his concern was, apparently no one ever found out.
But as I went from cell to cell, talking with these men, again among the toughest, certainly
the toughest, among the toughest in the New Jersey Department of Correction system, these
men were sobbing because what they got very clearly was a sense that they did not matter
and that they got the feeling that if it could be done for this, to this young man, it could
happen to them.
And the question was, would the persons who did this be able to do it with impunity?
Thank you.
My name is Hal Fleming.
I'm from the Trenton meeting of friends.
I had a long history in government.
I'm not surprised by what government can do.
If you believe that Abu Ghraib and the other horrifying events that we found we were capable
of over the last 10 years, 12 years since we had 9-11, you are living, unfortunately,
in a privileged and innocent state.
These are just the tips of the iceberg of torture that's now being done throughout our
judicial system and by government entities.
Increasingly, there are groups who are not government entities that we refer people to.
These are consultant groups when dirty jobs have to be done.
Those that are beyond the reporting ability of Congress to monitor, we often refer people
to those agents for interrogation and increasingly for torture.
Yes, coming from a Muslim perspective, I wanted to address what we call faith-based torture.
And that's something which is defined.
It's the purpose is to inflict spiritual harm on an identifiable religious population.
It occurs when the subject of torture belongs to an identifiable religious population.
And the chosen form of torture assaults deeply held religious beliefs of that population.
So I wanted to talk about how faith-based torture has been used in Guantanamo and Abu
Dhabi.
And how it has been officially sanctioned by the government.
It apparently was used during the Middle Ages, during which burning.
Even when the Puritans came, it was used against the Quakers and then the Mormons.
We had the Constitution which is trying to prevent further episodes of that.
Anyway, in Guantanamo, I want to talk about basically four types of how faith-based tortures
are being used.
One is, for example, to disrupt the prayers, which the inmates there are Muslims, so five
times a day they get up, they have a prayer leader.
They try to disrupt their prayers by having MPs, they gather around the cell, they mock
the leader, they basically battle the cage, the doors, they play loud rock and roll music,
throw gravel.
Second thing is the inappropriate touching.
There's a concept in Islam called khaya or modesty, where men do not expose themselves
even to other men.
And so you would have, in many cases, deliberately inappropriate touching where they're touching
around the genital areas.
It's basically for searching to see if the person has anything.
These are persons who've been there for months or years in mesh cages.
They're always shackled when they're taken out, they're always under constant supervision.
So there's really no reason why they should ever be suspected of having anything contraband.
In many cases, when a male prisoner is touched inappropriately, he will fight back.
This causes what's known as an IRFing, where you have maybe eight guards, will dress up
in riot gear.
And this is sometimes used at maximum security prisons, but here it's used to basically just
work on one person.
They'll forcibly go into the cage, spray the person with pepper spray, eight men will get
on top of him to subdue him, tie him up, and then he's dragged to solitary confinement.
The third thing, and the fourth thing, basically had very, very strong international repercussions,
which really turned a lot of opinion of Muslim countries against America.
One was the deliberate desecration of the Koran, and that was done sometimes just by violently
shaking it to check to see if it had anything in it, by dropping it, by kicking it.
It was so horrifying to the inmates when they saw this done, that they began to beg to please
have the Korans removed from their cells.
They didn't want them in their cells because they did not want them to be subject to that
desecration.
But their requests were refused, they were forced to have them, guards would come in,
and basically when they're checking the cell, they would be touching it inappropriately.
And this would often cause great agitation among the populations, and again, when it
was learned internationally, then you had riots, in many cases you had civilians who
were killed by police because they were so upset at what was being done.
It's a very, very sensitive point with Muslims.
The other thing, which is the forced nudity, and this was officially sanctioned, it was
even in a C.I. memo, an authorized memorandum, where they understood that you might not use
the forced nudity if the temperature was too cold, for example, but otherwise it was clearly
meant to be, to cause basically spiritual torture, to basically make the inmates feel
as such discomfort.
And as a result of all of these different forms, and again, I'm not even going into
the solitary confinement, the actual interrogation techniques themselves, but just this, the Islamic
basically, using Islam as a weapon against these people, you had many, many attempted
suicides, in some cases they succeeded, but they were so distraught, and again, it had
such a negative effect overseas when people learned about this, when people learned how,
for example, even on Abu Ghraib, men were forced to be nude and basically stacked on
top of each other, so the private parts of one man were touching another.
This was absolutely horrifying to the Muslim populations, I heard of it, as well as very
denigrating to the inmates themselves.
So again, this was, when I read this, I mean, I was shocked, I kept thinking, you are government
wouldn't do that, I just thought this was the result of local abuses, and when I came
to found out that no, this was actually sanctioned by the government, as a policy to hopefully
break down, I guess, the will of the people, I just, you know, I just couldn't believe
it, so am I, we're good, okay.
And I think that's basically all I wanted to say, there was, you know, I learned a great
deal, many other things researching this, but I guess those are going to be addressed
anyway, be our main speaker, so thank you very much.
As coming out of the Marine Corps, my job was to keep America safe.
I'm very happy to be here, I spend a lot of my time talking to policy makers and law makers
in Washington, so it's a particular pleasure for me to have an opportunity to talk to people
who are fighting for human rights at the grassroots.
The work that you all do could not be more important, and it's especially meaningful
for me because Reverend Moore and the Coalition for Peace Action helped launch the national
religious campaign against torture, which you heard about, and many of you are involved
in.
George Hunziger and Reverend Moore came up with this idea of a national campaign and
what an idea it was.
The launch of that campaign marked the organized entry of the religious community into the
political battle about torture, and this was huge.
The campaign did nothing less than help change the national debate and eventually national
policy about torture.
That's right, in this respect, I want to say we had a victory.
Perhaps amid all the other setbacks in this area, most notably that Guantanamo is still
open, that we have torture in our own midst through solitary confinement, as you've heard,
it's easy to lose sight of the progress that we have made, but I think, besides being a
professional optimist, which is somewhat of a professional hazard, I think, it is important
to stop and recognize the progress that we made so we can learn from it as we try to
build a national consensus against torture.
Back in 2006 when the national religious campaign against torture was formed, the hope that
an American president might sign an executive order banning torture was only that, just
a hope.
My colleagues from Human Rights First were here in Princeton at the conference that gave
birth to the campaign.
At that point, almost two years after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, those of us who were
engaged on this issue had a pretty clear idea about what was being done in our names.
As General David Petraeus has said, with respect to the impact of those images and that conduct
on our national security, he called those images non-biodegradable.
Mark Daner spoke at that conference back in 2006, and he said, this issue has been exposed,
it's been talked about, and the work now, as so often, is political work.
It's not the work of exposure, it's not information, it's politics.
And politics is what we did.
We organized, we mobilized, we debated, we took to the airwaves and the op-ed pages, religious
groups appealed to people's consciences, the retired generals and admirals that my organization
works with put the lie to the claim that torture keeps us safe.
These generals and admirals met with presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, during
the last campaign, and urged them, in many cases, successfully to take a tough anti-torture
stand.
So slowly, but unmistakably, the debate shifted.
Opposition to so-called enhanced interrogation, once regarded as a fringe and anti-American
position, evolved into a solidly mainstream pro-American one.
This was not inevitable, or even likely, but we made it happen.
After President Obama won the election, we pressed him to act on his stated opposition
to torture.
More than 200 religious congregations nationwide took part in a national religious campaign
countdown to end torture, which called for 10 days of prayer in the lead up to the inauguration.
On January 2nd, when President Obama signed the executive order banning torture, members
of the military coalition that we had assembled were standing behind him in the Oval Office.
It was an important victory for human rights and the rule of law.
Okay, that's the happy part of my talk.
I wish I could tell you that a consensus against torture has emerged, but in fact, the polls
show that support for torture in this country has gone up in recent years and that a narrow
majority of Americans now support it.
This is probably the place to mention that not one senior official who helped design
or carry out the torture program has been held accountable.
Some even travel the country on book tours and boast about authorizing waterboarding.
You know who they are.
No wonder that so many Americans think torture is acceptable.
In one especially alarming poll for me, a mother of three teenagers, the Red Cross found
that 60% of American teenagers believe that torture is sometimes acceptable.
For teenagers who were in grade school on 9-11, the new normal is just normal.
Not new normal, you may recall, is Dick Cheney's infamous description and justification of the
repressive measures enacted by our government in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.
Whether the U.S. government's open embrace of torture under the Bush administration represents
an aberration or becomes part of the new normal is very much an open question still today.
The torture lobby is trying to drag our country back over to the dark side and some of those
people are key advisors to Governor Romney.
The executive order banning torture could be undone by the stroke of a pen.
Clearly the political battle over torture continues and we have got to prevail.
We cannot let the use of torture become official policy of the United States again.
To that end, we all should recommit to and expand on the strategies that have proven
successful in the past, strategies like coalition building.
I've already mentioned the crucial role played by religious groups and military leaders.
We've also teamed up with professional interrogators and Republican politicians to generate opposition
to torture.
Only a broad-based, diverse, bipartisan anti-torture movement will succeed and create a durable
consensus against torture.
Likewise, we should make sure to make the anti-torture pro-human rights case to new
and even unfriendly audiences.
Right after Bin Laden's death, when torture advocates were dishonestly claiming vindication,
I was invited by the right-wing think tank, American Enterprise Institute, to debate this
issue with, among others, Bush's former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Bush's former speechwriter
Mark Teeson, and Bush's former lawyer John Yu, the author of the infamous Torture Memos.
This was not my idea of a good time, but I accepted the invitation.
Some in our community believe it's wrong to sit on panels with these folks.
They say that it only lends credibility to their indefensible positions.
But I don't agree with that.
I make a point of interacting with people whose views are different from mine.
In general, I think we human rights advocates should spend less time preaching to the choir
and more time trying to persuade others.
So that's what I tried to do.
Teeson and Mukasey sought to downplay the brutality of waterboarding, which John McCain
has likened to mock execution.
When I pointed out that the United States has actually prosecuted enemy soldiers for
waterboarding Americans, our former Attorney General Mike Mukasey argued that the enemy's
waterboarding was more brutal than ours because they use more water.
I could not help imagining what people around the world would make of this, a pundit sitting
in a well-heeled DC think tank saying that our torture is gentler than theirs.
So much for our shining city on a hill.
My fellow panelists that day seemed utterly unconcerned about what torture had done to
our country's image.
I told them a story about a Polish friend of mine who had been inspired to become a
lawyer by the example of the U.S. Constitution.
He was distraught that the United States was having a debate about torture.
What has happened to you?
He asked me.
People fighting for freedom around the world still believe the United States stands for
certain universal values.
It's a miracle, but they do.
American conservatives claim to believe this as well.
I pointed out to these folks that torture not only has stained our reputation, but it
weakened American national security.
It has alienated entire communities, undermined the capacity of the United States to fight
terrorism, and given al-Qaeda a public relations boon.
An interrogator I know who served in Afghanistan has said he can't even count the number of
detainees who have told them that American torture had motivated their violence.
Torture committed by Americans in the past continues to kill Americans today, he said.
You'd think such statements would concern anybody who cares about national security,
but Mukasey and Teeson and company are so invested in justifying torture that they can't
see the big picture, which brings me to another important anti-torture strategy, engaging
in the national security debate.
Again, there's some disagreement on this question, some torture opponents in our community think
that its immorality renders the question of whether it works irrelevant, and that merely
to debate this question is to cede the argument.
But to win the debate over torture, we don't have a choice, but to tackle head on the question
of torture's efficacy, or lack thereof.
I wish the moral argument alone were enough to win the debate, just that I wish that
a soft on terrorism charge lacked power, but that's just not the reality.
Most Americans, I am sad to say, will be inclined to support torture if they believe that it
makes them safer, and most will be inclined to oppose it if they understand that it makes
us less safe.
It's not a coincidence that the debate shifted when opponents of torture, including military
officers and veteran interrogators, began to make the practical case against it.
I already mentioned the campaign by torture supporters to claim credit for the successful
hunt for Bin Laden.
Americans were still trying to digest that stunning news about Bin Laden's death when
Congressman Peter King went on TV and declared, quote, the road to Bin Laden began with waterboarding.
There was a coordinated effort to advance this storyline.
Torture supporters were trying to rewrite the past in order to shape the future.
In the face of this incredibly offensive, offensive, it would not have been effective
for our side to argue simply that torture is wrong.
To see the national security argument is to invite defeat in the debate over torture.
They were saying that torture has made us safer.
We needed to say, no, you're wrong.
And that's what we did.
Start with the facts and allied with anti-torture lawmakers like John McCain and professional
interrogators who know what they're talking about.
We quashed that pro-torture push.
So in addition to making the moral and legal case against torture, we also put a great
deal of time and energy into explaining that torture doesn't work.
I brought some videos to show you, but I don't think we're going to be able to do it.
But when you look at this or your friends do online, you'll be able to see those videos
or if you want, you can go to Human Rights First YouTube channel and look at them, where
we have a former common on of the Marine Corps talking about why torture hurts our national
security.
One of the reasons I wanted to come here tonight was to urge all of you to continue to call
for a public reckoning, a collective acknowledgement of what was done by our government.
I said above that much of what was done in our name is already public knowledge.
And it's true, but a certain level of denial persists.
And we cannot disown torture until we own it.
Many Americans who understandably don't want to believe the worst about their government
employ this circular reasoning.
What the United States did isn't torture because the United States wouldn't torture.
We haven't gotten much help from the media in this area.
Two years ago, a Harvard University study documented how for 100 years, American newspapers
had called waterboarding torture.
Right up until the Bush administration made waterboarding official U.S. policy.
The New York Times defending this stance put out a statement saying that it didn't want
to take sides in this debate.
And then the paper's executive editor defended the paper's refusal to use the word torture,
dismissing it as, quote, the politically correct term of art.
I bring this up not to castigate the New York Times, well, okay, maybe a little bit.
But my larger point is about the importance of language in this debate.
By refusing to call waterboarding torture, the New York Times and other press outlets
are absolutely taking sides in this debate.
They are taking the side of torture supporters, who of course never say that they support
torture.
No, not them.
They support rough interrogation, or enhanced interrogation, or waterboarding, but never
torture.
I repeat, no wonder Americans believe that torture is acceptable.
Add to this the fact that much of the recent debate over torture has focused on the CIA's
brutal interrogation of Al Qaeda members.
But that's just a small part of the story.
In authorizing a program of official cruelty, President Bush and his team gave the CIA and
army interrogators license to, as they put it, take the gloves off.
The result was widespread horror.
As we will detail in a forthcoming report, based on the military's own records, more
than 200 people died in U.S. custody, and more than a few of them were literally tortured
to death.
Our country, our fellow Americans, must face these facts.
Ideally, the reckoning would include accountability for the perpetrators and justice for the victims.
But we know from long experience in Chile, Argentina, and so many other places that
this can be a long road.
But short of that, there are steps the government can take to help Americans understand what
was done, in their names, and what, if anything, we got out of it.
As you heard Kip mention, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has produced
a more than 5,000-page report detailing the post-911 interrogation of suspects in U.S.
custody.
It was this information, some 3 million pieces of data, that the committee chairwoman, Senator
Diane Feinstein, consulted to rebut the claim that torture helped the United States find
bin Laden.
This incredibly detailed report, which contains 20,000 footnotes, is by far the most comprehensive
of its kind.
According to a joint statement from Senator Feinstein and committee member Senator Carl
Levin, the report provides, quote, detailed factual description of how interrogation techniques
were used, the conditions under which detainees were held, and the intelligence that was,
or wasn't, gained from the program.
Last year, Senator Ayotte from New Hampshire introduced an amendment that would have effectively
legalized torture.
Along with other groups, we mobilized against the amendment, and it was defeated.
But during the debate, Senator Feinstein submitted a statement in opposition to Ayotte's amendment,
and in it, she discussed the Senate Intelligence Report.
Here's what she said, quote, as chairman of the select committee on intelligence, I can
say that we are nearing the completion of a comprehensive review of the CIA's former
interrogation and detention program, and I can assure the Senate and the nation that
coercive and abusive treatment of detainees in U.S. custody was far more systematic and
widespread than we thought.
Moreover, the abuse stemmed not from the isolated acts of a few bad apples, but from the fact
that the line was blurred between what is permissible and impermissible conduct, putting
U.S. personnel in an untenable position with their superiors and the law, end quote.
This Intelligence Committee investigation had bipartisan support at the beginning, but
after Attorney General Eric Holder announced that a separate investigation would review
allegations of CIA detainee abuse, Vice Chair Senator Kit Bond pulled the Republican staff
from the Intelligence Committee investigation.
Now, because of professed concerns about national security, some senators are fighting
to keep the report secret.
We are pressing the committee to release this report in its entirety, and with as few redactions
as possible, such a move would spark a national discussion about torture, and I believe would
lead many Americans to conclude that official cruelty is not only wrong, but ineffective
and downright dangerous.
I invite all of you to join us in this important effort to free the torture report.
There are a lot of books out there about the torture program, Vice President Cheney has
a book, President Bush has a book, the former head of CIA clandestine operations, Jose
Rodriguez has a book, this committee report, this is the real book on torture, and we
have got to get it out there.
The work of opposing torture is unfortunately perpetual, and it involves more than just
ensuring that it doesn't become official U.S. policy again.
The laws and policies of the United States can always be more anti-torture, and torture
by Americans can always be less likely.
The Senate hearing, you heard it referenced to the problem of solitary confinement in
our own midst, a form of terrible torture that breaks the minds and bodies of inmates
in our prisons.
Last week, the Senate subcommittee on the Constitution and Human Rights under Chairman
Senator Dick Durbin held a hearing on solitary confinement, and in the hearing room was a
replica of a solitary confinement cell, and I'll tell you, it was horrifying to many of
the senators who were there to have to look at that throughout the hearing.
I applaud Senator Durbin for courageously taking up this issue.
It is not a popular cause, but it is a vital one.
There are serious gaps, there's another issue I just wanted to raise with you, that my
own organization has focused on that relates to torture, and the perpetration of torture
by U.S. private companies, and that's with respect to private security contractors that
operate abroad.
There are very serious gaps in U.S. law when it comes to accountability for private security
contractors who, as all of you know, often operate with impunity, sometimes with very
tragic results.
To bring some accountability to this wild, wild west environment, we helped to create
an unprecedented international code of conduct for private security contractors, which exposes
these companies to independent assessments of their operations.
Right now this code is being negotiated, and our Pentagon is looking to interject very
unhelpfully bias into this process, so we need help in pushing back on that.
We've also been a driving force behind a bill called the Criminal Extraterritorial
Jurisdiction Act, or SEJA, a bill that would make it easier to prosecute private security
contractors for serious human rights abuses, including torture.
It unanimously passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee, and now we are fighting to push
it through Congress and get it onto the President's desk.
This is another effort that can succeed, another battle that we can win.
But there are no definitive victories in the fight against torture.
This is always going to be a gradual process, like all long-term political fights over polarizing
issues.
Victory will require the painstaking work of changing hearts and minds in Washington and
around the world.
The progress that we've already made gives me hope, hope that one day we will be able
to definitively conclude that Dick Cheney was wrong, that torture was not the new normal,
that it was the temporary abnormal, and we are never going back.
I want to thank all of you for being here and, most of all, I want to thank you for
all that you do to help our country live up to its ideals.
Thank you.
I have a profound belief in the need to treat people humanely.
I don't care whether they're prisoners or whether the fellow who owns the grocery next
door to you.
He, meaning the Marine Corps, had consistently emphasized by treating prisoners properly,
we are faithful to our own ideals.
With great power, I think, should go some characteristics that have been dramatically
missing over the last several years, humility is one of them, confidence, a quiet confidence,
and a willingness to listen.
I am not one who believes that on 9-11 everything changed.
I do not believe that for a second because I don't think our values changed on 9-11.
The treatment of the prisoners is absolutely fundamental.
There are rules and codes and laws that we follow.
We allowed kids to create their own hell on earth and film it.
The insurgent elements were handed a magnificent campaign poster.
Those images are out there for the rest of eternity.
You can't open enough schools, turn on enough electricity or freshen up enough water to
overcome those images.
These are our sons and daughters.
These are our grandchildren that are out there serving.
Do we want them to be torturers?
Do we give them a military occupation specialty as a torturer?
Is that what they're going to bring home with them?
I've got a son-in-law in the army and a son in the army, both of whom have been and one
is about to go back to Iraq, and God forbid one of them gets captured.
I'd like us to be in a position that no one can turn back and say, well, we just followed
your own policies.
For God's sake, I had no idea my country was capable of sending a captive to a place where
extreme means would be used.
Having a clandestine gulag of secret prisons in which anything goes is anathema to me.
Our moral capital has hit a bottom right now, and a primary component of that is how America
treats its prisoners.
Commanders at all levels set the tone.
The president has to clearly state where he stands, and that should be at the highest
level of American values.
From bottom to top, it's been a failure in leadership.
He's always going to be able to make the argument that, well, there's certain elements
on the other side that they're not going to follow the rules anyway, but I didn't think
the idea of the game was to become them.
I thought the idea was to stay the United States with our ideals and our values.
Torture under every circumstance is wrong.
It doesn't speak to this country, this heartland, this country of wonderful people that most
of us are sons and daughters of immigrants that have come to this country because where
we lived before wasn't the kind of place where we wanted to bring up our family.
I want this country to continue to be that kind of a place.
If we don't speak out, if we don't challenge what's happening, we've bought into the result.
I think reasoned, steady approach is what is needed, and I think in the long run it
will have its effect in ensuring that we remain loyal to our basic ideals.
We should capitalize on the courage and confidence of the American people and deal with the obstacles
that we face in that courageous manner which the American people are known for over the
decades.
People should be looking for every way in which they can express their concern on this.
They should be looking to require the alignment of American principles with American policies
and actions.
Nobody should sit on their hands, everybody should get out there and do something.
