A walk on the dark side: torture, Zero Dark Thirty, and a culture of denial by Phill Courtney

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side if you will. We've got to                                                    spend time in the shadows....                                                                                                          --Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, September, 2001,                                                                                                            referring to the pursuit of those responsible for 9/11  

Buried in the midst of a week last April filled with news about explosions in Boston and Texas, a week spent tracking down the perpetrators of the murderous mayhem at the marathon---two, deluded young men with their weapons of mass hysteria, who plunged an entire nation into fear with a couple of pressure cookers---was a far more important event, with far more important implications for our country and our future.  

That week a bipartisan, 577-page report by the Constitution Project---a study headed by two former members of Congress, Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and Democrat, James Jones---was released, containing their 11-person panel's "indisputable" conclusion that "the United States engaged in the practice of torture." Not "enhanced interrogations," as the Bush administration labeled it, nor "harsh questioning" as our spineless mass media consistently phrased it, or even "nasal irrigation" as one tea party member described it to me.  

No. It was torture--clear, unequivocal, and brutal torture. The same sort of torture that the U.S. has criticized when it's been done in other countries, and resulted in criminal prosecutions of Japanese military officials when they did it to our troops during World War II. It also needs to be made clear that support for the torture, like the panel that judged it as such, was also bipartisan, involving those at the top of both major parties  

And what was the reaction of the American people to this report? Was it a national outcry that the perpetrators of said torture be arrested and brought in to face justice? No. There was a collective yawn, if there was any reaction at all, and a quick return to the breaking Boston bombing news or the latest celebrity scandal.  

And why was that? Because, as a nation, we remain in deep denial of the criminality engaged in at the highest levels of our government. And many who are not in denial, are simply disengaged, completely oblivious to what's being done in our names, claiming that they're too caught up in their own lives to pay much attention, or just too tired out from the effort simply to survive in our economic system  

It's an understandable dilemma, but it flies in the face of what a representational democracy is all about, which is the responsibility of the citizenry to be informed about their representatives and what they're doing, then to choose which representatives they want to represent them based on that information and to vote accordingly.  

"As a country," the Sacramento Bee editorialized earlier this year, "we have not yet accepted that in the understandable fear and anger after 9/11, suspected terrorists were tortured." Certainly many people I've seen have not accepted it, including a 2011 meeting filled with around three hundred self-described patriots who'd came to see the late Andrew Breitbart, and shouted me from the room when I strongly disagreed with Mr. Breitbart, and insisted that waterboarding was torture.   

Of all the opinion pieces I've written through the years, none has had such angry feedback as the one I did about torture that was published almost exactly a year ago on June 25th, 2012, the day before the United Nations' International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. In the piece I pointed out a fact I knew then and has since been affirmed by the panel: that our country is what I called "tainted by torture."  

Several of those angry responses didn't even bother to deny that torture had occurred, or seek to euphemise it, but instead defended it with the old fallback position that the terrorists had done it too, and theirs was worse. One writer conjured up an old memory from junior high when my buddies and I would sit around during lunch quizzing each other with hypothetical moral questions such as: if you had a time machine and could go back to when Hitler was an infant, would you smother him in his cradle?  

This writer asked me this: if my wife was kidnapped, would I approve of the suspect's torture if it would keep her from being killed? When I asked my wife, she told me to tell him that the answer was no. She's a Christian who takes the teaching of Jesus seriously, and said it was better for her to lose her life, then for me to lose my soul.  

Earlier this year the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow---who won the best director Academy Award for The Hurt Locker, her 2007 portrait of bomb diffusers during the Iraq War---detailed the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and reignited questions about the efficacy of torture. The film seemed to imply that the CIA's torture "worked," and led us to bin Laden.  

In fairness, it should be pointed out that the ending of the movie is ambiguous, leaving us to wonder it the character who directed the team charged with tracking down bin Laden, feels right about what she did or not, with one overtly political statement by the filmmakers when they show a short video clip of President Obama ironically claming that we don't torture.  

But, whether or not the torture "worked"---and the Constitution Project is unequivocal about this too, with their assessment that there's "no persuasive evidence" that the torture resulted in any valuable information that could not have been gained by other methods---this fact remains: regardless of whether or not torture "works," it's still a violation of both national and international law. Or, as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture puts it: "Torture is always wrong. It is illegal, inhumane,and intolerable."  

Tea party members, and others who proclaim themselves "patriots," like to evoke the memory of Ronald Reagan and his description of our country as a "shining city" on a hill, which Reagan in turn had borrowed from an address in the 1600s by John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company who spoke of such a city upon a hill, and how "the eyes of all people are on us."  

They certainly are, and what they see now, many don't like. We cannot be that shining city on a hill and a beacon of justice for the world to see if there is, hidden within the bowels of that hill, hundreds of human beings subjected to the same torture privately that we condemn publicly.  

Yes, it's time for us to "look forward" as President Obama had famously said when he explained that although waterboardng is torture, there would be no consequences for the Bush administration, but we can only move forward when we stop denying what we know has happened in our  past, and begin to honestly address it.  

Sadly, torture, either engaged in by one of our major political parties, or enabled by the other, has rendered our government illegitimate both legally and morally, and until that changes, our claim of being a shining city on a hill, will remain just so much empty rhetoric,    ***    Phill Courtney was a 1998 and 2002 Green Party candidate for Congress in Riverside County. His e-mail is: pjcourtney@eartlink.net.