November 2, 2005 - There is a debate going on at the highest levels of our government.  The subject is whether and to what extent agencies of the United States may employ torture to achieve national security ends.  The debate in the Congress is over an amendment to a funding bill forbidding the torture of anyone detained by an agency of the United States.  It is sponsored by the one Senator who knows more about torture that almost all Americans – John McCain.   The debate in the executive branch is over a Pentagon draft directive using the language of the Geneva Convention to proscribe torture of detainees held by the US military.  I don’t know whether to be proud that in my country this subject is being openly talked about or horrified that in the United States the subject of torture is open to debate.

I am a child of the battle against totalitarian regimes.  My childhood was dominated by World War II and the struggle against Nazi Germany.  The dominate influence of my teen years and most of my adult life was the Cold War and the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.  Torture was the province of the Gestapo.  Torture was the business of the KGB.  Americans were tortured by the North Koreans.  Americans were tortured by the North Vietnamese.  Americans did not sink to the level of their adversaries.  Americas foes were treated humanely.  Our conduct was not governed by the nature of our enemies but was an expression of what we were – of the ideals of human dignity and freedom that we held proudly as the core of our national identity; of what set us apart from what they were.

It is significant that the opposition to banning torture by US agencies emanates from Vice President Cheney’s office.  It is also significant that the loudest voice arguing against adoption of the McCain amendment and the Pentagon directive is that of Davis S. Addington, the Vice-Presidents Counsel just named to succeed I. Lewis Libby.  Addington has been with Cheney since the Vice-President’s tour in the Pentagon,  He is regarded as the primary architect of the policy of clandestine detention and coercive interrogation employed by US agencies in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  He, among others, is entitled to credit for the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,

There is a museum in Vilnius, Lthuania where the visitor can tour the old KGB prison there.  The tour includes the tiny rooms in which up to 20 prisoners were held, where there was no room to lie down and the lights were always on and the detainees deprived of sleep.   It includes the rooms where prisoners were beaten and executed.  It includes the chilled solitary confinement cells where men and women were stripped to their underwear and held in cold and darkness.  It includes the room where blindfolded prisoners were forced to stand naked on a 18” square platform for days at a time.  They stood on an island in a deep pool of frigid water.  All these coercive interrogation techniques sound familiar.

Just weeks ago Senator Dick Durbin was vilified by the Bush Administration and their blogging supporters for having said that the reported treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo was more reminiscent of  the Gestapo or the KGB than  of the American military.  Last week in the debates on his Amendment Senator John McCain reminded the Senate that our treatment of detainees, however evil, must be justified not by what they are, but by what WE are.  The opposition to the McCain Amendment and to the draft direction on the treatment of prisoners posed the question: Have We Become Them?