Are We Really So Fearful?

When I first arrived at Seminary, there was a wonderful couple with adorable children who lived across the street from me. We were not neighbors for long. They were soon to travel back to their home where the husband would continue his ministry in the country of Namibia. They and their friends were busy trying to contact friends in Namibia who would meet them at the airport and pick up their children and care for them as long as needed. As a pastor who had take stands on human rights and opposed to the South Africa’s policy of apartheid, he knew that he and his wife would be arrested when they got off the plane and their children left to fend for themselves. Several months after their departure, the seminary received a letter letting us all know that the children were safe. When they arrived, he and his wife were arrested and after they were hauled away, friends moved in and picked up the children and kept them safe while he and his wife were in prison. The wife was tortured for about six weeks, this amounted to, among other means, kicks to her pregnant abdomen until her body aborted the fetus she was carrying. He was tortured for about six months with beatings and electric shocks, and told upon release never to preach against apartheid. It is my understanding that he did not stop preaching against apartheid and eventually went on to contribute to the formation of a free Namibia when it finally gained it’s independence. In spite of how horrible the torture was, it did not stop them from working towards what they felt was right.

Torture does not work! We are in Iraq now due in part to the false information received under torture. When they come at you with the electrodes, you will not only talk, but you will make up secrets just to get them to stop. The information received is for that reason, often wrong.

Torture says more about those sanctioning the torture than those being tortured! Just as we look at the barbaric manner of how the Christians were treated in the coliseums in Rome, so too, society now, and in the future, will look upon the United States if we pass the current legislation defining and allowing torture. True, some limits have been placed, but the mere fact that torture can be something we can compromise on, is a damning statement on who we have become as a people.

I would call upon every Christian to find out how your representatives have, or are planning to vote, on this legislation and let them know that there is no way, as a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ, you could support or vote for any candidate that would support such legislation.

The following is an article from the Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com

Are We Really So Fearful?

By Ariel Dorfman
Sunday, September 24, 2006;

DURHAM, N.C.
It still haunts me, the first time -- it was in Chile, in October of 1973 -- that I met someone who had been tortured. To save my life, I had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy some weeks after the coup that had toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a government for which I had worked. And then, suddenly, one afternoon, there he was. A large-boned man, gaunt and yet strangely flabby, with eyes like a child, eyes that could not stop blinking and a body that could not stop shivering.

That is what stays with me -- that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell in the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory.

It was his image, in fact, that swirled up from the past as I pondered the current political debate in the United States about the practicality of torture. Something in me must have needed to resurrect that victim, force my fellow citizens here to spend a few minutes with the eternal iciness that had settled into that man's heart and flesh, and demand that they take a good hard look at him before anyone dare maintain that, to save lives, it might be necessary to inflict unbearable pain on a fellow human being. Perhaps the optimist in me hoped that this damaged Argentine man could, all these decades later, help shatter the perverse innocence of contemporary Americans, just as he had burst the bubble of ignorance protecting the young Chilean I used to be, someone who back then had encountered torture mainly through books and movies and newspaper reports.

That is not, however, the only lesson that today's ruthless world can learn from that distant man condemned to shiver forever.

All those years ago, that torture victim kept moving his lips, trying to articulate an explanation, muttering the same words over and over. "It was a mistake," he repeated, and in the next few days I pieced together his sad and foolish tale. He was an Argentine revolutionary who had fled his homeland and, as soon as he had crossed the mountains into Chile, had begun to boast about what he would do to the military there if it staged a coup, about his expertise with arms of every sort, about his colossal stash of weapons. Bluster and braggadocio -- and every word of it false.

But how could he convince those men who were beating him, hooking his penis to electric wires and waterboarding him? How could he prove to them that he had been lying, prancing in front of his Chilean comrades, just trying to impress the ladies with his fraudulent insurgent persona?
Of course, he couldn't. He confessed to anything and everything they wanted to drag from his hoarse, howling throat; he invented accomplices and addresses and culprits; and then, when it became apparent that all this was imaginary, he was subjected to further ordeals.

There was no escape.

That is the hideous predicament of the torture victim. It was always the same story, what I discovered in the ensuing years, as I became an unwilling expert on all manner of torments and degradations, my life and my writing overflowing with grief from every continent. Each of those mutilated spines and fractured lives -- Chinese, Guatemalan, Egyptian, Indonesian, Iranian, Uzbek, need I go on? -- all of them, men and women alike, surrendered the same story of essential asymmetry, where one man has all the power in the world and the other has nothing but pain, where one man can decree death at the flick of a wrist and the other can only pray that the wrist will be flicked soon.

It is a story that our species has listened to with mounting revulsion, a horror that has led almost every nation to sign treaties over the past decades declaring these abominations as crimes against humanity, transgressions interdicted all across the earth. That is the wisdom, national and international, that has taken us thousands of years of tribulation and shame to achieve. That is the wisdom we are being asked to throw away when we formulate the question -- Does torture work? -- when we allow ourselves to ask whether we can afford to outlaw torture if we want to defeat terrorism.

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress -- such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 -- are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be that hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering?

adorfman@duke.edu
Ariel Dorfman,
a Chilean American writer and professor at Duke University, is author of "Death and the Maiden."