Taking a Stand

Yesterday I got together with my parents for Mother's Day, like a dutiful daughter. Amazingly, the topic turned to... torture. Sounds strange on a day when you're supposed to be celebrating Mom, but in our family, discussions often turn to politics, religion and other taboo subjects.

I've been mulling over the whole torture issue for several weeks, since President Obama declassified the memos advancing the Bush administration's case to use torture on suspected terrorists in response to a FOIA request from the ACLU. The memos are a legal response, justifying all kinds of "harsh interrogation methods" to extract information from terror suspects. I hate even using that euphemism (which many in the media seem hell-bent on doing) because it almost seems to side with those who would use any means to justify their behavior, and I don't think there is any justification for this. It is torture. We treated other human beings this way.

The Bush administration used these memos to make the case that what they were doing wasn't torture. But if one of our soldiers had been water-boarded, slammed against a wall, deprived of sleep, food and clothing, then shut in a box with crawling insects, you'd better believe we would be screaming about the torture that soldier had to endure. (This is precisely what happened in many of the cases outlined in the memos.)

I thought our country was better than this. In the past, we always said that we were better based on the fact that we didn't treat people this way. We didn't treat Japanese POWs this way during World War II, even though many of our soldiers were tortured in Japan's POW camps. We prosecuted U.S. soldiers in Viet Nam following the My Lai massacre. We could always hold our heads high and say that we wouldn't do the things the enemy does. Anyone who stepped out of line was held to account.

Yesterday, the former vice president was on the Sunday morning talk shows - again - to defend what he and others in the Bush administration ordered following 9/11. Former Vice President Cheney still maintains what they did was not torture, although his defense mainly centers around the idea that their waterboarding of suspects did elicit information. Despite his protests, there is evidence that this is not true. Still, this is a canard. Whether or not it gave us good information, do we want to be a country - a people - of torture?

My discussion with the parental units was also interesting because we haven't really talked about this issue yet and still we'd come to the same conclusion: this is absolutely horrible, and why aren't more people upset about it? Independently, we'd all read a fantastic op-ed from Leonard Pitts of The Miami Herald on May 6th when it was printed in The Salt Lake Tribune. Pitts' concern is also that more people, and Christians in particular, are not taking a stand against torture.

As my parents and I discussed it, Dad (who happens to be a Biblical scholar with a PhD in religion) was especially saddened and said, "Why is it that we Christians throughout the ages seem to come down on the wrong side of things? The Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, now this."

There's still time, though. We don't have to be forever known as a people of torture. As Americans, we can say that we won't condone this any longer. We can ask our political leaders for an independent investigation that will get to the bottom of this. As Christians, we can ask our religious leaders to stand up in opposition to this treatment of other human beings. We can ask them to speak out from a perspective of faith.

Finally, as a Christian, I can ask my ultimate question: "Who would Jesus torture?"