Prejudice and Enhanced Investigation Techniques: How Americans Torture, and Need to Stop

The Civil Rights Movement taught Americans to fight for justice even at the height of prejudice. Enhanced interrogation techniques must be completely restricted in order to fight for the justice of the innocent Middle Eastern people our prejudice has been hurting.

This can be proven through five simple steps:

1) Enhanced interrogation techniques is just another word for "torture"

2) Torture is wrong

3) Torture does no work

4) Better methods are available than torture

5) Finally, what is most relevant, Torture is causing our possible Middle Eastern allies to be our future Terrorist enemies.

1) Prove enhanced interrogation is torture based upon historical usage and scientific proof.

Historically, Enhanced interrogation techniques have always been torture. The term "enhanced interrogation technique" was only coined by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attack to justify using such techniques as waterboarding. Waterboarding, or forced suffocation by water, is not so recent. In fact, according to the historian George Ryley Scott in his book "The History of Torture Throughout the Ages," waterboarding has been called and used as torture since the Spanish Inquisition. In a sense, the idea of waterboarding as not torture is a historical anomaly created by President Bush.

Scientifically, Enhanced interrogation techniques are medically severe enough to be torture. Bush administration denies this in a 2002 memorandum by the Office of Legal Counsel that says enhanced interrogation techniques do not constitute torture because the pain is not severe either physically or mentally. Are we to believe that something like sensory assault-loud music, or sleep deprivation is not severe? The Office of the Inspector General, Bush's own cabinet, said in 2007 that enhanced interrogation techniques constitute "physical or mental torture and coercion under the Geneva conventions." In 2007, Physicians for Human Rights collaborated their extensive literature to produce the work called "Leave No Marks" which demonstrates that these techniques can have "profound long-term negative effects upon individuals, including psychosis, depression, suicidal ideation and/or post-traumatic stress disorder." Bush and Cheney won't say it, but the experts have been proving it for years ...

2) Enhanced interrogation techniques, otherwise known as torture, are wrong, based upon human's inherent right to dignity and torture's damage to the innocent.

Foremost, Torture is wrong because all people, even the worst of suspected criminals, deserve dignity. What is dignity? Simply the idea that everyone until proven guilty has worth, and must be treated as such. The Truman National Security Project in 2009 makes the observation that every human being, no matter how heinous a crime they are suspected of committing, has human rights. Even President Bush stated in his 2002 State of the Union Address that "America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity." The fact is torture does harm to people not even yet convicted of crimes, and does so in a manner which embarrasses, mocks, disturbs, horrifies them...but not just them...their entire family and places fear in entire communities. How dare we deny a person dignity upon our prejudice! Why is it 50 years after the civil rights movement this is still our way of treating people we don't understand!

This leads to the second point, that torture is wrong because it more often than not targets innocents. Even if these techniques were effective some of the time, the fact is our national government takes away human dignity in all cases, violating the natural rights of anyone it deems as prisoners of war. That's why the Human Rights Organization argued in 2007 "individuals captured in the war on terror are not [necessarily] prisoners of war...in many cases they are merely suspected of links to criminal activity (and, as past experience has indicated, often wrongly so). Extralegal military tribunals conducted behind closed doors without proper due process rights leave the U.S. on shaky moral ground." Let us get off this shaky moral ground, let us stand for innocent until proven against our own hidden prejudices.

3) Enhanced interrogation techniques do not work because they provide questionable confessions.

As the Physicians for Human Rights reported in 2007, "Information obtained from torture is suspect at best; studies have shown that given psychological pressure individuals will say a wide variety of things without regard for the truth...evidence obtained from torture may be inadmissible in the courtroom." Even Robert Baer, CIA Director of Operations in Iraq in 1997, says enhanced investigation techniques are "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough."

4) Other, non-confrontational methods are available.

We do not need enhanced investigation techniques to keep our country safe because they have failed to prove more valuable than other techniques. Within the 8 years the United States has used these techniques, the government has failed to prove one occasion in which enhanced investigation techniques were necessary over other options. Amnesty International quotes a declassified FBI agent on May 10, 2004, regarding interrogations at Guantanamo who said "[we] explained to [the Department of Defense], FBI has been successful for many years obtaining confessions via non-confrontational interviewing techniques." Such methods include leveraging and lessening of sentencing, these things would make someone want to give the best evidence in order to get the best reward. We do not need to ruin a person's dignity or do harm to their person to get a confession. Additionally, these methods do not compromise evidence.

5) Torture is a detriment, not an aid, to our foreign relations with the Middle East. This is because torture is the method of intolerance not diplomacy, is founded upon irrational fear, and legitimizes terrorist acts against us.

In a 2009 interview with the Washington Post, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said "The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world...The damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." We hurt our image by being a modern developed country which allows torture. According to the Human Rights Watch, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. Why do we want to be associated with this list of repressive countries?

In a CBS news interview in 2006, Andrew Kohut, who conducts the annual Pew Institute Global Attitudes Survey said "The United States is seen as conducting a unilateral foreign policy...they're not taking into account our interests or the interests of other people." We destroy our diplomatic reputation, because we are relying on our brutality rather than negotiation to get what information we want. Does this seem the actions of a rational government, or a fearful government?

Jack Cloonan, former FBI interrogator said in 2007 in an interview with reporter Carolyn O'Hara, "If you want to recruit young Jihadis...if you want to legitimize jihad...torture them. Admit that you tortured them...Al qaeda has said...We will get revenge against you. It may take a generation. But we will get it. The worst has not been visited upon us yet." As much as the Bush Administration says these techniques are working, they are only legitimizing our enemies against. We are creating more terrorists than we are stopping!

We have no doubt that if a captured American were subjected to waterboarding, the U.S. government would condemn this as torture and demand or seek prosecution. So how long will the Middle East, who provides the US with ¼ of its total oil in 2007 according to the U.S. Department of Economics, tolerate such unilateral, hypocritical intolerance of its people?

Instead of this eventual impact, how about the U.S. set the standard for international human rights rather than meet below the average. How about we stop pretending enhanced interrogation techniques is different than torture, that it is right, that it works, that there is no other way, that it is magically solving our Middle Eastern problems. It is too late to redo all damage, for on February 5, 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed to Congress that three al-Qaeda detainees had been waterboarded in U.S. custody. However, today, we can end this debauchery of moral and international law, and no more squander our ability to respect human dignity and to use effective foreign policy in the Middle East.

Rosa Parks once said, "I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear." Today, that means doing away with enhanced investigative techniques; and beginning the best defense strategy...diplomacy.