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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Why I Fight Against Torture

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I have been asked to write about why the fight against torture and for accountability is so important to me, so I thought I bring you the series of diaries I have written on “Why I Fight Against Torture”. Aside from this first dairy, it gives the first hand account of what has been done to real live human beings by or assisted by the United States since 9/11.

It is VERY important that we stand up and tell the President and the senators on the committee who will hold the confirmation hearings that Mr. Brennan, who defended the torture authorized by the Bush Administration should not be the next head of the CIA, the organization which committed much of the torture inflicted by the US since 9/11.

On the diary :

My husband, Dan, was a Vietnam Vet who survived torture. He came home with injuries that lasted for the rest of his life. Dan had scars all over his body, where they had cut him, and a trench in the back of his neck, where they had beaten him. His toenails had to be taken off three times when he got back to the US, because the bamboo poisoning was so bad where they had inflicted pain to get him to give them the answers they wanted. Even after the third removal of all of his toenails, the infection was so insidious that it came back and stayed for the rest of his life.

More importantly, Dan came back with his personality changed. He was given badly cooked or undercooked rice to eat during his captivity with occasional pieces of badly cooked fish or vegetables, so food was a huge issue for the rest of his life. There was never enough food to satisfy his psychological hunger. For the last two years of his life he was on dialysis, which is a long, slow, difficult road, but the worst part was the diet. Dialysis doesn’t take all the excess potassium or phosphorus out of your blood like your kidneys do, so you have to be very careful about how much of these nutrients you consume every single day or you can die. This was, and I use the term advisedly, torture for Dan; he became completely miserable and I became his warden, having to enforce the rules. His mind was so consumed by what it felt to be the deprivation of this diet that it rebelled and he began to eat in his sleep. He literally had no idea that he was doing it until I showed him the evidence. Even then, he was powerless to stop.

The nightmares were the worst though. He would scream out in pain many nights, even all these years later. In fact, they became more prevalent after the current war started, probably because the news brought it all back again. Often, he would speak urgently in Vietnamese in his sleep, which he had been taught as part of his training. It seemed as though he was trying to convince whoever he was talking to of something. There was a sense of desperation in his voice that was chilling and agonizing.

Seven and a half years ago, after four years of being disabled with diabetes and congestive heart failure, and two years on dialysis, Dan had a heart attack and didn’t come back. It has become my mission to try to live up to his legacy.

I need your help.

I need each and every one of you to stand up and tell the President, the Congress, and the Attorney General, that those responsible for torture MUST be held accountable, legally accountable. That you will accept nothing less.

I need each and every one of you to stand up and tell the President and the senators who will hold the confirmation hearings that Mr. Brennan should not be the next leader of the CIA, the organization which committed much of the torture inflicted by the US since 9/11.

Please stand up and give Dan the legacy that he deserves.

       With gratitude and standing for justice and accountability,

                            For Dan,

                            Heather


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 56 Comments

56 comments

  1. JanF

    Even if it were morally defensible, torture does not “work”: it does not produce reliable intelligence.  

    If the Brennan nomination restarts a national conversation about torture, that is a good thing. Many of us were sickened by Bush’s defense of torture including the Yoo-ian pretzel logic employed by his legal team. I guess we hoped that was the end of “we need to torture” as a national policy.

    I don’t know enough about the Brennan nomination yet but if he was party to torture, I think that is a blemish on his soul that can’t be fixed.

  3. plf515

    But, if you need reasons…..

    I read once (and I cannot remember the exact quote or the source) that all evil springs from treating people as objects instead of as humans.

    Torture treats people as objects. It is evil.

    If you need another reason: It doesn’t work. That is, torture can get a person to do anything you want. You can make him sign a confession, bow, scrape, whatever. But you cannot get the truth from it with any degree of regularity.

    If you need yet another reason, in one of Terry Pratchett’s wonderful books, Sam Vimes has a prisoner who has vital information that will save lives. He considers torturing him for that information, but he says to himself “If you do it for a good reason, you will do it for a bad reason”.

    Bravo to you, Chacounne, and I am glad to see you in purple. This fight should exist in all the colors of the rainbow.

  4. kirbybruno

    but thank you for sharing what drives your passion.  I admit that I don’t know a lot about the subject and appreciate the information.

  6. Chris Blask

    I won’t try to comment at length until I can carve the time to do it properly, but your story plumbs the depths of this issue. The leadership of those with those like yourself on this issue is critical if we are to retake the moral high ground this country once held on the humane treatment of those we have the most power over.

    The over-use of the word “hero” in recent years to describe any person who has ever served the country is something that I believe subtly denigrates those who truly deserve the title. Dan served and suffered and paid a price that all of his compatriots in arms would recognize as the true definition of heroism. I am humbled by the sacrifices he made and that you made with him, and thank both of you sincerely.

  8. HappyinVT

    the comments that led to you posting this.  But the issue with Brennan is exactly why we cannot simply trust a president of either party on his nominations.  By the same token this nomination might be the most important in that it can shine some light on the issue of torture and rendition.  And I would suggest contacting our Congresscritters to demand/encourage they ask the tough questions.  Although, frankly, I trust the CIA about thismuch.

  9. mahakali overdrive

    and don’t have the time, but I want to say now, before I do properly reply, that I think this diary makes something that many find abstract very concrete.

    There is no justification — ever — for torture in any civilized society.

  10. Kysen

    it is an always important conversation to have…and your personal experience with the subject matter lends weight to your views.

    I am one who believes that things are actually getting better. I believe that our government has ALWAYS been using torture (in one guise or another) and that it is only recently becoming something that light is being shone upon. I think as long as light continues to be directed upon it…and more people are aware of it…it will happen less and less.

    I think that, to some degree, it seems as though ‘more’ is happening because of the increase in open knowledge. The internet and global communication have each in their way brought to light that which was once easier to ‘hide’. It is not that torture is new…but that the open discussion of it is.

    It is not, nor has it ever been, something that ‘just the bad guys’ did. The sooner we accept the fact that ‘our side’ did it too…whether condoned by law or not…the sooner we can prevent it from happening again.

    Just my take on it.

    (on a side note, will you please check your email?)

  11. Chris Blask

    I was a young child during the Vietnam War, watching Johh Wayne movies and reading war comics. The reality of war was lost on me until the Big Kid in the neighborhood who had babysat me earlier returned from Vietnam where he had been a war correspondent. He had smuggled back a few reels of film and showed one to a few of us younger kids.

    In the film he was in a chopper, documenting an attempt to raise another from a river using a third helicopter. As the sunken machine cleared the water fire erupted from a tree next to the one lifting it. The crew released the wreck, swiveled and sawed off the top of the tree with the sniper in it with a door mounted gun.

    I remember thinking: “This isn’t a movie. John, sitting next to me, whom I have known all my life, was filming this. There was a real person hidden in that tree, and he died.” The reality of what war was sunk in for me sitting on that couch.

    From about the time of John’s film I started getting bullied horribly by a group of kids at school. For two years I put up with harassment then beatings which progressed into something much like torture to my small mind. I got very good at running because if I was fast enough I could get to and from school unscathed. During recesses and lunches, however, I was helpless and at their mercy.

    The kids who had been my friends never intervened. Nobody did, they just watched or mocked or just ignored. The image that most sticks in my mind was lying in the dirt with the fat bully on my chest while the mean small one kicked me in the head and looking up and seeing the teacher responsible for monitoring the playground watching. I felt a moment of hope, but as I looked into her eyes she looked away.

    As a childhood story we can feel pity for the poor kid but it is harder for you to understand the actual emotions. I can recall being ten and sprinting to school or lying on the ground as clear as if it was yesterday, and the abiding and constant terror I carried with me every moment. By far the worst part was not the pain or the humiliation, it was the helplessness. There was nothing I could do, nobody I could turn to, and no hope in sight for it to ever end. I contemplated suicide often as the only way out, and being unable to take that step into traffic just made the hopelessness worse, since I could not even do that to make it stop.

    During this time I got a Christian comic telling the story of a American soldier captured and tortured in Vietnam. I read it a thousand times, reflecting on both the similarities between his captivity and my own life as well as taking strength from his refusal to let go of who he was.

    In the end I stood up to the bullies and it was remarkably simple to make it stop. As some who know me very well have noted, that period was the defining crux of my life and made me who I am. All of my life I have been unable (and uninterested, frankly) to avoid walking directly into a confrontation, rather than allow an implied threat to shadow me for a moment. I would never be helpless again.

    But more than just reflecting that use of force and control back at other people, which is very common for bullied kids, I had decided during that period that I would not let them turn me into them. That if I did, I would lose the one thing that was left of me. No matter what anyone did to me for the rest of my life I would not allow myself to resort to their methods, to become them, to use my power over someone helpless.

    Many years later, a friend of mine was on a plane that hit the Pentagon at the speed of sound. Next to her was a five year old girl. I was a parent now, and the shock of the event in its entirety shattered me as much as it did anyone. In the early days after that event my country started ‘interrogating’ terrorist suspects. My thoughts at the time, I am not proud to admit, were: “good, fuck them”.

    But time passed, and it became clear that my country was doing a number of stupid things in response. Going to war in Afghanistan was obvious and had to be done, you cannot lay on the ground and hope unreasonable people stop because they will not. But after the first steps we were doing it the wrong way. Going to war in Iraq was foolish from first principles. Our treatment of prisoners had crossed the line of civilized behavior. We had lost our moral compass.

    We had allowed ourselves to make us become them. Defeated ourselves in finding victory, though our adversaries could not.

    The measure of civilization is neither pacificity nor strength. It is having the courage to stand against unreasonable force while simultaneously being able to extend a hand the moment your adversary is no longer a threat. It is being able to maintain your own humanity even when you have to resort to force, to restrain it at the moment it is no longer needed and revert immediately to being the better person, the better culture.

    In Afghanistan we should have used all the force that was needed to start and end the violence with dreadful swiftness, and we should have pivoted on that moment to providing an equally overwhelming demonstration of who we believe we really are. Who I think we really can be. We should never have gone into Iraq, the fact that we forfeited our ability to do both what was necessary as well as what was right in Afghanistan so we could be the bully in Iraq just showed how much we had let ourselves lose to bin Laden and his twisted world view.

    And we should never, ever, have tortured anyone. Not even if it worked.

    Because this is what they do. This is how our adversary behaved, using horrific force against helpless individuals. Much more important than not being OK even if they do it, it is the most fundamental defeat if we do it because they do it. We are supposed to be the ones who do not terrorize the helpless, not even if they “deserve” it, not even if it saves us, not even if there is no other hope left. Because, if we do, we become them. We lose our civilization, we lose our moral anchor, and we replace it with the morals of our enemies and we become them.

    Kysen may be right, maybe we have always used torture, though I would like to believe we did not. At least that we did not do it with the full will of our culture. Giving up our belief in ourselves and condoning our use of our enemies’ methods is admitting that they have won, and that we have become them.

  12. melvin

    about looking silly in some imaginary public eye for issuing a coin but thinks nothing of violating international conventions that it not only signed but largely wrote. Faced with naked evil we obsess on the irrelevant and the frivolous.

  13. DeniseVelez

    For me Dan is now one of the angels who inspires a fierce battle against injustice and you are his voice.

    Much love and respect.

    Dee

  14. Moozmuse

    I’m almost glad we had our “difference of opinion” now, because you posted this as a result of my request to do so. Thank you. As I pointed out in the “Cabinet” diary, my intent was certainly not to condone the selection of Brennan as head of the CIA, because I know nothing about him, but generally entrust the decision to the President alone. Now I admit in retrospect that is the easier way out, and I don’t have an excuse, but an explanation: I’ve been an expat for 27 years now, and politics in the US are far removed from my daily reality, so the only way I keep in touch is through the blogs. None of my friends where I live is particularly interested in US politics, so I can’t really talk about it to anyone, so some important subjects drop off the radar, unfortunately. I need to keep being reminded, and you are a very effective advocate on the topic of torture, so keep up the good work.

    I will try to do better, but I – and others, I’m sure, need to keep being reminded that the John Yoos and Alberto Gonzaleses of the Bush era were never made accountable for breaking international law and ignoring the Geneva Conventions in justifying “enhanced interrogation techniques”. It is truly an outrage, and I can understand your anger and frustration better, now that I have read your heartbreaking story. I’ll send a note to the White House right now, using the handy-dandy link at the top of the page, and let them know I do not approve of a potential Brennan appointment to the CIA.

  15. Chacounne

    I was with Idle No More in a drum circle and then marching to Parliament Hill yesterday, so was exhausted, soaked, sore, exhilarated, and inspired when I got home. Slept through until just now.

    I am so grateful for your comments, and the front-paging. I am going to make food now, and then will come back and reply to everyone.

                 With a full and glad heart,

                        Heather

  16. Lightbulb

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/a…

    Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

    “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

    Lessons that the Reagan/Bush contingent were too cowardly to learn from. Bolding is mine.

  17. plf515

    Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

    The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VIII, “Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Indiana Regiment” (March 17, 1865), p. 361.  

  18. 1864 House

    Thank you for sharing Dan’s story again. It is powerful.

    It just seems right to be able to click “Fierce” for you. That’s the word I’ve always used to describe you and your mission to end torture.

    Fierce!

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