Back in the days of the Reagan Revolution, when all of us young, feral youth believed in "peace through strength" and "We will not negotiate with terrorists" I was a true believer. Communism was the mortal enemy and only Reagan and the Republican Party could stop it.
At the University of Florida in 1988, I joined College Republicans. I became involved in their "Clothes for Contras" campaign. I campaigned for Bush 41, and ran the student involvement angle in a local republican county commission race. We won. Victory was fun. I ended up interning for my Republican Senator the following summer, and spent a few dizzying hot months in Washington, D.C.
I returned to UF that fall as a junior and entered my upper division Political Science classes. Doubts about my fealty to the party in power were starting to emerge. However, I enrolled in a class called, "Communism: Theory and Practice". My laughable point in taking the Communism class (other than filling a graduation requirement) was to find out if rumors about the professor being a communist were true: a communist in our midst! Shocking!
The class assignment was to pick a communist movement and write a research paper on it. While my classmates chose typical subjects like the communist government of China or the USSR, I chose the FMLN -- The Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional – the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front of El Salvador. I happened to have spent some time in the Library of Congress that summer reviewing CRS reports and picked up one on El Salvador. In these packets was a student’s dream: newspaper clippings, original sources, charts, graphs, and historical data. In other words: facts.
So, I started reading this research that had already been collected for me. Holy hell. What had we been doing? We were providing military aid that went directly to the paramilitary groups in the country, led by none other than Roberto d’Aubuisson, the de-facto leader of the extreme right and the death squads. We were providing money and tactical information, as well as CIA intelligence, to these groups. The results were stunning: clinics and schools attacked, nuns and teachers killed, and thousands of civilians who were caught in the crossfire between the extreme right and the FMLN were murdered. Most notably, the violence led to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Torture...Salvadoran style
The Mano Blanca was one of these terrorist organizations. They would capture supposed subversives and torture them. We’re talking thumbs tied behind the back, mineral water and electrodes kind of torture. We’re talking about using the capucha – the hood over the prisoner’s head filled with lime or ant poison. We’re talking carving "EM" (for Escuadron de la Muerte) in the chests of the victims. We’re talking sticking bamboo shards up finger nails and cutting off testicles. Yeah – that kind of torture. Then, the bodies would dumped in the streets or end up at El Playon – the garbage dump. Eventually, 75,000 people would die. We weren’t the only ones providing the money. Our allies in Argentina and Guatemala were part of this imported "dirty war." Misery loves company.
And we didn’t just provide the money. We provided the training through the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning.
I was shocked. It was the kind of shock that we see on Shepard Smith’s face on Fox News this week. "America does not torture!", he says, as he pounds his fist into the anchor desk, as if to convince himself that he is just part of a nightmare and will wake up. I know how you feel, Shep. I’m sure I said the same things back then. But the evidence was before me. It was there.
I went to graduate school to study this further and spent 6 years off and on traveling to Central America and writing my master’s thesis on the war in El Salvador and the death squad leader, Roberto d’Aubuisson. He had, in fact, trained at the School of the Americas in 1972. I studied the use of torture on civilian and guerrilla population of El Salvador. I examined the military and economic assistance given to El Salvador in our name.
Did torture work? As a fear mechanism on the population, yes. As a means to gather intelligence, probably not, because that was never the real intent when someone was captured. It was to kill them – slowly. It was to send a message to the population to not support or harbor the FMLN guerrillas. The message extended even to the moderates in the military and among the Christian Democrats – moderation was akin to communism.
D’Aubuisson once said, "In no moment should you feel culpable for fighting these terrorists. If our commanders have captured people like this, they are committing no fault...Nothing done to defend your country is against the law."
Right. Just like Cheney. Here’s what he said, "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in. And so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."
The issue is twofold, really.
- First, is the ethical and moral issue. It’s the notion that even if it did produce valuable intelligence (which interrogators such as Matthew Alexander are saying it does not do) it would still be wrong. Don’t conservatives understand right and wrong? It’s not what we stand for. We are better than that. It gives the wrong message to our enemy and it makes our troops less safe. It’s like saying, "It’s probably not right to rob a bank, but heck, I’ll make a million dollars doing it, so it has to be good!"
- The second issue is practical: torture doesn’t work if the goal is to try to gather intelligence. For that point, I’ll just refer you back to the above-mentioned Matthew Alexander for his fascinating book titled, "How to Break a Terrorist." Israel has even banned the torture of suspects, and if any nation is at the forefront of the "ticking time bomb" scenario, they are. But, if the goal is to instill fear in the population and to kill thousands of innocent people, as well as to provide a policy for bloodlust and revenge, then yes, I suppose it works.
So which goal is it, conservatives? What goal are you defending? To watch the remaining republicans that can still defend this topic on the news is just surreal. The contortions they have to go to in order to defend our heinous practices are at times amusing, but mostly seriously disturbing. Is this really where we are in 2009 in the United States? Do the politicians need more of a history lesson like I had? My hope and my prayer is that we will look back on this time and recognize it as the end of the torture debate.