What You Can Learn From Torture

Boy, torture has been all over UT's radar these past couple of weeks. Tuesday, at the law school's latest installment of torture-talk, civil liberties lawyer and activist Jennifer Harbury told those listening that "someone from the top has to go to prison for torture in the name of the U.S. to stop."

If nothing is going to happen to them, she asked, why would they stop using torture as an intelligence gathering tactic? She also carved up Sen. John McCain's position on torture, saying that he "twice caved in to the Bush administration on an issue that is completely his issue."

Harbury's torture background comes from the story of her husband, Efraim Bamaca Velasquez. He was a part of the Mayan resistance in Guatemala in the 1980s, when a severe form of feudalism was shackling the natives. He was captured and proclaimed dead, but when Harbury went to identify his body, she saw someone 17 years too young to be her husband. He had been "disappeared."

"They had faked his death to be able to get more information out of him," said Harbury. She went on three hunger strikes, one lasting 32 days with only water, to get any attention she could to the case. All the while, Velasquez was being tortured by what the Reagan administration called a "Guatemalan death squad." But Harbury's and the ACLU's subsequent investigations found too many connections between the CIA and these death squads, like this guy.

Harbury outlined classic government defenses of their use of torture: First, they say the guilty parties were "a few bad apples" and that no higher officials knew of or ordered the torture. When someone like the ACLU gets their hands on the documents that prove otherwise, the government will say that the specific interrogation practices used were not "necessarily" torture. And even if the methods were ever proven to be torture, the government will claim next that it's hunky dory because the Geneva Convention rules somehow don't apply to "this new terrorist." Their overarching trump card is the ticking bomb theory, which says that torture must be allowed on suspects if there is a ticking atomic bomb underneath a place like Grand Central Station and thousands of lives are at risk.

But, you say, the Third Geneva Convention covers prisoners of war! Well, the government will claim that "this new terrorist" is not a prisoner of war because he/she is not a part of a recognized army or force. According to Harbury, the federal government is in "grotesque violation" of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which covers civilians and refers to "saboteurs." But undoubtedly there's some way for the ole' feddy gov to get out of that one as well.

Harbury also took the time to dissect the ticking bomb theory. She said there were four basic possibilities when the CIA or FBI has a suspect in a situation like this:
1. The tortured suspect will blurt out anything he/she thinks his/her captors want to hear and give them bad information.
2. The suspect may not be high up enough on the terror ladder to have all the pertinent information; the torture would be useless on someone without the knowledge for which the government is looking.
3. If they do nab a suspect who is high up enough to know all the details, these types are usually well trained and might lead government operatives astray on purpose or give no information at all (much like Velasquez did in Guatemala.)
4. If they get someone who knows all the details and eventually got the truth out of them, it would probably take long enough for the bomb to explode or for the suspect's people to move the bomb (realizing his/her long absence).

So, yea. UT is all over the torture issue. Now let's see if Clinton or Obama address it in tomorrow's big debate.