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# To torture or not to torture?
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/to-torture-or-not-to-torture/
- Published: 2006-02-15T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T17:16:20.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By GUEST COMMENTARY BY JOHN W. WHITEHEAD*

During a recent debate in Chicago, former U.S. Justice Department official John Yoo, who wrote the crucial memos justifying President Bush’s policies on torture, was asked, “If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?”

“No treaty,” replied Yoo, now a professor at the University of California law school at Berkeley. He then went on to espouse the notion of the “unitary executive.” This is the idea that as commander-in-chief the president is the sole judge of the law, is unbound by the

This concept, the cornerstone of the Bush doctrine on presidential power, was attested to by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his testimony before Congress on the administration’s warrantless electronic surveillance of American citizens. This doctrine also has been vigorously championed by the White House, which at some points has even argued in defense of the use of torture.

Moreover, it has been widely reported that American government agents have resorted to outsourcing suspected terrorists for torture through a program know as “extraordinary rendition.” The program, apparently condoned by Vice President Dick Cheney, involves the clandestine transfer of suspected terrorists to countries ruled by regimes where it is possible that torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment occur. Dr. William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, referring to a set of CIA flight logs obtained by the organization, said the logs were “irrefutable proof that the United States is ‘disappearing’ people into secret facilities where they are held incommunicado without charge, trial or access to the outside world.”

Such reports give rise to a host of moral and ethical questions, such as: Can a country that claims to champion human rights and whose elected officials claim to abide by Judeo-Christian precepts advocate torture of any kind? And if the United States is determined to advocate torture, should there be limits to what can and cannot be done in the name of fighting the so-called war on terror?

Various government regimes in numerous countries throughout the world, including the United States, employ torture tactics. The following are just a few of the many examples of brutal methods of coercion employed by these regimes: Uzbekistan (currently an ally of the United States), Iraq and Afghanistan all have long histories of subjecting people to torture and ill-treatment in the name of national security. These include stretching limbs apart; burns with cigarettes, heated instruments or a scalding liquid; electric shock; asphyxiation by drowning, smothering, choking or use of chemicals; penetrating injuries such as stab and gunshot wounds and wires under nails; chemical exposures to salt, chili pepper, gasoline, etc., in wounds or body cavities; sexual violence to genitals, molestation, rape; medical amputation of digits or limbs and surgical removal of organs.

Interrogators in western Iraq have stuffed insurgents face-first into sleeping bags with a small hole cut in the bottom for air, which resulted in suffocating to death. An American warrant officer was recently found guilty of a similar act.

Torture by American interrogators of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also has been documented. An unnamed FBI agent reports: “On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated and defecated on themselves, and had been left there from 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning was turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.”

The FBI report also notes that at least on one occasion an American female guard in charge “had grabbed the detainee’s thumbs and bent them backwards and indicated that she also grabbed his genitals.” The memo also stated that “her treatment of that detainee was less harsh than her treatment of others.” One Marine indicated that “he had seen her treatment of other detainees result in detainees curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain.”

Most Americans were shocked by the photos of the contorted bodies of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib as the American guards looked on with ghoulish smiles. Megan Ambuhl, a former guard at Abu Ghraib, said she was stunned the first time she stepped into the prison. There were naked men in dusty cells, male prisoners wearing women’s underwear and others hooded and shackled in contorted positions to metal railings.

A Jewish prophet once proclaimed, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” Understanding this about people, another Jewish prophet some 600 years later, who suffered extreme torture himself, taught his followers to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.” Indeed, one wonders what Jesus, with his professed love of children, would say to John Yoo about torture that might justify “crushing the testicles” of someone’s child.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 15, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/021506.pdf?ref=smdp.com)