Ignoring torture: no excuse.

I'd like to add to the articles in the July/August 2004 issue of the Humanist that there is No Excuse for Ignorance. Such gross hypocrisy! Our administration and Congress are "shocked" by the horrible abuses finally uncovered in Iraq, yet Congress itself voted to continue the School of the Americas (under the guise of a new name) in Georgia at Fort Benning. Some of us have protested and gone to jail because of this infamous place, where the United States teaches torture and assassination methods not only to the U.S. military but also to government leaders and military in Central and South America.

For many months the International Red Cross Committee, Amnesty International, and several other Human Rights organizations have warned the Bush administration and military heads that the Geneva Conventions were being blatantly ignored in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq prisons. Yet the "top dogs" paid scant attention to this important information of excessive torture methods.

There is no excuse for claiming ignorance and for the belittling of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" by our so called leaders--and their blaming the lower echelons for the gross excesses.

Martha Killebrew

Oakland, California

Thank you for Michael Milam's "Torture and the American Character" (July/August 2004). Valuable as it is, however, I do question one point. Milam argues that "philosophical and cultural implications" transcend the issue of the "personal disgrace" attached to ordering or facilitating torture. Later, he hopes that the debate over torture won't focus on the "almost tragi-comedy of who did what and when but on the status of torture in the American charactery 

This "either/or" approach seems to me misleading. For decades our leaders have been involved in torture, although that involvement has, for the most part, been hidden from the public. These leaders have been carefully protected by a culture of impunity. This culture has assured no punishment whatsoever for involvement in torture.

At one point, Milam seems to recognize this: "... when the leaders of a country defend torture and dehumanization, those aspects do threaten to become a part of the national character." Thus to protect the very values Milam supports, the culture of impunity must be shattered. If our leaders, elected or appointed, order torture, facilitate torture or knowingly permit it, they simply must be subject to criminal prosecution.

For reasons of justice and national character, TASSC has called for an independent investigation of these leaders (Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, George Tenet, and others) and, where warranted, their criminal prosecution. If prosecutions were to follow, I suggest they be seen not as some tragic-comedy but as evidence of national character at its best.

Harold Nelson,

Torture Abolition and Survivors Support

Coalition International, Washington, D.C.