"Torture in Our Midst"
November 14, 2007
In and out of the car the other day, running errands, I heard part of a radio interview.
Daniel Levin, the former U.S. acting assistant attorney general, was talking about an interrogation technique most of us have heard about by now called waterboarding. He knew it first-hand, having volunteered to experience the gruesome act to see if it qualified as torture.
With water squirting up your nose and into your mouth, while you're strapped down on a board, unable to move or, eventually, even breathe, you will say anything to make it stop.
Waterboarding, he concluded, is torture -- legally, practically and ethically.
And what happened to this brave man who defied the claim of the Bush Administration that waterboarding is not torture?
He was fired.
Something he said in the radio interview keeps running through my head. Americans can expect to be waterboarded, he said. There's no doubt about it. It's coming.
Wait. What? Americans waterboarded?
I thought about this as I waited to board a plane the other day. A man next to me in the check-in line was yelling at the representative behind the counter.
He turned and looked around at the group of us nearby.
"They can do anything to us," he shouted, to no one in particular. "And we just stand around and take it in the #$@. Come on, people."
I made eye contact with him briefly, then looked down. I didn't want in any way to attract attention to myself, to get caught up in airport drama. Others also lowered their gazes.
When I went through security, the agent pulled my backpack for inspection. It happens to me all the time. But this time she looked carefully at each book in my bag, took everything out of my pencil case, opened my tiny watercolor set. She thumbed through my personal journal. Notes scattered to the floor. She picked them up in her blue-gloved hands and shoved them into the front of the book.
I remembered reading that federal agents are now taking note of passengers' reading material, so I keep mine in my backpack. A lot of good that does, I thought.
My books: "An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan" and "A Storyteller's Daughter" -- by the woman who created the movie "Beneath the Veil." The agent talked to a supervisor.
"We're going to run your bag through again," the supervisor told me. What's the point, I wanted to say. You've already memorized everything in it. But, of course, I said nothing.
Waiting, I thought of the time my husband and I flew together recently. He wasn't allowed to print his boarding pass at home. Once at the airport, his only option was to wait while two supervisors inspected his ID and itinerary, in the back room. "Will they take me back there, too?" my husband wondered. "Torture me to find out why I'm going to New York City? This is ridiculous."
"Shush," I said.
Finally, he got his boarding pass.
Every time my husband travels, a chief supervisor must issue his boarding pass. It seems he's on one of those "selectee" lists (not quite as bad as "no fly") along with tens of thousands of other Americans whose sin is to have been erroneously fingered by an inept Homeland Security computer program.
But back to torture.
"I taught prisoner of war interrogation for 18 years to U.S. Army soldiers," wrote Brig. Gen. David R. Irvine, in response to a Wall Street Journal article endorsing the use of torture. "Neither I nor the Army taught torture: It's morally wrong, it endangers our own troops who may be taken prisoner, it undermines our values, and it does not produce reliable information."
So, with my books being perused, I waited for the supervisor to ask me; "Why are you reading about the Middle East?"
She didn't. Not this time.
But why do I feel like a criminal? I'm a writer. I read. Anything wrong with that?
Curiosity. It's dangerous. Remember the guy who was curious about waterboarding? He got axed.
"I've listened to some of our current leaders say that we should use 'enhanced' interrogation techniques to combat terrorism," Irvine continues. "Abandoning our principles is never the answer. An expert interrogator needs to be clever, not inhumane."
Good thing you've already retired, general -- or you'd be out of a job.
