“Torture, or just kind of rude?”

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’m writing yet another op-ed on the torture issue (no pun intended).

First off, let me just say that I am a bleeding heart liberal and get that out in the open.

G.W. Bush’s actions and inactions have been a disgrace to our nation. Dick Cheney is the epitome of evil. Cheney couldn’t terrify me more if he had the horns, forked tongue and tail. Guess that makes Cheney a terrorist. So there, take that for what its worth. My opinion is probably biased.

No one, including Cheney, has claimed that waterboarding is not torture. It is a technique that has been tried previously by other nations, and has been classified as torture. Cut and dry. Other techniques, such as putting some bugs in a cell with a prisoner, has been compared to waterboarding in attempts to muddle the line between right and wrong. What it comes down to is this: If Americans would have a fit if it was done to one of our citizens or soldiers by another government or faction, it is not moral. Whether or not a medical professional was present. I could remind you of plenty of times in history when medical professionals were involved in immoral acts, ie. the Tuskegee syphilis study.

The question of who to hold accountable has come up. The actions of each person need to be addressed. The lawyers who said that it okay to used specific enhanced interrogation techniques obviously don’t know the law and should be disbarred. They gave advice that violated the rules of the Geneva Convention, the governing board on prisoners of war. Bad advice, however negligent, is not a crime. The people that these lawyers were advising can be expected to be familiar with the specifics of the Geneva Convention, or at the very least have the intelligence and knowledge of history to question this advice. Should Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice and company be investigated for what they knew? Absolutely. In fact, Cheney has been televised blatantly saying that he knew about the waterboarding and approved of it. Shouldn’t be much to investigate there, as he was speaking freely without any enhanced interviewing techniques. Should members of Congress be investigated for what they knew about and approved? Absolutely. Yes, I am aware that includes Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. Should the investigations go all the way ‘down’ to the medical professionals who were present and violated their creed to ‘first do no harm’ and to the low ranking military personnel who assisted in the techniques? Absolutely. Without thorough investigations, no one will be held accountable. President Obama demands transparency and accountability for the budget and the banking industry, but not for the former Administration that committed crimes.

Imagine for a moment some ordinary citizen committing these acts on another ordinary citizen and blaming it on someone else telling them that it was okay, or ordering them to do it. Does that make the person actually committing the crime exempt from prosecution? Several cases can be cited to the contrary.

Article Four of part one of the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war clearly qualify the detainees in these prisons as prisoners of war. This refutes the theory that terrorists held in detention are not prisoners of war, and thus are not subject to the same protections.

President Obama has concerns about how a journalist will be treated in an Iranian prison after being convicted of espionage, and there are concerns about the fate of two U.S. journalists who have been captured by North Korea. How can we possibly be so hypocritical as to request that these prisoners be released? One has had a trial, which is more than we can say about the detainees at Guantanamo and other U.S. prisons around the world. Iran and North Korea are not our friends or allies. They have very different governments and philosophies than the U.S. Yet we are expecting them to take a higher moral ground than we have displayed. Now don’t get me wrong, I would like these journalists to be released as well. But they did go into another country and break their laws. I’m not comparing their actions to actions of terrorists, but I am comparing our expectations of Iran and North Korea to the way the Bush Administration approached the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Its hypocrisy, its sickening, and its not what the American people want or expect.