Tojo hearts Cheney

For those with lingering questions about whether our government has gone all Mussolini and Tojo on us, here's the latest from Vice-President Dick Cheney, courtesy of MSNBC and the Financial Times:

WASHINGTON - Dick Cheney, US vice-president, has endorsed the use of "water boarding" for terror suspects and confirmed that the controversial interrogation technique was used on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the senior al-Qaeda operative now being held at Guantánamo Bay.

Cheney was responding to a radio interviewer from North Dakota station WDAY who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a "no-brainer" if the information it yielded would save American lives. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney replied.

The comments by the vice-president, who has been one of the leading advocates of reducing limitations on what interrogation techniques can be used in the war on terror, are the first public confirmation that water boarding has been used on suspects held in US custody.

"For a while there, I was criticized as being the 'vice-president for torture'," Cheney added. "We don't torture ... We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth.

"But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture and we need to be able to do that."

Cheney said recent legislation passed by Congress allowed the White House to continue its aggressive interrogation program.

But his remarks appear to stand at odds with the views of three key Republican senators who helped draft the recently passed Military Commission Act, and who argue that water boarding is not permitted according to that law.

"SO," YOU SAY, "Cheney approves of waterboarding terrorist scumbags. So what?"

This what (from The Washington Post):

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier supervising the questioning of a captured North Vietnamese soldier who is being held down as water was poured on his face while his nose and mouth were covered by a cloth. The picture, taken four days earlier near Da Nang, had a caption that said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk."

The article said the practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."

The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.

BUT WHY TAKE TED KENNEDY'S WORD FOR IT? OK, there is more detail and documentation in this column by Robyn Blumner:

Bush was strident in asserting that the CIA chamber of horrors or ''program'' could be open for business again. But at the same time, the president gravely assured us: ''The United States does not torture.''

Interestingly, we weren't nearly as blithe to water-boarding when it happened to our own guys during World War II. Then, we considered it a war crime and a form of torture.

In Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts, Judge Evan Wallach of the U.S. Court of International Trade, has documented the trials in which the United States used evidence of water-boarding as a basis for prosecutions. The article, still in draft form, will be published soon by the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Among the numerous examples, Wallach cites one involving four Japanese defendants who were tried before a U.S. military commission at Yokohama, Japan, in 1947 for their treatment of American and Allied prisoners. Wallach writes, in the case of United States of America vs. Hideji Nakamura, Yukio Asano, Seitara Hata, and Takeo Kita, ''water torture was among the acts alleged in the specifications . . . and it loomed large in the
evidence presented against them.''

Hata, the camp doctor, was charged with war crimes stemming from the brutal mistreatment and torture of Morris Killough, ''by beating and kicking him (and) by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils.'' Other American prisoners, including Thomas Armitage, received similar treatment, according to the allegations.

Armitage described his ordeal: ''They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness.''

Hata was sentenced to 25 years at hard labor and the other defendants were convicted and given long stints at hard labor as well.

Wallach also found a 1983 case out of San Jacinto County, Texas, in which James Parker, the county sheriff, and three deputies were criminally charged for handcuffing suspects to chairs, draping towels over their faces and pouring water over the towel until a confession was elicited.

One victim described the experience this way: ''I thought I was going to be strangled to death. . . . I couldn't breathe.''

The sheriff pleaded guilty and his deputies went to trial where they were convicted of civil rights violations. All received long prison sentences. U.S. District Judge James DeAnda told the former sheriff at sentencing, ''The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country.''

But, obviously, not Dick Cheney . . . or George Bush.

It is not my place, on this non-partisan blog, to proclaim that we have voted ourselves over to a fascist -- or neofascist, as it were -- regime. It may or may not be the case and, at any rate, we shall have our answer soon enough.

That determination lies with you, dear reader. Listen to what the administration says, then look at what it is doing in our name and, finally, look at how we have dealt with enemies who have done the same.

Look at how torture is defined. Here's a definition.

And here's what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about torture:

2297 Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong. Terrorism threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately; it is gravely against justice and charity. Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law. 90

2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

What you, as a Christian and an American, are willing to tolerate is up to you. Free will and all that, don't you know?

Christ will judge George Bush and Dick Cheney, whether or not the American people get to them first. As He will judge us all.

Just remember that we all are accountable to God for what we do, what we fail to do, and for what we put up with. Lord, have mercy.