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Torture on FPR
A Margie Menzel Report
2/15/08
As Floridians cast their votes for president, retired military leaders ask the candidates to oppose the use of torture by Americans – and the voters to hold them to it. Margie Menzel prepared this report.
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The three generals gathered at Florida State University’s Claude Pepper Center on Wednesday. Lieutenant General Harry Soyster, Major General Fred Haynes and Brigadier General David Irvine represent a group of forty retired generals that has been meeting with the presidential candidates about U.S. interrogation policies. They oppose torture for practical, legal and moral reasons…and say the commander-in-chief must set the highest standard for Americans in the treatment of prisoners. And they’ve spoken with every presidential candidate who will listen.
We have gotten to, I think, all of the Democratic hopefuls. We have gotten one or two of the Republicans. 10, Fred Haynes2
Retired General Haynes is a combat veteran of World War Two, Korea and Vietnam…and a captain in the regiment that raised the flag on Iwo Jima, where he saw first-hand how humane treatment of a prisoner gave the Americans valuable intelligence. He says Republican candidates John McCain and Mike Huckabee, along with every Democratic hopeful, have signed on. After their pitch to former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Haynes saw the Democrat on TV, making a speech.
We said, “You know, Mr. Edwards, if you become president, in your inaugural speech, we’d like you to include the following: I intend to close Guantanamo within the next month…there will be no more renditions of prisoners to countries that torture…and finally, we’ll close the secret prisons we have in Eastern Europe.” Edwards said exactly that to the crowd, and the crowd really went wild over it. 36, Fred Haynes2
A top concern: that while the U.S. military has been directed by General David Petraeus, the commanding officer in Iraq, to reject the use of torture… the Central Intelligence Agency continues to use so-called “enhanced techniques.” Such euphemisms are dangerous, warned Retired General Irvine, a lawyer and former four-term Utah legislator. Irvine served in the Army Reserve from 1962 to 2002…including stints as an intelligence officer and instructor of interrogation and military law.
The words that our leaders use are extremely important. And they can change the nature of the debate. One of the things that has happened in this debate – because no one favors torture, not one of us supports torturing another human being. So because that’s a bad word, we talk about ‘enhanced interrogation’…’harsh interrogation.’ We mask what we do with the words that we use. 31, Irvine 2
Irvine offered the example of “waterboarding,” in which the experience of drowning is recreated.…and which has been used by the United States, along with exposure to temperatures ranging from 10 to 100 degrees…sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and beatings to interrogate prisoners in the war on terror.
So as we talk about enhanced interrogation methods – someone mentioned waterboarding and whether it is torture or not. Sometimes that’s been referred to as ‘simulated drowning’…It’s not a simulation at all. It’s causing both the psychological and the physiological effects of drowning because you’re injecting water into someone’s lungs, and that’s clearly a torturing, tortuous undertaking. 30, Irvine 2
Nor are such practices effective, said Retired General Soyster, who served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during Desert Shield/Desert Storm.
Torture techniques, the enhanced techniques which amount to torture, do not get the results, or at least reliable intelligence, that can then be converted into reliable information. There are a number of stories – we could be more specific – where we’ve been led down the primrose path. 18, Soyster 1
But above all, such violations of military and international law are not who we are as a people, said Soyster.
We think it’s immoral to torture. We think it’s against the treaties we’ve been a part of. And so we have a fundamental belief that the United States of America is a country against torture. 14, Soyster 2
The generals agreed that to be effective, the prohibition of torture must be consistent from the commander-in-chief all down the chain of command. For Florida Public Radio…