A Standard for Judging Torture and War

Often a question about one type of violence applies just as well to another. Those responsible for U.S. foreign policy should ponder a question about the death penalty that Rev. Lawrence Davies asked in 1982. A Baptist pastor who was then mayor of Fredericksburg, Va., Davies wrote a powerful essay against the death penalty for a magazine called theOtherSide. This was before DNA and other evidence had freed many from death row. But Davies knew innocent people had been convicted because, as he said, "when human beings are involved, error is inevitable."

His question: "What if the one innocent person executed this year was the person you loved most dearly and deeply in all the world?"

Anyone involved in the CIA rendition program, which sends suspected terrorists to other countries for torture, should ask this question about Canadian citizen Maher Arar. U.S. authorities detained and questioned him in New York after Canadian intelligence mistakenly identified him as 'an Islamic extremist.' The U.S. sent Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was tortured and then held "in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months" (Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2006). CIA officials might ask themselves, "What if someone had done this to my son?"

Those who have administered or tolerated America's own forms of torture--waterboarding, extreme sleep deprivation, nakedness in the cold--should ask: "What if someone had done this to my brother?"

Then there are the countless civilian victims of our recent wars. Some people refer to the heavy bombing that precedes troop advances as "softening up" the enemy. Mohammed Sardar, an Afghan taxi driver, described the devastation it brought to his community near Kabul. In a sense speaking for the powerless everywhere, he said that "the people are dying and there is no one to listen to us." One bomb had killed an entire family in his community. "There was no sign of a home left," Sardar said. "We just collected the pieces of bodies and buried them" (Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2001). Suppose that this had been your family or mine. How would we feel?

Many American parents of young adults have reason to wonder, "How can I face it if my son or daughter comes home from Iraq in a casket?" Many also feel deep sympathy for Iraqi parents who have lost little children to U.S. bombing or to the civil war that has resulted from the U.S. occupation. They agonize over other Iraqi children who have survived, but only with terrible injuries and only while losing their parents. Do U.S. policy makers agonize over these children? Do they realize that severe war injuries can provide lifetime torture? Or do they see the suffering of the innocent as mainly a PR problem?

In May, 2006, in Iraq, a man was speeding to a hospital in his car with his sister, Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, who was about to give birth to her third child, and a cousin. The brother didn't see a warning about a forbidden area near a U.S. observation post. U.S. troops fired on his car, killing Jassim and the cousin. Doctors tried to save Jassim's baby, but could not (abcnews.go.com, May 31, 2006). What if those killed had been the daughter, niece, and grandchild of a U.S. senator?

Policy makers should follow the wisdom of Rev. Davies by asking themselves: "What if any one of these innocent people had been the person I love most dearly and deeply in all the world?" They should speak out--either inside or outside the government--against the cruelty that causes the innocent to suffer so deeply.