Torture

I think that most of us would agree that torture is wrong.

I think that most of us would agree that government sanctioned torture is very wrong and un-American.

A two-year study last year by a Washington watchdog, the bi-partisan Constitution Project,  concluded that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques approved and sanctioned by the George W. Bush administration violated international and American law. 

The use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and chaining prisoners in painful positions is torture. The report criticized these tactics and said the legal justification by government lawyers was “acrobatic.”

The United States instituted “crimes against humanity” ex post facto during the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg after world war two. The world was appalled by the tortures the Nazi regime perpetrated on Jews and Gentiles alike. Apparently some in our government did not learn from our own abhorrence.

George Santayana was right when he said, “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Torture is not the American way in which I grew up. To me there is no justification for it anytime, anywhere.