Poison pill

The National Religious Campaign against Torture is a wonderful group that actually practices Christianity instead of just praying loudly in public. In fact, it adheres to what the world’s religions claim are universal spiritual truths even when ignoring them in the pursuit of the great joys of mammon: power, influence, wealth and most especially self-propagation.

I attended one of the NRCAT’s ceremonies last night to mark the eighth anniversary of the arrival of prisoners to Guantánamo from Afghanistan, and as their name announces, NRCAT isn’t a bit shy about putting a name to what happened to them there—it’s called torture, spelled T-O-R-T-U-R-E.

The service took place in the basement of a Catholic church, and it included a liturgy with hymns and prayers. There were lovely phrases from a Buddhist monk who led the assembled in meditation with the help of a gong, an imam chanting from the Koran in eerie quarter-tones, priests and pastors quoting Biblical phrases about acting justly toward one’s fellow creatures. Compassion and righteousness, not domination and control, are God’s priorities, said the clergymen. What a concept.

The ceremony also included a moving address from a human rights lawyer who spoke about the surprising effect her work has had on her over the years, how she rediscovered her spiritual identity by seeing the humanity of her clients shine through the brutality they underwent.

She shared and marveled at the official transcripts of interrogation sessions, in which prisoners are cited verbatim pleading for mercy, asking the attendant doctors and translators how they can be complicit with such cruelty and the dehumanization that is essential for torturers to be able to perform their criminal work.

And that is why the torture issue is not going to be swept under the rug by any mere president of the United States eager to cut deals with and avoid criticism from the perpetrators and their minions. ‘Torture is a moral issue’, says NRCAT’s slogan, and it is also a poison that its users drink, thinking that it will kill the enemy. Instead, it slowly rots the body politic’s internal organs.

In the grimmest and most depressing days of the Chilean dictatorship, we never dreamt that the secret agents who swaggered and prowled through the streets in their aviator sunglasses would ever face justice. They were officially amnestied for all their crimes by Pinochet, protected by a monolithic and fanatical army and insidiously defended with expert smokescreens thrown up by the country’s reactionary news media.

And yet, 20 years later they scramble for absolution or hide their identities behind new, more respectable lives. The country looks at them in horror, often in shame and guilt for its own complicity in enjoying the fruits of their appalling acts.

I have no doubt that if I live long enough, I will witness a repeat of that cycle and that the 40 percent of the public who now tell pollsters that torture is a pretty good idea will scramble to deny that they ever said such a thing or lent their moral support to this enterprise.

A French victim of the Nazis famously said that ‘Once tortured, always tortured’, meaning that the impact of that experience never disappears. That goes for the perpetrators, too, even if the mills of the gods grind very, very slowly.