The American torture of Iraqi prisoners was not especially helpful to Army Spc. Keith M. Maupin, who was shot dead by "the Sharp Sword against the Enemies of God and his Prophet." Torture is a two-way street. Nor does it seem so helpful today to U.S. Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. He has been missing since June 21 and now he is being shown on Arab television with a sword over his head. Voices say they will cut off his head. This is simultaneously impossible to contemplate and yet so familiar that you flinch at the mention.

I wonder what these dangerous fools in Washington, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, think about the Marine.

Bush won't be back. He lost the last election to Al Gore by 500,000 votes. He cannot possibly win this election. But in these last months, Bush and his people get others killed and think torture is fine as long as we do it. Anything we do is in the cause of freedom. If the other side does anything to our men, they are heartless thug killers.

The Bush people apparently believe every sick myth about torture. We've been grabbing prisoners for a year and the war goes on. If anybody ever had spent 20 minutes in a Queens precinct on a murder investigation, they might understand. These Washington fools passed out a memo that certain kinds of torture can be used in Iraq and Guantanamo. As that torture already was being used, they tried making it sound legal, and thus comforting to all Americans.

Q. Can we use electrodes?

A. If there is a wall socket.

As for South Jamaica, Police Officer Edward Byrne was alone in a patrol car in 1988 in front of a drug location when he was shot to death by a gunman aiming through the window.

Somebody said that a man in a dark car that had a hubcap missing had done the shooting. The police found a dark car that was missing a hubcap and was parked in front of a house several blocks down. They grabbed a man as he came out of the house. He said that he was a mechanic and that he had a few drinks the night before and then came home and was asleep at the time of the shooting.

Nobody believed him because he had a missing hubcap on his car. They became excited. So often, a cop grabs on the tiniest fact and thrills to it and says, there, that shows he did it. In this instance, they were wild. One of their own was dead. They questioned the man all day. If he cleared his throat they regarded it as an admission. At 4 p.m., other detectives came on. One of them was a big guy who had a reputation of roughing people up.

He is retired now and attempts to evade being known forever as a gorilla. I know him from the old Son of Sam case. This time, with a cop dead, the boss of the investigation took the big guy aside. He remembers it clearly, and I remember him telling it to me at the time.

"I want you to go in there and lean on this guy. We know he's the guy. We got to have him."

The big detective walked into the room where a half-dozen detectives were questioning the suspect. They walked out. "We got him right on the edge," he remembers one of the detectives saying. Alone with the suspect, the big detective remembers saying, "You know why I'm here." And the suspect looked at him with steady eyes. "You can do what you want to me. You can break my head. But I didn't do this." His voice said that every beating in Jamaica wasn't going to get a thing because there was nothing to get.

"Where were you going when they brought you in this morning?" the detective asked,

"I work as a mechanic. You people been all over my job."

That did it. By sight and sound, there was no way that the guy did a cop's murder. The detective walked outside and announced: "This isn't the guy."

"What am I going to do?" the boss said. "Everybody here thinks he did it." He didn't. The detectives then worked the streets and the real killers were caught, found guilty and are away forever.

If there had been torture and the guy broke under it, you would have had another innocent guy in prison. If you have torture in all the precincts, you would have prisons everywhere filled with people who say anything under horrible pain.

Knowing this case, and all the others like it, you must think right away of some guy grabbed in a Baghdad alley, who speaks an Arab language and is beaten for answers to questions he can't understand shouted by nitwits from Virginia who speak only hillbilly English. He doesn't know much about anything to begin with. Our government calls this interrogation. Anybody with common sense calls it torture. And suddenly we look at a young Marine, blindfolded, the sword over him, and see that our torture can be a two-way street.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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