A“free society” that condones torture, secret prisons and tossing habeas corpus out the window – as sold to the public by so-called defenders of constitutional law who act as if “inalienable rights” isn’t a founding principle?

While military generals publicly called for a torture ban, torture apologists like the “conservative” Thomas Sowell and “liberal” Alan Dershowitz offer up the false dichotomy of either intelligence gleaned from torture or no intelligence at all.

Cloaking state terrorism in a veil of moral concern for saving innocent lives, the fantasy of the so-called ticking bomb scenario gets trotted out, despite the “phenomenally slender” chances of interrogators being faced with an actual torture/ticking-bomb choice.

Historian Alfred McCoy shows how the ticking-bomb scenario involves the coming together of several unlikely occurrences:

1.) The interrogators somehow have enough detailed foreknowledge of the plot to know they must interrogate this very person and do it right now;

2.) Authorities, for some unexplained reason, are missing just a few critical details that only this captive can divulge;

3.) With just one chance to get the information that only this captive can divulge, torture increases the chances of cooperation.

This week, President Bush is supposed to sign the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA), which allows him to define what forms of torture are acceptable to use on people he declares “enemy combatants,” who will have no recourse to a court of law to challenge their detentions.

It also retroactively absolves any war crimes that may have been committed between 2001 to 2005 – an implicit admission of guilt in my not-so-humble-opinion.

Yes, the “compromise” bill the Senate approved a few weeks ago bans obvious things like murder and rape, but doesn’t forbid torture techniques like water-boarding, where prisoners are tied to a board, a piece of cellophane is taped across their face, before interrogators pretend to drown the prisoner over and over again.

The significance of water-boarding not being expressly forbidden in the MCA is articulated by foreign policy adviser Jonah Blank. Blank highlights the similarity between practices used by the Khmer Rouge and the kind Congress just approved. “Many of the ‘enhanced techniques’ came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) schools, where U.S. military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy.”

This was done so that U.S. military personnel could handle being tortured by Cold War commies. But here’s the kicker: “The torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies – the states where U.S. military personnel might have faced torture – were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That’s what the Khmer Rouge…were after with their water-boarding.”

Bottom line, Blank says, “not only do water-boarding and the other types of torture…put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half century; they’re also designed specifically to generate a (usually false) confession, not to obtain genuinely actionable intel. This isn’t a matter of sacrificing moral values to keep us safe; it’s sacrificing moral values for no purpose whatsoever.”

Last week I got an email from Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a member of the Washington Region of the Religious Campaign Against Torture (RCAT). Timed to coincide with Bush’s signing what should be called the Torture Act of 2006, RCAT is holding a peace vigil in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. They’re also encouraging people to organize vigils in front of post offices across the country.

The email brought to mind a brief exchange I had with a Palestinian shopkeeper in the Old City of Jerusalem in 2001. “American?” he inquired. I nodded. “Good people. Bad government,” he said.

If you come across a group of folks in front of a post office, serving as witnesses against torture, you might join, or thank, them for reminding shopkeepers – from Jerusalem to Jakarta – there’s still a difference between good Americans and our bad foreign policies.

But how much time do we have in this unconquerable world before all the shopkeepers – and not just the jihadists – stop distinguishing between good Americans and the bad policies enacted in our name? That’s the real ticking bomb.

Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and a syndicated columnist. E-mail him at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com

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