“Torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that torture.” Pres. George W. Bush, from a January 27, 2005 interview in the New York Times.

We agree that Torture is never acceptable. But in fact our government does indeed torture. Our chief of intelligence has acknowledged that at least three individuals were interrogated under torture. Other reports (recently dramatized in the Oscar-winning film “Taxi to the Dark Side”) have shown that innocent captives have actually died under torture.

Many of the so-called “enemy combatants” who have been imprisoned for as long as six years in Guantánamo and/or in “black sites” elsewhere in the world – and tortured – and given no opportunity to challenge the reasons for their capture – are there because someone collected a reward of $5,000 for turning them in. They may well have been personal enemies of the person turning them in. Or just a convenient way to “earn” a bounty of $5,000 in a land where the average daily income may be under $2.00.

It is also false that “we do not turn over people to countries that torture.” One of the several hundred who were sent into the hands of known torturers was a Canadian, Maher Arar. He was detained while making a connection at JFK airport from a flight from Tunisia, where he had been vacationing, to a flight to his home in Toronto, kept in secret confinement for two weeks, and then drugged, diapered, shackled, and flown in a CIA-hired plane to his native Syria; there he was imprisoned and tortured for nearly 12 months, until it became clear to the Syrians that none of the U.S. suspicions that he was a terrorist held water. The Canadian government has since apologized to him and paid him damages for failing to protest his American capture.

Back in 1215, British nobles, distressed by the dictatorial practices of their King John, forced him to sign the Magna Carta, agreeing to the principle of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus (“you have the body”) means that if someone is in prison, he or his representatives have the right to go to court to make his jailer give a good reason why the prisoner should be detained and to have him released if no good reason is offered. This has been a principle of English law for nearly 800 years and was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution. The Bush administration, with the collaboration of the U.S. Congress, has abolished this right for persons it brands as “enemy combatants.” This means they cannot challenge before an independent judge whether this ill-defined classification has been properly applied to their case.

Former Secretary of State General Colin Powell stated on July 10, 2007: “If it were up to me I would close down Guantánamo not tomorrow but this afternoon. . . Essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system. . . and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it.”

Others have complained that information obtained from persons under torture is worthless, since a tortured person will often say anything to get the torture stopped, and that such information can therefore not be used in a court of law to convict the prisoner of a crime.

All these are good practical arguments against the use of torture: it gives us a bad name, it fails to get at truth, it inhibits legitimate prosecution in a court of law. But these arguments fall short of the real reason to oppose torture: torture is inhumane, it violates not only U.S. law and international law – it violates human dignity. Torture is WRONG.