Up here in the York/Lancaster area, the best source for conservative talk radio is WSBA (AM 910). They air Rush Limbaugh (bleh!) and Michael Savage (double bleh!) in the afternoons, but from 9am-Noon there’s this local guy, Gary Sutton, who seems a bit like Ron Smith and Chip Franklin. (Oh, how I miss WBAL! )

So this morning, Mr. Sutton was talking about waterboarding, torture, etc. and basically said the military needs to do all o’ that and more to find out whatever they can to stop terrorists. I’m no good on the phone, so I sent him a few e-mails (two of which I sent in early enough for him to read on the air):

Gary,

My concern with waterboarding is a concern with torture in general being used to extract information: it’s not very reliable.

Here Gary broke in and asked, “how do you know it’s not reliable, Travis? It was reliable with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, right?” Well, maybe not. Anyway, I wasn’t on the phone so I couldn’t disagree with him there. Continuing, I quoted Ron Paul:

“Legal issues aside, the American people and government should never abide the use of torture by our military or intelligence agencies. A decent society never accepts or justifies torture. It dehumanizes both torturer and victim, yet seldom produces reliable intelligence.” — Rep. Ron Paul

Gary said he respects Paul, but called this stance “naïve.” Seems it was so naïve that he made sure to say my e-mail “attributed the quote to Ron Paul.” That’s true, but Paul really said it back in 2004.

Anyway, Gary went on to read my second e-mail (a bit of context first: a caller had asked Gary if the President swears an oath to defend the people of the United States, and Gary answered in the affirmative):

Gary,

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The oath is to defend the Constitution, not American lives. True, “faithfully execut[ing] the Office” does include being “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States,” but this doesn’t mean he can commit Treason against the Constitution in an effort to “protect American lives.”

I can’t remember exactly what he said in response to this, but he essentially said I was spending too much time on particular words and phrases and missing the gist of the thing. (Gosh, if he only knew!)

The problem with this “the President swears an oath to protect the people” statement is that there’s a reason folks assert “people” instead of “Constitution”; namely, the current Administration has been acting in blatant opposition to the Constitution since 9/11 (if not earlier), and justify their unlawful acts by saying, “it’s to protect the people.”

So I sent him another e-mail as a follow-up, but couldn’t get it off before his show ended. In it, I laid out my case for why I believe the Executive Branch’s condoning of waterboarding and similar interrogation methods constitutes an Act of Treason:

Thanks for addressing my e-mails. Sounds like I need to flesh out my stance a bit.

• Under Article 6, The Constitution states that “…all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”
• The United States ratified the Geneva Conventions (a series of four treaties) in 1882.
• The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony.
• In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Third Geneva Convention applies to all detainees in the War on Terror.
• Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention states, in part:
  

  No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

So unless and until the Federal Government breaks these treaties, the Executive Branch is knowingly allowing its members (within the Armed Forces) to commit felonies and breach ratified treaties which are, according to the Constitution, “the supreme Law of the Land.”

Ours is a nation where the Rule of Law is supreme, so condoning acts which our Constitution prohibits makes a person an Enemy of the United States. Adhering to such an Enemy is an act of treason, according to Article 3 of the Constitution.

And that’s where I stand. The “Rule of Law” is the foundation for our country, and so we cannot tolerate anyone who would exchange that foundation for the Rule of Men.

Our nation’s continued existence isn’t nearly as important as what sort of people will comprise this nation in the future. Are we willing to become a Western imitation of Iran or Saudi Arabia or communist China, so long as we keep the “USA” brand? It would be better for the USA to be overthrown from without than for it to be gradually converted to the philosophies of our enemies.

We will not defeat terrorism by becoming terrorists. Yet that is exactly the course our government seems to be Hell-bent on pursuing.

God help us all.

UPDATE: I came across an article regarding President Bush’s admitting that waterboarding has been used as an interrogation tactic since 9/11, and the author makes some excellent points:

Describing waterboarding in the book The History of Torture, George Ryley Scott wrote:

[The torture of water] was generally adopted when racking, in itself, proved ineffectual. The victim, while pinioned on the rack, was compelled to swallow water, which was dropped slowly on a piece of silk or fine linen placed in his mouth. This material, under pressure of the water, gradually glided down the throat, producing the sensation experienced by a person who is drowning. A variation of the water torture was to cover the face with a piece of thin linen, upon which the water was poured slowly, running into the mouth and nostrils and hindering or preventing breathing almost to the point of suffocation.

The KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the Gestapo, the Vietcong, the Communist North Koreans and the Burmese Junta all used waterboarding as torture.

Japanese soldiers who engaged in waterboarding were tried for war crimes after World War II.

The author goes on to say, as I did, that “[t]orture, even when used on those that seem so transparently evil as the al-Qaeda henchmen in our grasp at Gitmo, is, simply put, a betrayal both of America’s past and her promise for the future.”

The United States is supposed to be better than this.