Don Smith

In 1949, diplomat and philosopher Charles H. Malik of Lebanon succeeded former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt as president of the Human Rights Commission, which produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

That April, speaking to a World Council of Churches Symposium in New York City on the topic “Spiritual Implications of the Universal Declaration,” he said,

“Either there is a common morality about man that can be codified and not only respected but also actually observed under a rule of law, or we are on the verge of chaos.”

A “common morality” about humankind was codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was ratified by the original members of the U.N., including the United States.

In 1994, seeking to establish the rule of law, the United States signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which binds us to the following: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

And when some circumstance is “invoked as a justification of torture,” there must be an accounting and in more than one narrative. Reports to the people from independent nonprofits, as well as from governments, are required.

With a bipartisan 11-3 majority, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted on April 3 of this year to release key portions of a report on an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture. The report is said to describe morally abhorrent acts of torture and to detail how certain elements of the CIA misled government officials into approving the use of torture.

Voting to release the report is commendable, but only the first step. President Obama has put the CIA in charge of redacting the report. This creates a potential conflict of interest, since the report is critical of illegal acts of torture by the CIA; we must hold the president responsible for ensuring that any redactions are necessary for national security. The CIA should not be allowed to cover up information just because it is embarrassing or reveals immoral or illegal activity.

The NRCAT (National Religious Campaign Against Torture) in Washington, D.C., and ACAT-USA (Action by Christians Against Torture) in Pleasant Hill, Tenn., trust that once the public is able to know the truth about our government’s use of torture, we will take concrete steps to ensure that we, who must answer for the acts of the regimes we tolerate, never torture again.

Don Smith is president of ACAT-USA and a supporter of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. He lives at Uplands Village and is a member of the Pleasant Hill Community Church (UCC) in Pleasant Hill, Tenn.