Congress is faced with the opportunity to forbid the CIA from engaging in torture forever, thanks to a bill sponsored by Sens. John McCain and Dianne Feinstein. The legislation passed the Senate in a recent impressively bipartisan 78-21 vote, and now heads to the House of Representatives.

When we talk about torture, too often we use distant, medical language to grapple with the most vile things that can be done to a human being. Very few of us can imagine this horrific treatment, and even fewer of us want to think about it.

But our government has too often sanctioned torture. It is critical that we understand it so that we can stop it.

Through Survivors of Torture, International, an organization that advocates for an end to torture everywhere and treats torture survivors, I have heard stories from survivors that have never been more relevant. I shall try to share my sense of what torture is and why Congress must pass the McCain-Feinstein legislation that would prohibit it.


For the victim, torture begins with the reputation of the torturer that renders the tortured helpless. The tortured is often exposed to sounds and sights of others being tortured – screams, blood, vomit or hooded figures – and kept in soundproof places away from all human sympathy or rescue. Torture aims to teach terror and despair.

Torture harms your heart and spirit. Eventually, it touches your flesh. Many tortured people do not live through it, or die slowly from its aftereffects. You want relief from your torture, perhaps the relief of dying from it.

There is usually a mechanical, unfeeling, heartless quality to the way a torturer tortures. You are a sack of blood and bone to your torturer and to the administrators and citizens of the country responsible for your torture.

For so many torture survivors, an unjust shame surrounds their torture. It ought to be the torturers and their governments feeling this shame.


Often the “results” of torture have no value as information, or are misleading – as the information gained through torture about “weapons of mass destruction” turned out to be misleading in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Many torture survivors of my acquaintance look to the United States as an answer to the torture they endured. Coming to the United States from other places lacking “rule of law,” they find themselves immensely loyal to and appreciative of American values expressed as defending human rights everywhere. They look to the principled stand for human rights that the United States often enunciates and that the United States often promotes in international forums. They know that often the U.S. State Department makes sharply barbed comments on the human rights behavior of other nation-states, encouraging more humane treatment of citizens.

A cognitive dissonance confuses or dismays better informed torture survivors when they learn that the American government has trained torturers in special schools for the work of “interrogation” in other countries, or they learn that “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding used by the CIA constitute the very practices for which Americans condemned Japanese war criminals after World War II.

How can a country that expresses the will of a people who are so very humane and civilized, a country with an evident “rule of law” with more justice than most countries, permit a violence be done to its principles and reputation by torture? This makes no sense to torture survivors of my acquaintance. Sometimes it degrades their positive feeling for the United States. And it certainly tempts the enemies of the United States to erect an unfair “moral equivalence” between the U.S. and other torturing countries through their propaganda.


For the protection of the United States’ reputation, for the protection of American armed service members in the hands of enemy entities, and for the protection of the American conscience, I ask that Rep. Scott Peters, Rep. Duncan Hunter, and our other San Diego County representatives to Congress vote for the McCain-Feinstein amendment passed overwhelmingly by the Senate last month, forbidding the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency.

DeBus, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist at PsyCare, Inc., and a contract psychologist for Survivors of Torture, International, both in San Diego. He holds a master’s degree in religion from the Claremont School of Theology, and is active in the Pacific Beach United Methodist Church and the California-Pacific Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.