Letter: Torture is a cancer growing on America

Tuesday, March 7, 2006 | 7:45 a.m.

The Sun's March 5 editorial, supporting a revision of Sen. John McCain's law to control the treatment of detainees, was right on. There is a cancer growing on America and its name is torture. The Bush administration's ongoing policy of the psychological torture of detainees has been exposed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and with the rendition program.

Rather than "a few bad apples" at work, the pictures from both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib show CIA methods of torture-sensory disorientation, sexual/cultural attacks, self-inflicted pain and the promotion of individual phobias.

We know that most of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were innocent and it seems likely that many other victims are also innocent, including some American citizens who have and may yet be rendered to another country or to the newest supersecret prison, Bagram in Afghanistan.

The administration's determination to continue torture while feeling the lawful and political need to deny it leads one to wonder what will be the fate of all those prisoners if their eventual freedom means they can tell what happened to them.

We should also wonder what will happen to the health of our democracy and to our own freedoms if Americans accept torture as a necessary government policy.

Jerry Bitts, Las Vegas