Politics and Society
Inhuman and Degrading Muslims utilize Torture Awareness Month to sensitize fellow Americans to unite against cruelty. By Paz Artaza-Regan
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very June, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), alongside many human rights and faith groups, marks Torture Awareness Month. Why in June? Because the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) was enacted on June 26, 1987. In 1997, the UN commemorated CAT’s 10th anniversary, and declared June 26 the International Day of Support of Victims of Torture. President Ronald Reagan signed CAT in 1988 and the U.S. Senate ratified the Convention in 1994. By ratifying CAT, the U.S. agreed to the commitment: “No exceptional
circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, international political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as justification for torture.” However, after 9/11, in its War on Terror, the U.S., despite being a CAT signatory, tolerated the CIA and military interrogators using torture on detainees captured in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other nations. In 2013, as a nation, we are still trying to heal the deep wounds caused by U.S.sponsored torture. For more than three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted an investigation into CIA torture. This investigation, the most thorough that has yet been done into CIA torture, has been reported to detail how the use of torture was not conducive to our national security.
Torture wounds the soul of the perpetrator, the victim, and inflicts great moral harm on our society. 44
The Committee, which adopted the 6,000-page report last December, is still undecided about making it public. However, in order to ensure that U.S.-sponsored torture never happens again, the public needs the facts. The NRCAT is also concerned about torture in U.S. prisons and the overuse of prolonged solitary confinement. The U.S. is a world leader in holding prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement, where a prisoner is confined alone in a small cell for up to 23 hours per day, allowed to exercise alone for the remaining hour. There are 44 state-run super-max prisons and one federal super-max prison—each of which holds inmates exclusively in solitary confinement. At least 80,000 people in the U.S. criminal justice system are held in solitary confinement on any given day. The UN considers anything over 15 days in solitary confinement to be torture. Torture is illegal, immoral and counterproductive. Yet, a recent poll showed that almost half of respondents accept torture as either sometimes or always justified (YouGov poll, December 2012). Healing a culture of torture requires people to truly embody our common belief in the inherent Islamic Horizons May/June 2013