Good ole Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay. It just doesn't seem to go away. For some reason, it just doesn't fade from public consciousness in the way the current administration seemed to think it would.

I listen to the news every night, though it's certainly a challenge at times. I try to read articles written by people on both the left and the right so that I can understand points of view that do not come to me naturally. And, as usual, I feel like I must be from another planet.

On the left and the right people are arguing about the legality of the practices carried on at Gitmo. Now it seems that physicians may have compromised their ethics and broken the trust of the people who were supposed to be in their care. Even if you are one of the people who believes that torture is okay in some circumstances....

I have not yet run across anybody who thinks that it ought to be carried out by physicians. The first tenet of the hippocratic oath is "First, do no harm..." So, okay, it looks like there's been a serious breech in judgement here. And, once again, there are two kinds of victims: the tortured ( look, this is my blog and I personally believe these folks are being tortured, so that's what I'm gonna call it) and the torturers. The plight of the tortured is obvious, but the plight of the physician/ torturer is less so.

At some point, these people are going to have to be released. The "War on Terror" cannot go on forever, this administration will not stay in power forever, and the legal questions about the legal status of these detainees will have to be answered at some point. Then Dr. Sleep Deprivation will have to go home to his home town and, presumably, to patients whom everybody is pretty sure are NOT terrorists. Without the insular atmosphere of the prison camp, in the light of day, he will have to face himself and his actions. And, if he had any morals or ethics in the first place, he'll pace the floors at night knowing right good and well that sleep deprivation IS torture, and there's not a drug in the world that will obliterate his nightmares when he falls asleep.

But the question I want to ask about all of this is not a legal one. It's a moral one. You don't have to be Christian to ask it, but if you are a Christian, though the answer may be hard for you, the answer is very clear. Are we doing to these people as we wish them to do unto us? The argument of what they could/would/did do to our prisoners, or even innocent travelers is not answering the question. It's side stepping it. We don't have control over the actions of our enemies. We only have control over our own actions. We as individuals only control our own actions, of course, but we, as a people in a representative democracy have a voice.

Speaking just for me, I find Christ's commandment "Therefore all things you would that men should do to you, do you even so to them...." (Matt 7:12) pretty easy to understand. I'm confident it doesn't include causing trauma and pain to people who may, or indeed may not, have wished to do us harm. Jesus didn't say you should simply pray for your enemy or think good thoughts about him, or that there were extenuating circumstances under which this commandment doesn't apply, or "all's fair in love and war". It's a commandment about how to ACT, about what to DO or refrain from doing.

The "golden rule" speaks to people of all religious traditions or even those who have no faith. And we're not doing it. We aren't even talking about it. The debate is all about legalities, words on paper, dots on i's, and precedents.

I wish somebody on the left would ( excuse my frank language here) get the balls to say, "We need to put a stop to this because it's just plain wrong".

That's my opinion, and I'm stickin' to it.