America the beautiful may get ugly once behind closed doors

I don’t think I would be a good candidate for torture for the simple reason that I would confess to almost anything to avoid pain.

It is the nature of the weeping liberal to be free of discomfort at any cost, which is why we are so dead set against war.

And although war is very personal if you are the target of a bullet or in the proximity of a bomb, torture takes pain to an even more intimate level, in that there are often only two of you involved: the torturer and the torturee.

Thinking about this the other day while nursing a very small pain, I reached the conclusion that I would instantly confess to any crime or give up any information under the threat of being physically hurt.

Confessing to a crime would be easy for me, since I have a guilty conscience about almost everything anyhow, and it is the nature of the liberal to accept blame for whatever evil deed mankind has performed.

As for confessing to secrets I do not possess, that is also a snap. I have an active imagination and could easily come up with information that is theoretically helpful to the enemy and would get me off the hook, until, of course, he discovers that no such secrets exist.

Then, I guess, I would have to explain to them that under the rules of the Geneva Convention and the United Nations’ declaration, they are forbidden from causing me pain and suffering, except on an accepted field of battle. They would ponder that and conclude that I was correct in my interpretation of both documents and let me go.

On the other hand, a more scholarly member of the group might bring up the new Pentagon doctrine, which upholds the Geneva Convention on torture but -- and this is a big but, so to speak -- only for “traditional prisoners of war” and not for “unlawful combatants.”

In other words, if I am wearing a uniform and possess documents assuring that I am a member of an official army, my captors would not be allowed to cause me physical or mental pain in pursuit of either information or personal pleasure.

However, lacking any such documentation, I would then be what the U.S. Army would regard as an “unlawful combatant” or, in more simple terms, a terrorist and therefore eligible for any form of sadistic applications they might conceive. Then I’d be in biiiiiig trouble.

I realize that under these guidelines, America’s Revolutionary soldiers, who often lacked any kind of uniform or legal military status, would have been subject to all kinds of pain, but that was a long time ago, silly and not applicable in today’s debate.

President Bush’s latest proposal to Congress takes the issue to a level best described by the homily “Out of sight, out of mind.” He is asking for permission to allow the CIA, that grand old instrument of information-gathering, to take unlawful combatants, I mean terrorists, to secret prisons and to, well, torture them there.

By that measure, don’t you see, we would be protected from the terrible moans and screams that usually accompany the deliberate infliction of pain on one’s enemies.

They would be beyond even the reach of the International Red Cross and far beyond constitutional assurances of due process. Their pain would be muted by distance and therefore nonexistent.

But wait.

The president’s measure provides limits to the manner in which information can be extracted from what we have come to call detainees. As I understand it, half-drowning a prisoner during “tough interrogation” is out, but other persuasive techniques remain available to the questioners.

Given the idea that all of this is taking place at a secret foreign location and no one is allowed to monitor the conduct of the interrogators, who would know what kind of horror is allowed to exist in a dark world beyond our ability to hear the screams?

Other nations have cringed at the request by Bush for permission to adopt as national policy those tactics we once condemned as torture when practiced by the secret police of the old Soviet Union.

We’re going it alone again, ignoring the sweeter counsel of others to honor the tenets of the past to recognize compassion in war, as ironic as that might seem.

The Geneva Convention and the U.N. Doctrine have taken small steps toward humanity while that minimal, self-possessed man in the Oval Office, preaching Jesus in one breath and torture in the other, leads us back to the Dark Ages.

I said I wouldn’t be a good candidate for torture, and I’m barely standing up under the torture of watching a good and just nation slide downward into the abyss.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez @latimes.com.