A former prisoner of war who was subjected to dislocated shoulders and frigid cold gave his take on a U.S. Senate report that outlines brutal CIA torture — a word he said he is hesitant to use.
Jim Bedinger, now a retired Navy commander, was captured during the Vietnam War on Nov. 22, 1969. He spent his first month in solitary confinement at the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison.
He remembered the bitterly cold nights.
“They took my flight suit and flight boots away at night and left me in my jockey shorts on the bare ground,” said Bedinger.
He was then moved to a cell with another prisoner.
“I am very thankful that I ended up with a cellmate like Ernie Brace,” he said, “and of course we had John McCain on one side and Admiral Stockdale to the other side. We had pretty good communication.” The group would communicate in code.
Bedinger said while America has historically taken the high road in the treatment of POWs, our enemies have not — from World War II to North Korea to Vietnam.
“They get your arms tied behind and your wrists are tied together and then push your head down between your knees, then they pull your arms over to the point where both of your shoulders come out of the scapula joint. It's extremely painful,” Bedinger described.
He said he never went through that kind of treatment as the end of the war neared, but others did.
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“The torture that many of the American prisoners of war endured in Vietnam have left them with limbs that don't move right, knees that are fused, backs that were broken,” said Bedinger.
The torture is closer than previously thought to the tactics used by the CIA, according the Senate torture report released earlier this week.
It revealed the enhanced interrogation method of waterboarding was used more widely than first thought and that interrogators force fed suspects through their rectums.
“This is not to condone some of the actions that are said in the report, but war is an ugly business,” said Bedinger, who later served in the Pentagon.
“We've got to understand that our warriors often are rough men that go into the dark of night to protect us while we sleep at home with our families,” he added.
To protect those warriors and Americans is the ultimate goal, Bedinger said, and he talked with people who felt the situations gave several documented cases of actionable intelligence that prevented another 9/11 in the U.S.
However, Bedinger acknowledged that as he witnessed in Vietnam, in many cases, torture doesn't produce truth.
“They're going to inflict such pain that you will sign and admit to anything simply to stop the pain,” he said.
Bedinger was freed after serving three years and four months as a Vietnam POW.
His biggest take-away from the experience is similar to that of fellow POW John McCain: “We always want to strive for what is high and more noble … I'm all for truth, and the truth always comes out in the end, but I think when you're dealing in defending this country there are certain things that we need to protect because if we don't, our enemies will use that to their advantage and do us harm.”
