Death and the Maiden

The Maiden Returns

2007-09-17T03:44:00.000-07:00

I've been gone for three weeks. I needed the time off. Wading neck-deep in the literature of torture--memoirs of torture survivors, psychological profiles of torturers, clandestine torture operations of governments (democractic and otherwise), medical descriptions of the lifelong after-effects of torture, descriptions of torture techniques--makes me feel filthy and exhausted after awhile, and I simply have to get away to recover some equilibrium.

Torture survivors don't have that kind of luxury. They stay in the torture cell long after its actual door has swung open. They endure their torture to the end of their days. There's no vacation from it.

So I'm humbled that I, who have never been tortured, have so little psychological and physical stamina that I must periodically retreat from a blog where I merely write about torture. But so it is.

At any rate, I'm back, with more resolve than ever to help others comprehend what a brutal thing torture's malfiguration of self and society is.

torture, human rights

Saturday at the Movies

2007-08-25T05:21:00.001-07:00

A new weekly feature: movies on Saturday!
This week, a clip of Rev. Lennox Yearwood's speech earlier this summer against torture and The Decider's abuse of civil liberties. The occasion was a rally hosted by the Hip Hop Caucus, Amnesty International, and the ACLU. Yearwood, a peace activist, heads up the Hip Hop Caucus.

"We're in a state of emergency. We must come together as human beings fighting for justice. If we don't stand up now, seven years into the 21st century, there will be no 22nd century," says the good Rev, and he calls on hip hop youth to step up and get involved in the struggle against torture. Inspiring words.

torture, human rights, politics

Another Bad Apple

2007-08-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

Sgt. Jerrod M. Glass of the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot has been charged with abuse of abusing boots under his command. No one who's ever gone through basic training will be terribly surprised at this story of recruit torture. The abuse that US military recruits go through is designed to tear down their wills and identities. Basic training is a malfiguration of self. Sound familiar?

Wonder how long it'll take the Marine Corps to denounce Sgt. Glass as a lone ranger...

torture, human rights, politics

Padilla and Perverse Justice

2007-08-23T04:21:00.000-07:00

Lindsay Beyerstein, freelance progressive journalist and author of the blog Majikthise, has just published an In These Times piece on Jose Padilla and enhanced interrogation entitled "Perverse Justice."

Many pundits hailed the August 16 conviction of Jose Padilla on conspiracy charges as a victory for civil liberties and the rule of law. The trial, according to them, proved that a suspected terrorist could be successfully prosecuted in the civilian legal system—something the government had initially insisted was impossible.
However, Padilla’s case raises troubling questions about whether there can be fair trials for detainees who have been held in military prisons for extended periods of time and subjected to coercive techniques designed to destroy their sense of agency and instill dependence and trust in their interrogators.

Read the entire article here. Good stuff.

bush, iraq war, torture

Bush Delendum Est

2007-08-22T05:01:00.001-07:00

Wishing to provide "a broader context" for staying the course in Iraq, the Decider will shortly make a speech to Kansas City VFWers in which he'll claim that we're up to our necks in terrorists now because we cut and ran in Vietnam then. He'll say that Iraq will go to hell in a handbasket, just like Vietnam did (sic), if US military forces withdraw. And just for good measure, he'll invoke Japan as an example of a country that found its way to democracy because of US military occupation (huh?).

Sixty-four percent of Americans oppose the war. Seventy-two percent say that they'll continue to oppose it even if next month General Petraeus reports (which he won't) that the surge has been successful.

Honest to God. Why do we bother to call ourselves a democracy?

bush, iraq war

How Do I Torture Thee? Let Me Count the Ways...

2007-08-22T04:09:00.000-07:00

Methods of Torture in the Late Twentieth & Early Twenty-First Centuries

(From Edward Peters, Torture, pp. 169-170)

I've highlighted those techniques we know have been used by US interrogators (military, criminal, civil, and intelligence) since WWII. There may be other techniques used for which we have no documentation.

Somatic Tortures

Beating: punching, kicking, striking with truncheons, rifle butts, jumping on the stomach

Falanga: beating the soles of the feet with rods

Finger torture: pencil placed between victim's fingers, which are then pressed together violently

Telephono: the torturer strikes with his flat hand at a victim's ear, imitating a telephone receiver, producing rupture of the tympanic membrane; telephono may also consist of blows delivered against a helmet worn by the victim

Electricity: probing with pointed electrodes; cattle prods; shock batons; metal grids, metal beds to which victims are tied; the dragon's chair, an electric chair used in Brazil

Burning: with lighted cigarettes, cigars, electrically heated rods, hot oil, acid, quicklime; roasting on a red-hot grill; byt he rubbing of pepper or other chemical substances upon mucous membranes, or acids and spices directly on wounds

Submarino: the submersion of the victims head in water (often filthy water) until on the brink of suffocation (US readers: sound familiar?)

Dry submarino: the victim's head is covered by a plastic bag or blanket, or the mouth and nostrils gagged until the point of suffocation is reached

Suspension in mid-air: victim is suspended with knees bent over a metal rod and tied tightly to wrists

Prolonged assumption of forced and stressful positions of body

Prolonged standing

Traction alopecia: the pulling out of hair

The forcible extraction of nails

Rape and sexual assaults

Insertion of foreign bodies into vagina or rectum

Operating Table: table to which victim is strapped, either for being forcibly stretched, or secured only below the lower back, necessitating victim's supporting his or her own weight that is off the table

Exposure to cold: submission in cold air or water

Deprivation of water: providing only soiled, salty, or soapy water

Forced consmption of spoiled or deliberately heavily spiced food

Dental torture: forced extraction of teeth

Psychological Torture

Witnessing the torture sessions of others: relatives, children

Threats made to witness the torture of others

Sham executions

Sleep deprivation

Continuous exposure to light

Solitary confinement

Incommunicado (being held without any human communication)

Total sensory deprivation

Conditions of detention

Threats

Shame-infliction: stripping naked; forced participation in or witnessing of sexual activity

Pharmacological Torture

Enforced application of psychotropic drugs

Enforced application of nerve stimulants: histamines; aminazine; trifluoro perazine-stelazine

Enforced injection of faecal matter

Enforced ingestion of sulphur or poison
________
Photo: Vietcong suspect being subjected to field submarino by US interrogators

torture, human rights

The Maiden Stands Corrected

2007-08-21T14:38:00.001-07:00

Thanks to The Liberal Avenger

A Question for Torture Apologists

2007-08-21T09:41:00.001-07:00

"If patriotism has to precipitate us into dishonor; if there is no precipice of inhumanity over which nations and men will not throw themselves; then why in fact do we go to so much trouble to become, or to remain, human?"

Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Henri Alleg's La Question

torture, human rights, terrorism

A Question for the Lawyers

2007-08-20T16:13:00.001-07:00

Here's what puzzles me. As I've argued in an earlier post, the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, although approved by President Bush, violates international law, US constitutional law, and civil law. Yet the nation's legal beagles seem not to have noticed--or, if they have noticed, seem not to care very much. So torturers get impunity, and the law is ignored.

But just today, charges were dropped against Lt. Col. Stephen Jordan, commander of the Joint Interrogation Briefing Center at Abu Ghraib, who lied on at least two counts when he denied knowing what was going on at the prison. The charges were dropped on a legal technicality: nobody read Jordan his rights prior to the testimony in which he lied. In this case, the law is scrupulously followed--as it should be, by the way--and in being followed, it lets a torturer off the hook.

That's what I find puzzling. When it comes to international and constitutional law forbidding torture, we don't seem to give a damn. When it comes to a criminal suspect's Miranda rights, we follow the straight and narrow as if the entire legal system depended on it. What's the difference? Why the one, but not the other?

torture, human rights, terrorism, Abu Ghraib

Torture in the News

2007-08-20T02:02:00.000-07:00

Lead Story
Convicted "terrorist" Jose Padilla may be permanently damaged by US enhanced interrogation techniques.

Other Torture News

The Uganda Human Rights Commission orders the Ugandan government to compensate two victims of illegal detention and torture. An international legal precedent for Guantanamo suits...?

"Because of its power and global interest U.S. leaders have committed crimes as a matter of course and structural necessity. A strict application of international law would have given every U.S. president of the past 50 years Nuremberg treatment." (Edward Herman, Z Magazine, Dec.1999, p.38) Ethiopian columnist Tesfaye H.H. agrees.

Blackanthem.com reports the discovery of an insurgent "torture house" near Mahmudiya A few "wire whips" and a "short handled maul" were the give-away. Sounds a bit flimsy--the Pentagon wants to document insurgent atrocities in the worst way--so the Maiden will keep an eye on whether this story develops.

In Sydney, Australia, a man named Saleh Jamal has been sentenced to a prison term for a gangland shooting. His story is unremarkable except for the account he gave during his trial of being tortured by Syrian and Lebanese authorities during an earlier imprisonment in Lebanon.

Following the revelation that American psychologists have participated in US-sponsored torture, and responding in part to an ACLU call, the 148,000-member American Psychological Association bans members from taking part in over a dozen "interrogation" techniques, but stops short of a complete ban on all techniques. The APA is the largest professional organization in the mental health field. Now, what about the American Medical Association?

Guantanamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who also happens to be a British citizen, alleges that he and others are tortured by US guards and interrogators. Deghayes charges are made in testimony to an attorney seeking his release.

In her recent New Yorker piece on CIA torture tactics, Jane Mayer mentions an International Committee of the Red Cross report on the US interrogation of prisoners at CIA "black sites." University of Toledo law professor Benjamin Davis calls for the public release of the report.

Torturers are nothing if not inventive. The Pakistan Supreme Court has ordered an investigation into allegations that cops recently forced suspects in a robbery case to strip naked and bite one another "in a replay of traditional dog-and-bear fight — a common sport in some parts of the country."

Chicago's finest have a sorry history of torturing criminal suspects. The latest chapter revolves around allegations that James Andrews, convicted of a couple of murders in 1984, confessed under torture.

Alas. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been corrupted by the CIA. Released documents indicate that the RCMP cooperated with US authorities in the 2002 extraordinary rendition and subsequent torture of Maher Arar. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was kidnapped in New York City during a flight stop and whisked off to Syria. His lawsuit against the US was dismissed in 2006 on national security grounds.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Torture Expands

2007-08-19T02:42:00.001-07:00

One thing that makes torture (aka "enhanced interrogation") palatable to so many of us is that it's so far away. It's done in distant (psychologically, if not geographically) places to people who are on the margins of respectable society anyway: terrorists, enemies of the state, thugs, criminals, bad people who want to hurt us.

Now, there's some truth in that. As a general rule, people who are marginalized--who are relatively unempowered socially, politically, and economically--are the most likely victims of torture. Like all general rules, this one isn't written in stone. Mainstream intellectuals and clergy, for example, were frequently targeted by fascists in Central America and Soviets in the USSR. But in large part, torture focuses on the marginalized, partly because they're easy targets, partly because it's easier to get away with torturing people about whom society-at-large doesn't give much of a shit anyway.

So far, so good--at least if you're a respectable member of society. But here's the thing: when it comes to torture, what counts as marginal is fluid. Standards shift, especially in times of war or crisis, and the class of people who are perceived as marginal and hence torturable tends to expand.

This tendency in torturing societies to widen the circle of those who may be tortured with impunity is observable, for example, in imperial Rome. Initially, the torturable class was limited to slaves charged with crimes. Then the shift occurred: slaves could be tortured both as defendants and witnesses. Then, another shift: freemen were also deemed torturable, but only when being interrogated for suspicion of treason. And then the circle expanded even more: freeman could be tortured as both defendants and witnesses in any number of criminal cases. By the fourth century, torture was a common practice, both in interrogation and in punishment.

A similar expansion occurred in Christian Europe. Although condemning torture in the late fourth century, the Church opened the door for the torture of heretics--those on the religious margins--in 1252, and the insidious expansion began again. From the mid-thirteenth to the late eighteenth century, torture was common in both criminal interrogation and punishment, and social class was no guarantee of immunity.

Torturability expands. That's the tendency. Illiterate, crazy, hate-filled "ragheads" are tortured today (we like to think). But when the torture circle widens, as it probably will (as it already has, for all we know) who'll be next? Muslim clerics? Muslim intellectuals? Anglo-Saxon dissidents? American citizens? All that's needed to qualify is to be perceived as a threat by a powerful government and a scared nation. This gets you an immediate transfer from the homeland of respectability to the hinterlands of marginality. And in that forlorn and desolate place, torture happens.

________

Edward Peters' Torture is a good source for the historical expansion of torture.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Silence of the Peaceniks

2007-08-18T02:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a curious thing. Until the scandal at Abu Ghraib broke, voices denouncing torture in the US peace community were far and few between.* There was School of the Americas Watch and TASSC (God bless 'em!), but that was about it--

despite the fact that both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch regularly document the widespread use of torture throughout the world;
despite the fact that torture inevitably accompanies war, and continues after war has ended;
despite the fact that the malfiguration inflicted by torture is at least as grave a wrong as the destruction wrought by warfare;
despite the fact that torture makes no distinction between combatants and noncombatants;
despite the fact that torture, unlike war, has been unequivocally condemned by the UN;
despite the fact that no reputable ethicist or policy wonk has dared to publicly defend a "just torture" position;
despite the fact that torture, like war, accomplishes nothing useful or fruitful;
and despite the fact that the CIA has tortured or condoned torture with the tacit approval of ever US President since WWII.

Why this silence? Ignorance? Indifference?

Probably not the latter, and not quite the former. Denial might be more of an explanation. Prior to Abu Ghraib, most of us, even those most critical of US militarism, were in denial. Our vision of the US just didn't allow for the possibility that we--as opposed to the sordid little juntas and regimes we supported--actually twisted the bodies and minds of fellow humans in torture chambers. That wasn't the American way, and so it simply wasn't on the radar. Even suggesting the possibility seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Why ruin what thin credibility the peace movement had with an already suspicious American public by making wild, chicken little allegations about torture?

Looking back--and I've been a member of the peace community that I'm criticizing for over 30 years, and so am implicated up to my eyeballs in its silence--this naivete seems incredible. The ugly facts really were there for us to see, and other nations certainly weren't as blind to them as we. But for the most part, we just couldn't or wouldn't take notice of them. Even now, too many of us in the peace community would like to keep torture as a sidebar issue. Just the other day, an acquaintance of mine worried that it was a "distraction" from the "real issue" of war--as if the two can really be separated.

But that's ridiculous. It's time for a change. It's time for the US peace community to affirm that torture is a big box item. It's time to end the silence.

______

*In my library, for example, I have over 1,000 volumes on just peacemaking, nonviolent conflict resolution, war and peace, and so on. Fewer than 1% of those published before 2005 even mention torture.

torture, human rights, terrorism

peace

Marc Ash of "Truthout" Interviews Fr. Louis Vitale

2007-08-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

Nine weeks ago I wrote about the showdown at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, between the US military and Fathers Louis Vitale and Steve Kelly. The Roman Catholic priests (Franciscan and Jesuit, respectively) were arrested for a November 2006 peaceful protest against military intelligence (sic) training, headquartered at For Huachuca, which teaches "enhanced interrogation" methods. The charge against them is federal trespassing. Their trial began in early June. They are two dangerous hombres.

Father Louis Vitale is featured in this Truthout video-interview and accompanying news story. The interview, an excellent discussion of torture techniques used by US interrogation teams, was conducted by TO Executive Director Marc Ash. The feature story was written by TO staffer Sari Gelzer.

By the way: if you don't get a good feel from the video-interview of why Fr. Vitale is a dangerous hombre who needs to be locked up, take a look at this threatening article he wrote.

torture, human rights, terrorism.

Bush delendum est: Impeach The Decider

2007-08-13T04:30:00.000-07:00

A poll by the American Research Group finds that 45% of Americans favor impeachment proceedings against The Decider, and 54% favor impeachment proceedings against the Vice (and we do mean "vice") President. Let me count the reasons: illegal and unnecessary war-making, violation of constitutional and criminal law, erosion of civil liberties, disregard for due process, etc. etc.
Bill Moyers and Constitutional expert Bill Fein discuss it all in Bill Moyers' Journal.
_________
Thanks to Mad Melancholic Feminista for alerting me to this!

torture, human rights, politics

A Good Resource on Torture

2007-08-12T02:37:00.000-07:00

Born in 1918, Ella Mazel has been compiling material about torture--its meaning, purpose, technique, morality, victims, perpetrators, and consequences--for nearly half a century. Two years ago, she cyber-published the results of her work. Her book is entitled Not in My Name!: A collection of quotes on the past, present, and future of the practice of torture. It's an invaluable resource, and deserves wider recognition than it's received.
Here's one of the passages Ms. Mazel quotes. It's from George Ryley Scott's 1940 The History of Torture Throughout the Ages. It seems especially pertinent today.

"War and torture are bedmates. . . . When once a war breaks out, torture may be recognized as an inevitable concomitant. Even if the governments concerned ostensibly denounce and prohibit torture, it occurs nevertheless. There is no way in which bodies of men or individuals can be prevented from surreptitiously practising torture upon such of their enemies as fall into their power where licence to kill and maim has been freely given."

Torturespeak and Language Rules

2007-08-11T05:37:00.000-07:00

Language is uncanny, especially when it's manipulated by people with evil intent and uneasy consciences. In an earlier post on torturespeak, I referred to Marguerite Feitlowitz's brilliant observation that torturers rip "benign domestic nouns" from their normal contexts and appropriate them as descriptions of their own disgusting practices. Torturers in Latin America, for example, took the ordinary word "disappear" and gave it an entirely new and sinister meaning.

So torturers can demonize ordinary language. But they can also use language as a shield that hides the demonic nature of their actions. As I argued in yesterday's post, they sometimes use language that neutralizes the horror of what they do. "Torture," for example, becomes "enhanced interrogation." Once again, ordinary, benign, domestic words are appropriated. Torturers malfigure language as well as bodies and spirits.

In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, which I've referred to on several occasions in this blog, Hannah Arendt notes that the Nazis in charge of the "final solution" invented an entire lexicon of neutralization to shield their real intentions. They adopted a "language rule" (Sprachregelung) which generally banished "bald words" (or, as Feitlowitz might put it, "malignant" ones) such as "extermination," "liquidation, or even "killing," and replaced them with neutral code words: "evacuation" (Aussiedlung), "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung), "resettlement" (Umsiedlung), "labor in the East" (Arbeitseinsatz im Osten). Arendt perceptively notes that "The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, 'normal' knowledge of murder and lies." (Chapter VI)

This is a powerful insight. The language rule of torturers that neutralizes language is motivated by the fact that what torturers do is utterly unacceptable, both to themselves and to the public, if it's equated with the ordinary meaning of "torture." Psychotic child molesters kidnap, torture, and rape. Drunken, abusive husbands torture. Leering, scar-faced, monocle-wearing Nazi sadists torture. Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin torture. How could any nation accept, much less condone, this kind of behavior as its own? How could torturers, at least the ones who aren't completely insane, accept this as their professional description?

So a torturing nation shifts into linguistic neutralization. We don't torture. They, the enemy, the bad guys, are the ones who torture. All we do is interrogate in enhanced ways. And even if at times our interrogation can get a bit "rough," all that really means is just enough discomfort to the prisoner to persuade him to tell us what we need to know. And if things do get out of hand, and circumstances force us to publicly confess that torture, not enhanced interrogation, really took place, we have two separate modes of neutralization to fall back on. Either the torture was accidental, performed by misguided individuals and not condoned by officialdom; or the torture was tragically necessary to protect tens of thousands of Americans in the Homeland. In the first case, the torture is neutralized by reducing it the same status as child molestation: the work of a single, fucked-up loner. In the second case, the torture is neutralized by appealing, with regret, to a greater good: sometimes the noble thing to do is dirty one's hands for the good of one's country.

Curious, that we're so adept at spotting and condemning another culture's Sprachregelung, but so blind to our own. Perhaps such deception is a necessary survival tactic. But this doesn't make it any less disgusting.

________

Photo credit: "Book Burning," Joe Moorman.

torture, human rights, politics

Neutralizing the Language of Murder and Torture

2007-08-10T05:13:00.000-07:00

The expression "collateral damage," beloved by military types, is a neutralizing reference to the act of violently killing innocent noncombatants. Sometimes the infliction of "collateral damage" is accidental, as when a so-called smart bomb lands off-target. Sometimes it's intentional, as when a military target is hit with the full knowledge that, because of their proximity, noncombatants will die. But in either case, "collateral damage" is a weasel expression designed to neutralize the brutal state of affairs to which it refers: the murder of innocent people.

The expression "enhanced interrogation," beloved by Bushite bureaucrats and pseudo-patriots, is another neutralizing term. It refers to torture: the physical and psychological abuse of persons, the malfiguration of their identities, the breaking of their wills and the collapsing of their spirits, the infliction of wounds that will cripple them for the rest of their lives. It is a weasel expression designed to neutralize the brutal state of affairs to which it refers: the intentional and orchestrated destruction of another human being.

People who use these sorts of neutralizing references have uneasy consciences. They try to hide bitter reality by covering it over with pink linguistic icing. But this kind of dissimulation is disgusting. Slain and maimed noncombatants are not accidentally damaged items. Waterboarding, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, stress positioning, isolation: these are not innocent ways of asking questions.

Verbal neutralization of horrible deeds is a sign of cultural decay, reminiscent of expressions like "final solution" and "cultural revolution."

torture, human rights, politics

From the Why-Do-I-Even-Bother? Department

2007-08-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

I use a software program that tells me the keywords used in internet searches that bring visitors to this blog as well as which posts are most heavily visited. (Don't worry: it doesn't divulge identities of visitors, although it does tell me what part of the world you come from.)

Here's the single most trafficked post in the whole blog. The most common search keywords that bring visitors to this site include "torture fucks," "torturing and fucking maidens," "sex and torture," "handcuffs shackles" and "fucks+tortures."

I could've gone all day without learning this.

Why US Torturers Get Away With It

2007-08-09T04:32:00.000-07:00

"Enhanced interrogation"--or as Bush's legal beagle John Yoo puts it, questioning that falls short of maiming or murdering (Yoo is also the guy who opines that, if it came to it, the President has legal authority to torture a child)--is a euphemism for torture. Torture violates both constitutional and criminal law. Thus "enhanced interrogation" violates both constitutional and criminal law.
The syllogism is simple. But US torturers are getting away with torture. Nobody but a handful of underlings have been prosecuted for the Abu Ghraib debacle. Guantanamo excesses continue. The CIA continues interrogating at black sites, outsourcing its interrogations to regimes known for having their "ways of making people talk," and blithely ignoring standards of decency. All of this is done with the President's knowledge and approval--and, you can bet, with the knowledge and approval of a lot of his lieutenants in the White House, State Department, and Justice Department, as well as the intelligence and military establishments.
So why aren't Bush & Co. in jail? Can you say "legal loopholes"?

1. Military Commissions Act (2006). Since early 2002, Bush administration officials have feared that they could face legal prosecution for their approval of torture. So President Bush included a provision in the Military Commissions Act, the infamous law rushed through Congress to circumvent the US Supreme Court's decision that struck down Bush's flaunting of the Geneva Conventions, that retroactively decriminalized any act of torture committed before the end of 2005. Critics have referred to this as a "stealth pardon" granted by the legislation to both President Bush and all his associates (a unique instance of a sitting President issuing a presidential pardon for himself). Along the way, of course, it also nullified habeas corpus, granted the President the omniscience-assuming right to jail anyone he designates an enemy combatant, and continued to defend enhanced interrogation--thereby, according to Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) "setting the [human rights] clock back 800 years." As Press Secretary Tony Snow let slip in mid-October 2006, the Military Commissions Act makes Bush the "final arbiter on torture."

2. US v Verdugo-Urquidez (1990). So the Military Commissions Act decriminalizes torture committed up to the end of 2005, and President George "Final Arbiter of Torture" Bush has basically guaranteed that any subsequent torture will be decriminalized as well by not being officially recognized as torture. But can torture victims sue him and his pals for civil damages?

Under normal circumstances, individuals are unable to bring civil suits against the US government or any of its federal officials or agencies. This is the "doctrine of sovereign immunity." But one of the exceptions to immunity is constitutional violations. If the constitutional rights of an individual have been violated, they may still, despite the doctrine of sovereign immunity, file civil suit against the offending federal employee. If the employee is found guilty, damages are out of his or her pocket.

This possibility of personal liability was intended to deter federal employees from abusing their power, and it's pretty much worked with the FBI, whose legal domain is limited to domestic investigations. But the CIA (for example) legally operates outside the US. Are its employees similarly liable?

Apparently not. In US v Verdugo-Urguidez, which focused on a Drug Enforcement Agency's warrantless seizure of a Mexican drug lord's papers, the Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to the search and seizure by US agents of property owned by non-resident aliens and located in foreign countries. So long as CIA agents or contractees use "enhanced interrogation" on aliens in foreign countries, they work with civil impunity. While it's true that in another decision, Rasul v Bush (2004), the Supreme Court ruled that some Guantanamo detainees had habeas corpus rights, Rasul v Bush doesn't overrule US v Verdugo-Urguidez, because the 2004 ruling was made in part on the understanding that Guantanamo, leased as it is from Cuba, is de facto US, not foreign, territory. The Court found for Rasul only because the second necessary condition of US v Verdugo-Urguidez was violated.

3. Sosa v Alvarez-Machain (2003). But wait a minute. There's always the Federal Tort Claims Act (FACTA) to fall back on, isn't there? Enacted in 1946, FACTA permits private individuals actually to sue the US itself because of actions committed by individuals working on behalf of the US. So if a US-employed CIA agent tortures you, or if the US-employed CIA agent outsources the torture to a third party, you can sue the US. FACTA allows for a waiver of sovereign immunity. Now we're getting somewhere, right?
Wrong. In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, the Supreme Court ruled that actions carried out on foreign soil by US agents on behalf of the US government aren't subject to the FACTA waiver of immunity. Once again, CIA agents or their contractees are exempt from civil liability.
And that's how they get away with it. Despite Supreme Court rulings that torture is criminal, legal loopholes--the Military Commission Act's blanket pardon, the denial of constitutional rights to aliens on foreign soil, and the protection of US agents from civil prosecution--allow torture to continue. When you factor in the national paranoia about terrorist enemies within and without and the American public's apparent willingness to swallow the Bush Administration's disingenuous claim that enhanced interrogation isn't really torture, the outlook is bleak.

________

Two very good resources for exploring the legal discussions of US torture are Karen Greenberg's The Torture Debate in America and chapter 4 of Jennifer Harbury's Truth, Torture, and the American Way. Both were published prior to the Military Commissions Act. Michael Otterman's more recent American Torture discusses the latter.

torture, human rights, politics

Why Bush & Co. Are Criminals

2007-08-08T00:26:00.000-07:00

"The soldiers at the bottom of the chain are taking the heat for Abu Ghraib and torture around the world, while the guys at the top who made the policies are going scott free. That's simply not right."

Scott Brody, Special Counsel, Human Rights Watch

It's genuinely astounding, this game the US government is playing with the American public. Everyone in the nation either knows or should know--the documentation is available for the asking--that "enhanced interrogation" is sanctioned by the President and all his underlings. Everyone also knows that "enhanced interrogation" is a thin euphemism for torture. Whenever a government official uses the term, it's always with a wink and a nudge. We're not really deceived by the term, and they know we're not really deceived. But so long as no one breaks the rules of this cynical game by actually uttering the torture word, so long as we all continue to make nice by loudly proclaiming that torture isn't The American Way, we can continue the charade. We can pretend that state-sponsored and public-sanctioned enhanced interrogation isn't torture, and that when torture does happen, it's the act of individual goons acting on their own.
It's time to end the game. Torture is sanctioned at the highest level, and torture is criminal. The American public is complicitous in this crime--guilty after the fact, if you will, by not denouncing torture and removing those officials responsible for it--and this complicity calls for justice. But more immediately, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and Major General Geoffrey Miller--and this is only the first echalon of felons--should be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. They are criminals. They ordered torture at Abu Ghraib. They denied their own complicity. They have continued the policy of torture since Abu Ghraib.
In doing so, they have at least violated:

1. Article VI of the United States Constitution: "This Constitution and the laws of the United States shall be made in pursuance thereof and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land. Any provision of an international treaty ratified by the United States becomes the law of the United States."

The US is a signatory to the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "No one shall be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." (Art. 5)
The US endorses the 1949 Geneva Convention which prohibits the torture of any prisoner, whether a formal prisoner of war, a saboteur, or a resistance fighter in a civil war.
The US approved the 1975 UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture.
The US agreed to the 1992 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. (Art. 7) This provision is non-derogable--cannot be suspended--even "during time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation."
The US signed onto the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture.

2. Ashcraft v State of Tennessee (1944), in which the US Supreme Court overturned a murder conviction based on a confession extracted under torture. Chief Justice Hugo Black wrote the decision that banned coercive interrogations:

"The Constitution of the United States stands as a bar against the conviction of any individual in an American court by means of a coerced confession. There have been, and are now, certain foreign nations with governments dedicated to an opposite policy: governments which convict individuals with testimony obtained by police organizations possessed of an unrestrained power to seize persons suspected of crimes against the state, hold them in secret custody, and wring from them confessions by physical or mental torture. So long as the Constitution remains the basic law of our Republic, America will not have that kind of government."

3. Columbe v Connecticut (1961), in which the US Supreme Court reaffirmed the ban on coerced confessions and stated that "neither the body nor the mind may be twisted until it breaks."

4. Filartiga v Pena-Irala (1980), in which the Second Circuit Court ruled that "Turning to the act of torture, we have little difficulty discerning its universal renunciation in the modern practice and usage of nations."

5. Hudson v McMillian (1992), in which the US Supreme Court ruled against the sadistic disciplining of prisoners.

6. Hope v Pelzer (2002), in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the "unnecessary infliction of pain" upon prisoners is "both degrading and dangerous," and furthermore ruled that guards inflicting such pain have no legal immunity.

Why, then, aren't the multiple violations of Article VI and Supreme and Circuit Court rulings being prosecuted? Why aren't Bush & Co. behind bars? Tomorrow's post explores this question. Some previews: US v Verdugo-Urquidez, Sosa v Alvarez-Machain, and the Military Commissions Act. Oh, yeah. And public indifference.

"The official position of defendants, whether as heads of state or responsible officials in government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
Nuremberg Charter, Art. 7

torture, human rights, politics

Torture in the News

2007-08-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

Top Stories

A victory for School of the Americas/Assassins Watch. The House of Representatives has approved a report accompanying the FY 2008 Defense Appropriations bill that demands the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC) release to the public the names of all students and instructors who attended the school during the fiscal years of 2005 and 2006. The directive also requires that the same information be available to the public in all future fiscal years.
In the report accompanying HR 3222, the fiscal year 2008 Defense Appropriations bill, the committee declares:

The Committee supports the mandate of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation to be a transparent and democratic institution. To promote such transparency and democratic values, the Committee directs the Institute to release to the public the names of all students and instructors at the Institute for fiscal years 2005 and 2006. The list shall include all names, including but not limited to the first, middle, and maternal and paternal surnames, rank, country of origin, courses taken or taught, and years of attendance. In all future fiscal years, this same information shall be made available and provided to the public no later than 60 days after the end of each fiscal year.
______________________________

The New Yorker reports that al-Qaeda lieutenant and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was tortured at a "black site" following his 2003 capture. The CIA, of course, responds by saying "the United States does not conduct or condone torture." This and more on the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" practices in Jane Mayer's "The Black Sites."

Also in the News

The Los Angeles Times editorializes on the duplicity of the Bush Administration's denial of torture. Meanwhile, the Vero Beach Press-Journal criticizes what it calls the "sort of against torture" policy of the White House.

Bisher al-Rawi and other victims of extraordinary rendition sue Boeing, the parent company of the private airline chartered to fly al-Rawi to imprisonment and torture. The experience, says al-Rawi, was "horrific beyond words."

The Muslim Brotherhood accuses Cairo police of torturing and disappearing three of their members. The Egyptian Interior Ministry refused to comment, but Egypt has a notorious torture record, so the accusation is credible on the surface. The Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist international organization, publicly denounces violence but has been implicated in several terrorist actions. Elsewhere in Egypt, in the Nile Delta village of Tilbanah, local cops have been accused of torturing Nasr Amed Abdallah to death.

Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler denounces rape as torture in the Congo, where rape, forced amputation, murder, and lawlessness, despite a 2003 peace agreement, continue.

Torture victim Clement Abaifouta reflects on Chad's "African Pinochet," ousted dictator Hissene Habre's, reign of terror.

Azerbaijani officials announce a criminal investigation into allegations that Baku cops tortured two criminal suspects. Given Azerbaijan's poor human rights record, it's not clear how genuine the investigation will be.

A senior police official in India's Tripura district has been suspended for torturing a criminal suspect while interrogating him. "The police official pierced pins in my nail and thrust chilli powder inside my anus and penis, besides the nose. Then he beat me for the whole night using a thorny branch," Kamal Acharjee, the victim, told journalists at a hospital.

Ten years after his torture by New York City cops, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima reflects on police brutality.

torture, human rights, politics

We Are Hibakusha

2007-08-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

Please take some time today, August 6, and Thursday, August 9, to remember the terrible atomic killings that took place on these dates in 1945. An estimated 140,000 people died from the blast in Hiroshima, and another 70,000 in Nagasaki.

Survivors of the blasts are called "hibakusha"--literally, "explosion-affected people." But the term could also be used to describe all survivors of military-inflicted violence, including torture victims.

It also includes all of us, who live in a world forever changed by August 6 and 9, 1945. We are all explosion-affected people. We are hibakusha.

_______

Photo: the sunflower is the international symbol for a nuclear-free world.

Hiroshima Nagasaki anniversaries, nuclear weapons

"Every country has its own way of torturing people..."

2007-08-06T04:22:00.000-07:00

When we were kids, my sister and I went through a (thankfully) short period of fighting like cats and dogs. Its physical expression never got beyond the occasional slap or pinch, because my parents quickly laid down the law: no physical contact. None. Period. Use words. Be nice.
But my sister and I soon figured out a second-best alternative. We went through a spell of psychologically slapping each other. We deliberately bugged the hell out of one another by tauntingly getting in each other's face (but scrupulously avoiding physical touch), playing music too loudly, hiding cherished items, defacing homework, reading each other's diary, and so on. Pretty childish stuff, in the grand scheme of things, but significant for this reason: it was a premeditated assault, a deliberate infliction of pain that scrupulously stayed within the letter of the law (no physical contact!) while ruthlessly violating its spirit (be nice).

I suppose we expect this kind of behavior from kids. But we oughtn't to tolerate it from adults, and we certainly oughtn't to let our governments get away with it. Yet this is what's going on in the US today when it comes to torture. Our officials point to the genuinely horrific physical torture practiced by repressive regimes--Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe--and innocently insist that because we don't chop off fingers or gouge out eyes, we don't torture.

But this is innocence in the technical letter-of-the-law sense, because we do use techniques that are the grown-up analog to the juvenile psych ops my sister and I tried out on each other. The method of torture preferred by the US is one that minimizes physical contact and focuses instead on psychological abuse--a beating, as it were, that leaves no telltale bruises. As Rustam Akhmiarov, a Russian detainee who spent some time as a Guantanamo detainee said, "Every country has its own way of torturing people. In Russia, they beat you up; they break you straight away. But the Americans had their own way, which is to make you go mad over a period of time. Every day they thought of new ways to make you feel worse."

I've discussed torture US-style several times in previous posts (for example, here, here, here, here, and here). There's absolutely no doubt that detainees are being subjected to psychological abuse--sleep deprivation, auditory overload, isolation, anxiety-inducing threats, and so on--in addition to "mild" physical abuse such as waterboarding and hooding (not to mention the out-sourcing of physical torture to governments that do lop off fingers and gouge eyes). President Bush admitted as much last month in his Executive Order concerning acceptable interrogation techniques; the admission was repeated by his Director of Intelligence Mike McConnell; and the practice was infamously defended by The Decider in his September 2006 White House speech announcing the formation of military commissions to try detainees.* So more verification of the US practice of psychological torture isn't necessary.

What's intriguing is how the government--and, apparently, many US citizens as well--is able to rationalize this abuse of prisoners as "nontorturous." In any other context, we'd readily acknowledge that the deliberate attempt to inflict psychological pain on another human being is cruel and outside the law. But when it comes to the "interrogation" of detainees, we insist otherwise. If we're not actually smacking them around, we're not torturing them. Our hands are clean, our consciences are clear, our motives are righteous.

If our blows are invisible, they're not really blows: this is the logic of torture US-style. It's a strategy adopted by children on the one hand or people with uneasy consciences on the other.

_____________
*From The Decider's September 2006 White House speech: "We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why -- if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary."

________________

Photo credit: Cindy Debold, "The Silent Scream"
torture, human rights, politics

Until Next Week...

2007-07-31T14:56:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends: The Maiden is traveling, and will post no new messages until early next week.

Torture, Ticking Time Bombs, and the Part of the Report that WAS Read

2007-07-30T05:05:00.000-07:00

A clumsy way to do ethics is to take the worst case scenario and use it as raw material from which to manufacture ethical strategies. I remember one or two (thankfully, not more) of my ethics professors doing this in my college days. Your mother is being attacked by a crazed rapist. You have a gun in your hand. What ought you to do? or You have the opportunity to assassinate Hitler. Should you go for it?

Worst case scenarios (or thought experiments, as the professional philosophers like to call them) are bad ways of doing ethics for the obvious reason that they're so unlikely. I suppose it's possible that someone could try to rape your mother in front of your eyes, or that you might have the opportunity to assassinate a meglomaniac dictator, but the chances are against it. So why use such scenarios as test cases? Far better to generate ethical principles and moral strategies from realworld scenarios.

Much of the torture debate in North America (but not so much elsewhere) either explicitly assumes or has in the back of its mind a worst case scenario: the ticking time bomb. A weapon of mass destruction has been planted in Manhattan or Los Angeles. Authorities have captured the terrorist who knows the WMD's precise location and the exact time of its detonation. May they torture him to save hundreds of thousands of lives? Put in less Hollywoodish terms, the scenario is one that stresses urgency: may we torture someone to prevent an imminent disaster from befalling innocent people?

History has shown that this is an unlikely situation. There is no known actual ticking bomb torture case. These sorts of things may happen on shows like "24," but not in real life. The intelligence that interrogatory torture obtains is generally (a) unreliable, (2) small change of little importance, or (3) already known for the most part by the torturers. And as this blog has documented over and over, most torture isn't interrogatory anyway. Its purpose is to punish, to intimidate, and to assert authority. It's these types of situations, not improbable ticking bomb scenarios, that ought to be the test cases when debating the ethics of torture.

Now, I raise this obvious point because the 2004 Schlesinger Report on torture, which I introduced in an earlier post, discusses torture and morality exclusively in terms of the ticking bomb scenario in a brief Appendix H. The analysis is astoundingly simplistic. "Most cases for permitting harsh treatment of detainees on moral grounds begins with variants of the 'ticking time bomb' scenario," write the Report's authors. The reader's expectation is that this is a preliminary to taking a different, more fruitful approach. But the expectation is quickly disappointed, because the authors slide right into a strangely coy justification of torture from a ticking bomb perspective--as if no other torture scenarios either exist or are worth considering.

In a stressful ticking bomb scenario, the Report continues, it's understandable that military personnel would be tempted to use torture. But "a morally consistent approach...would be recognize there are occasions when violating norms is understandable but not necessarily correct." So if a soldier indeed does step over the line, he or she must do the honorable thing and turn themselves in to their superiors.

Huh? What this amounts to is: if you torture, be sure to do the right thing afterwards. What about doing the torture itself?! Here it is: military professionals much "accept the reality" that in some situations "morally appropriate methods to preserve...lives may not be obvious." "The tension between military necessity and our values will remain."

So, it appears that the prevention of torture isn't a priority for the Schlesinger Report, perhaps because it thinks of torture only as a desperate attempt to forestall absolute calamity. The problem, of course, is that "absolute calamity" is a relative term, and what seems calamitous to one interrogator may not at all seem so to another. The give-away is the Report's use of the term "military necessity." This is a weasel expression that can be used to justify nearly anything.

Perhaps the most ominous line in the whole Report is this: "National security is an obligation of the state, and therefore the work of interrogators carries a moral justification." But it's not entirely clear if this means that interrogators ought not to torture because such behavior would reflect badly on the state, or if torture is ethically permissible because interrogators are working to preserve the state. Given that the Report identifies the necessity for torture with ticking bomb scenarios, thereby implying that torture only occurs in situations of immediate and horrible urgency, the latter interpretation seems most appropriate.

Incredible.

Torture, Moral Disengagement, and the Report That Wasn't Read

2007-07-27T01:50:00.001-07:00

I've been re-reading the Schlesinger Report lately.

You remember the Report, right? It came out in August 2004, and was a document submitted by "The Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations." This panel, commissioned by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was chaired by ex-Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger (an old pal of Rummy). Also on the panel were ex-Secretary of Defense Harold Brown (ditto), Republican hawk and Rumsfeld advisor Tillie Fowler, and retired Air Force general and Desert Storm veteran Charles Horner. (With four military insiders like these, the "independent" part of "Independent Panel" obviously is loosely-defined.)

The Independent Panel's charge was to "provide independent professional advice on detainee abuses [at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and Afghanistan], what caused them and what actions should be taken to preclude their repetition." Its final report pretty much repeats the Bush Administration's line: abuses are the actions of lone rangers, not the consequences of policy.

Nothing much new or interesting there.

What is interesting are two appendices to the report: Appendix G, "Psychological Stresses [contributing to torture]" and Appendix H, "Ethical Issues [of torture]." Study of the first appendix suggests that administrative officials have astoundingly little self-insight. Study of the second one suggests that they flunked Ethics 101.

Let's look at Appendix G today, and save Appendix H for tomorrow.

In Appendix G, the Report's authors appeal to social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment as well as one of Albert Bandura's studies of moral disengagement to come up with a list of behaviors that discourage "normal self-regulatory mechanisms" and encourage "abusive treatment and similar immoral behaviors."

Two of these behaviors are especially descriptive of persons who actually perform torture: displacement of responsibility ("I was just following orders") and diffusion of responsibility (groupthink). But the other five are descriptive of apparatchiks who give the orders to torture but don't actually participate: moral justification (torture is justifiable if it serves a social good); euphemistic language (avoid "torture"; substitute benign expressions like "enhanced interrogation"); advantageous comparison (torture really isn't so bad compared to what terrorists do) ; disregard consequences of actions (minimize torture by attributing it to lone rangers and bad apples, not policy); and attribution of blame (torture victims are terrorists, and bring their suffering on themselves).

These behaviors create moral disengagement by downplaying torture on the one hand--using euphemistic substitutes, pointing the finger, if a public scandal erupts, at bad apples, making lop-sided comparisons between torture and terrorism--and emphasizing its importance on the other by creating a climate of crisis--torture is necessary to protect the common good, the horrible plans of terrorists have to be discovered before they can be carried out, and so on. This much is easy to understand. You don't need to have studied social psychology to see how this kind of thinking and speaking creates moral distance between "us" and "them."

What's truly incredible, though, is how the current administration, despite the caution about morally disengaging behavior in one of its own officially commissioned reports, continues to indulge in such behavior. In just the last ten days, with the publication of the new Executive Order on interrogation of detainees, President Bush and the White House have insisted that the US doesn't "torture," but only "interrogates," thereby also implying that any "torture" that takes place must be the behavior of bad apples; insinuated that enhanced interrogation--not "torture," mind you--is necessary to protect US citizens from 9/11-like attacks; and stirred up anger and fear by emphasizing the brutality and determination of the "enemy," thereby suggesting that US interrogation tactics are really pretty tame in comparison. We're the good guys--so good that even when we interrogate in ways that might appear torturous, we're not. Besides, they're the bad guys--so even if we do torture them (which we don't, by the way), they deserve it, because they'd do worse to us if they could.

Appendix G of the Schlesinger Report concludes with the warning that this kind of rhetoric, if tolerated, carries a "higher risk of moral disengagement on the part of those in power and, in turn, are likely to lead to abusive behaviors."

Did anyone in the White House actually read the Report?

torture, human rights, politics

Torture, US-Style: Slip-Ups in Mike McConnell's "Meet the Press" Interview

2007-07-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

You'd think a National Intelligence Director would be a little more discrete. But the revelations about torture that Mike McConnell let slip last Sunday on "Meet the Press" are such that he's probably had his lips sewn shut this week. Or at least he might've, if the US public gave a shit about what he said. So far, there's been remarkably little flap, and almost all of it comes from the marginalized independent media that don't reach especially large audiences anyway. Yet McConnell said several things that ought to be red flags. None of them is brandnew information, true. But the fact that they were confirmed on national television by the US intelligence czar is sobering.
Admiral McConnell, who after all is new on the job and so not yet adept in spin, was asked by "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert to comment on The Decider's "new" policy on torture. Here's the pertinent section of the interview (the entire transcript can be read here):

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about the executive order the president issued about enhanced interrogation measures. What does that allow a CIA-held target—what kind of measures can they use to get information from them?
Admiral McCONNELL: Well, Tim, as you know, I can’t discuss specific measures. A variety of reasons for that. One, if I, if I announce what the specific measures are, it would, it would aid those who want to resist those measures, measures to train to understand them and so on. So I won’t be too specific. Let, let me, let me go back to a higher calling in this context. The United States does not engage in torture. President’s been very clear about that. This executive order spells it out. There are means and methods to conduct interrogation that will result in information that we need. And what I would highlight, I was, I was concerned and worried and quite frankly appalled by Abu Ghraib. My view was America risked losing the moral high ground. And so I focused on this when I came back. What I can report to you is that was an aberration. The people who were responsible for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib have been held accountable, and, and they’re serving a sentence for that. That is not the program the CIA was administering. It is not the program that the president approved in the recent executive order.
MR. RUSSERT: But by the use of the term “enhanced interrogation measures,” there clearly are things that are used to elicit information. Have we eliminated waterboarding? Can you confirm that?
Admiral McCONNELL: I would rather not be specific on eliminating exactly what the techniques are with regard to any, any specific. When I was in a situation where Ihad to sign off, as a member of the process, my name to this executive order, I sat down with those who had been trained to do it, the doctors who monitor it, understanding that no one is subjected to torture. They’re, they’re treated in a way that they have adequate diet, not exposed to heat or cold. They’re not abused in any way. But I did understand, when exposed to the techniques, how they work and why they work, all under medical supervision. And one of the things that’s very important, I think, for the American public to know, in the history of this program, it’s been fewer than 100 people. And so this, this is a program where we capture someone known to be a terrorist, we need information that they possess, and it has saved countless lives. Because, because they believe these techniques might involve torture and they don’t understand them, they tend to speak to us, talk to us in very—a very candid way.
MR. RUSSERT: Does this new executive order allow measures that if were used against a U.S. citizen who was apprehended by the enemy would be troubling to the American people?
Admiral McCONNELL: I can report to you that it’s not torture.
MR. RUSSERT: How do you fine—define torture?
Admiral McCONNELL: Well, torture is—an attempt to define torture in the, in the executive order, it gives examples: mutilation or murder or rape or physical pain, those kinds of things. Let me just leave it by saying the, the techniques work, it’s not torture. They’re not subjected to heat or cold, but it is effective. And it’s a psychological approach to causing someone to have uncertainty and in a situation where they will feel compelled to talk to you about what you’re asking about.
MR. RUSSERT: And we would find it acceptable if a U.S. citizen experienced the same kind of enhanced interrogation measures?
Admiral McCONNELL: Tim, it’s not torture. I would not want a U.S. citizen to go through the process, but it is not torture, and there would be no permanent damage to that citizen.

Now, take a look at some of the extraordinary assertions/admissions in the transcript.

What isn't said by McConnell is much more revealing than what is said. He can't discuss specific interrogatory techniques--he won't even deny, when asked pointblank, that waterboarding is one of them--but he asks viewers to accept on trust that the US government follows a "higher calling" and so doesn't torture. Enhanced interrogation, the going euphemism, doesn't include, per The Decider's newest Executive Order, murder (whoever said that murder was a torture technique, anyway?), mutilation, rape, or physical pain (this an benignly stretched version of the Executive Order's "cruel or inhuman treatment"), sexual degradation, or religious denigration. But McConnell knows, The Decider knows, and Jane and John Q. Citizen know, that there's a lot of space in between these categories for some down-and-dirty torture. So there's a unsettling coyness to McConnell's remarks. His claim of clean hands is transparently false, and he doesn't seem to care.
Perhaps he doesn't care in part because at least some US torture is terroristic, as he let slip. State-sponsored torture generally comes in two varieties: interrogatory and terroristic. The purpose of the first is, obviously, to gather intelligence. The purpose of the second is to terrorize potential dissenters or enemies with the threat of torture: If you cross us, this is what we'll do to you. That the US uses torture as a terroristic deterrent comes across clearly in McConnell's remarks: torture doesn't work unless not-yet-captured detainees are convinced that horrible things will be done to them unless they cooperate.
McConnell insists that whenever the US government appears to get caught torturing, it's really a few bad apples, like the ones at Abu Ghraib, who are responsible. Does anyone really believe this anymore? Yet apparently the US government works under the assumption that a lie told often enough becomes truth.
McConnell admits that the US practices "white torture," the brutal psychological malfiguration favored by nations like Iran, and speaks as if this is a humane alternative to old-fashioned physical torture. Something sinister seems to be going on with the administration's latest understanding of torture: if you don't physically touch 'em, it ain't torture. This isn't to say that there's not one helluva lot of physical touching going on--waterboarding, for example--but the denial that white torture techniques are real torture is alarming, bespeaking either egregious stupidity or equally egregious malevolence.
McConnell says on more than one occasion that torture is practiced under "medical supervision." Extraordinary! Medical doctors, who presumably have taken the Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm," are overseeing the abuse of prisoners. When German doctors or Chilean doctors or Russian doctors similarly supervised torture, the US denounced them as monsters. Why isn't McConnell's admission front page headlines across the nation? Why has it gone almost unnoticed?
Finally, McConnell admits that even interrogatory torture is more often a fishing expedition than a focused intelligence-gathering. There's a big difference between the two. In the latter, the torturer goes after the answer to a specific question. Theoretically, at least, when the answer is gotten, the torture ends. But torture as a fishing expedition has no specific goal. The torturer inflicts pain just to see what might bob up to the surface. Since there's no focused goal, there's no anticipated end to the torture. Prisoners can be fished again and again and again. Detainees held at Gitmo are such fish.

torture, human rights, politics

Torturers as Dementors

2007-07-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

While watching the opening scene of the latest Harry Potter film in which dementors attack Harry and his Muggle cousin Dudley, it occurred to me that J.K. Rowling's horrific dementors are a perfect literary metaphor for torturers.
Dementors are malevolent wraiths who specialize in "malfiguring" their victims by destroying minds and souls. They rob them of their good will, their virtue, their very identities, leaving them mindless and spiritless shells. Rowling herself says that Dementors suck out hope and leave in its place a "deadened feeling." Dementors are incapable of empathy, compassion, or warmth. Tormented by their own nothingness, they are nothing but voracious hungers incessantly driven to feed off of the vitality others.

They are torturers.
torture, dementors, harry potter

Torture in the News

2007-07-25T03:57:00.000-07:00

Top Story

July 20. President Bush issues new Executive Order that continues the policy of allowing torture just so long as it's called something else in public (text); the White House issues a statement (text) that insists on the usefulness of torture, even though the White House also insists that al Qaida is growing; and a White House press conference on the EO follows (text) in which Senior Administration Officials demonstrate that it is indeed possible to speak for an entire half hour without actually saying anything. The civilized world recoils in horror. Two days later, National Intelligence czar Mike McConnell repeats the refrain on "Meet the Press": "I would not want a US citizen to go through [the approved interrogation techniques]. But it is not torture, and there would be no permanent damage to that citizen." A small percentage of the US public sputters in disheartened protest for approximately 98 seconds, after which business as usual resumes.

Other Stories

Torture in Uganda. Activists cite torture as the number one human rights abuse in Uganda. Report to be released next month. Majority of reported cases attributed to national security forces.
Tortured Confessions. The six medics, 5 Bulgarians and 1 Palestinian, released after a decade in Libyan prisons, reported that their "confessiona" of infecting Libyan children with HIV were made under torture. All six endured electric shock and beatings. There are also allegations of rape.
A World Without Torture. Yemen editor Yusra Al-Shathli opines that the "human soul is too precious and sensitive to be subjected to torture." A courageous stand, considering Yemen's torture record.
Madison, WI, Apparently Secedes from the US. The Madison Impeachment Coalition, obviously separating itself form the rest of the nation, protests state-sponsored torture.
Police Torture. Pakistan cops apparently tortured 5 boys to death. The lads, aged 7 to 15, had been picked up for petty theft. Most torture in the world is perpetrated against criminal suspects, not political prisoners.
Conservative Christians & Torture. Four months ago, the National Association of Evangelicals endorsed a statement calling for an end to torture. Religious columnist Peter Steinfels wonders why it's caused no buzz.
Force Feedings at Gitmo. Two Gitmo prisoners, Abdul Rahman Shalabi and Zaid Salim Zuhair Ahmed, continue their hunger strike, and are force-fed by US military.

torture, terrorism, politics, intelligence, bush, gitmo

The Un-Long-term Effects of Un-Torture (which, according to Mr. McConnell, we STILL don't want to inflict on US citizens)

2007-07-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I reported Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell's bizarre (and breathless) "Meet the Press" string of claims that the US (1) doesn't use torture on detainees, that (2) he wouldn't like to see the untorture the US inflicts on foreign detainees inflicted on US citizens, and (3) but if it were, there'd be no permanent or longterm effects anyway. (As a sidenote: presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who never met an enhanced interrogation technique he didn't like, thinks The Decider's newly-released Executive Order on torture, the immediate reason for McConnell's TV appearance, is just peachy.)

Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows that the first and third claims made by McConnell are falsehoods (see this, for example), suggesting that he either knows nothing about torture or is lying. I'll take him at his word on the second claim, although history clearly shows that states which torture gradually extend the circle of those who are considered torturable.

Physicians for Human Rights has just released an executive summary of a forthcoming "Report on Criminality of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," co-authored with Human Rights First. The entire summary is worth reading. One section in particular speaks to McConnell's idiotic claims:

"Medical literature clearly establishes that tactics such as the CIA’s reported “enhanced interrogation techniques cause the types of physical and mental anguish that are criminalized under the WCA and other laws. In a letter sent to Senator John McCain during the height of the MCA debate, several leading medical and psychological experts, including current and past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, conveyed this collective knowledge:

There must be no mistake about the brutality of the “enhanced interrogation methods” reportedly used by the CIA. Prolonged sleep deprivation, induced hypothermia, stress positions, shaking, sensory deprivation and overload, and water-boarding (which may still be authorized), among other reported techniques, can have a devastating impact on the victim’s physical and mental health.

The pain and suffering arising from the individual and combined use of water-boarding, hitting, induced hypothermia, prolonged bombardment with loud music and flashing lights, stress positions, total and long-term isolation, and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques is directly related to the purpose of these techniques: to “break” detainees, mentally and physically. The medical consequences of such abuse have been well-documented through years of research and treatment of survivors of violence and severe trauma.

Some of the enhanced techniques, particularly water-boarding, hitting, induced hypothermia, and stress positions are capable of causing “severe” or “serious” physical pain and suffering, the intentional infliction of which violates the “torture” and “cruel and inhuman treatment” provisions of the WCA. Each of the techniques can also cause significant psychological harm. According to one recent study, in fact, the significance of the harm caused by non-physical, psychological abuse is virtually identical to the significance of the harm caused by physical abuse.

This mental harm can take many different forms, including:

• Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), manifested in: prolonged, recurring flashbacks and nightmares; significant impairment and instability in life functions; suicidal ideation; and, weakened physical health, among other consequences. Rates of PTSD range from 45% to 92% of torture survivors, subjected to both physical and mental torture.

• Depressive disorder manifested in self-destructive and suicidal thoughts and behavior, and other characteristics.

• Psychosis, in the form of delusions, bizarre ideations and behaviors, perceptual distortions, and paranoia, among other manifestations.

These techniques, moreover, are generally used in combination – prolonged isolation, for example, combined with sleep deprivation, light and sound bombardment, and exposure to cold – compounding their devastating psychological impact."

torture, terrorism, politics, intelligence, enhanced interrogation

Have You No Shame, Sir?

2007-07-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

Mike McConnell, new Director of National Intelligence, gave his first big interview on today's Meet the Press. Tim Russert asked whether McConnell would be comfortable if a US citizen was subject to the enhanced interrogation techniques defended (but not specified) in The Decider's latest Executive Order. McConnell: "It's not 'torture,' Tim. I want to make that clear." But McConnell then said that he wouldn't want to see it used on US citizens. If it were, though, he hastily added, "there'd be no longterm damage."

This is a man who either knows nothing about torture or is a liar.

torture, terrorism, politics, intelligence

Let's Hear It for Torture! A Letter from a Christian Patriot Yahoo

2007-07-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

There's a document making the rounds in cyberspace that pretends to be red-white-and-blue but in fact is as splenetic and hate-filled a piece as I've ever read. There are several accounts of its authorship. The version that was sent me credits it to "a housewife in New Jersey--one ticked-off lady!" Other versions of it claim that one Pam Foster from Atlanta is the author. TruthOrFiction insists that the document is largely based on a piece written by columnist Doug Patton back in 2005.

Personally, I don't care who wrote it. What interests--and frightens--me is that it's all over the place. Google lists over 30,000 references to it, and this doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of people who've received it over e-mail. Its popularity is a testiment to just how easily (and, for many, persuasively) rage legitimates torture.

Here it is, as I received it. The friend who forwarded it to me, an octogenarian Christian pacifist and activist, tells me that he thinks the final paragraph "about as close to blasphemy as anything I have ever seen." Not too mention stupid and pathetic.

---------- Forwarded message ---------->

Written by a housewife from New Jersey and sounds like it! This is one ticked off lady.

Are we fighting a war on terror or aren't we? Was it or was it not started by Islamic people who brought it to our shores on September 11, 2001?

Were people from all over the world, mostly Americans, not brutally murdered that day, in downtown Manhattan, across the Potomac from our nation's capitol and in a field in Pennsylvania ?

Did nearly three thousand men, women and children die a horrible, burning or crushing death that day, or didn't they?

And I'm supposed to care that a copy of the Koran was "desecrated" when an overworked American soldier kicked it or got it wet?...Well, I don't. I don't care at all.

I'll start caring when Osama bin Laden turns himself in and repents for incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi Arabia .

I'll care when these thugs tell the world they are sorry for hacking off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling slashed throat.

I'll care when the cowardly so-called "insurgents" in Iraq come out and fight like men instead of disrespecting their own religion by hiding in mosques.

I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide bombs.

I'll care when the American media stops pretending that their First Amendment liberties are somehow derived from international law instead of the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights.

In the meantime, when I hear a story about a brave marine roughing up an Iraqi terrorist to obtain information, know this: I don't care.

When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been humiliated in what amounts to a college-hazing incident, rest assured: I don't care.

When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to move because he might be booby-trapped, you can take it to the bank: I don't care.

When I hear that a prisoner, who was issued a Koran and a prayer mat, and fed "special" food that is paid for by my tax dollars, is complaining that his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts: I don't care.

And oh, by the way, I've noticed that sometimes it's spelled "Koran" and other times "Quran." Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and-you guessed it-I don't care !!

If you agree with this viewpoint, pass this on to all your E-mail friends. Sooner or later, it'll get to the people responsible for this ridiculous behavior!

If you don't agree, then by all means hit the delete button. Should you choose the latter, then please don't complain when more atrocities committed by radical Muslims happen here in our great Country! And may I add:

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the Marines don't have that problem." -- Ronald Reagan

I have another quote that I would like to add AND.......I hope you forward all this. "If we ever forget that we're One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under." Also by.. Ronald Reagan

One last thought for the day: In case we find ourselves starting to believe all the Anti-American sentiment and negativity, we should remember England 's Prime Minister Tony Blair's words during a recent interview. When asked by one of his Parliament members why he believes so much in America , he said: "A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in... And how many want out."

Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you:

1. Jesus Christ

2. The American G. I.

One died for your soul, the other for your freedom.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO PASS THIS ON, AS MANY SEEM TO FORGET BOTH OF THEM. AMEN!

torture, terrorism, christianity, patriotism

New Bush Directive Forbids Torture (wink-wink)

2007-07-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

Remember when Clinton said "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is..." when asked if he was schtupping Monica Lewinsky? It was pretty clear to the nation that he was playing word games to weasle out of a tough spot.

Well, The Decider is playing his own word games now. Under international pressure, he's just issued an Executive Order prohibiting the CIA from using "torture." The problem is that what he means by "torture" remains his and the CIA's little secret. We know from the public five-page EO that torture has something to do with "mutilation or cruel or inhuman treatment," and that "sexual humiliation" and acts denigrating religion are out. Short of that, though, we're given little idea of what the Bush team thinks the term means. Everything is vague--and deliberately so. As CIA Director Michael Hayden puts it, "the information developed by our program is irreplaceable," with the information developed by our program being bureauspeak for torture and irreplaceable meaning "we're not stopping."

We should also note that there's no significant difference between this EO and The Decider's long-standing insistence that he and he alone will be the one who decides how to define the word "torture."

So, does the US government torture? It depends on what the meaning of the word "torture" is. Rings just as false as Clinton's testimony, doesn't it? Except that this time, we're not talking about blowjobs. Wonder if the nation will go as ballistic over this transparent dishonesty about torture as it did over a lie about a bit of hanky-panky in the White House?

bush, torture, CIA, human rights, politics, gitmo

Guilt and Self-Loathing on the Torture Trail

2007-07-20T03:15:00.001-07:00

One of the consistent claims of this blog is that torture is a moral (and spiritual, if one accepts such things) abomination because it aims to "malfigure" the torture victim's self: to break her will, erode her identity, and fragment her ability to relate normally with others even if she survives and returns to society.

The longterm physical consequences of torture are horrendous enough: chronic and frequently severe pain caused by nerve damage, broken bones, permanently damaged tissue. But the psychological effects are even worse: a sense of lost identity, chronic anxiety and panic disorder, sleep disturbances and nightmares, depression, suicidal ideation, uncontrollable anger and aggression, decreased memory or outright amnesia, lack of concentration, and PTSD-related flashbacks.

There's also one more common psychological symptom suffered by torture victims, and it's the focus of today's post: guilt and self-loathing. It's one of the true tragedies of torture that people who survive it frequently come away thinking that they're no better than their torturers, and consequently fear and loath themselves as much as they do their tormenters.

To those of us who have never experienced abuse, it may seem strange and even slightly perverse that torture victims would feel guilt. But it makes sense if one keeps in mind that the fruit of torture is malfiguration. The torture victim is subjected to violations that, if "successful," result in deep humilitation. The victim is trespassed upon in every imaginable way: orifices are violated with penises, fingers, and objects; bodies are violated with pain-causing instruments and techniques; psyches are invaded with terror and agony; resolve is broken with each and every blow; taboos are thrown to the winds as victims are forced to do unthinkable things such as eating excrement.

Under these circumstances, it's surprising if a torture victim doesn't develop a negative self-image. She loathes herself for being so weak, so cowardly, so pliable. She feels dirty, filthy, disgusting, because of the sexual invasions she's endured. She comes to hate her very body because of the pain and humilitation it's brought her, her very mind because it couldn't block the agony, her will power because it shattered under pressure. Every virtue she once thought she possessed has failed the test. How could she not despise herself?

Once the self-loathing sets in, the guilt isn't far behind. The torture victim may experience survivor-guilt, for example: she's survived only because she wasn't as strong as her comrades. They resisted to the death. She broke. It's they who deserved to live, not she. The torture victim may also feel guilt because she's been so traumatized that she's unable to experience appropriate emotions such as compassion or pity for other victims or rage against their tormenters. Some victims report that after a certain point they witnessed the torture and even execution of their friends dispassionately.

Other victims feel guilt because they've been forced by their torturers to perform horrible acts. Sister Dianna Ortiz, kidnapped by Guatemalan security forces in 1989, reports that one of her captors forced a machete into her hand, closed his fist around hers, and forced her to chop a fellow female prisoner to death. Raped repeatedly, Sister Dianna was impregnated and, after her release, obtained a medical abortion. Both of these acts haunted her as much as the actual abuse she herself endured. "You're no better than we, your torturers, are! You're just like us!" For years after her torture, Sister Dianna heard these words echoing inside her.

Horribly, most torture victims are psychically impregnated by their tormenters. Victim after victim reports that their torturers continue to "live inside" them. They associate their torturers with filth, agony, brutality, and hatred. But because these powerful emotions have been internalized and self-directed, the torturers remain with the victims. How unspeakably awful it must be to fancy that you've become what you most fear and loathe.

As I've said in earlier posts: torture doesn't end in the torture chamber, and anyone who seriously thinks that the ethics of torture is up for debate doesn't know the first thing about torture.

________

Photo credit: "The Guilt" by resquin, for the Emotions 6 contest

torture, enhanced interrogation, human rights, torture victims

Is Torture Banal?

2007-07-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

Hannah Arendt's banality of evil thesis stirred up a good amount of hot disagreement when first introduced in her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, but it's since acquired the status of conventional wisdom. Arendt argues that people like Adolf Eichmann who perform evil actions aren't necessarily moral monsters with a will to destruction. Instead, they might just be ordinary people who have so internalized their state's everyday normative assumptions that they uncritically accept them as part of the moral landscape. What characterizes them isn't a malevolent will so much as an absence of critical thinking, empathic imagination, and moral judgment. For them, acts which any reasonable intelligent and empathic person would consider heinous are normalized by being given official sanction.

There's a good deal of merit to the banality of evil thesis, and it certainly does a better job of explaining an anonymous little apparatchik like Eichmann than its malevolent monster alternative. But like many good ideas, Arendt's thesis has been overused. Not all evil is banal. Some evil actions, as William James observed in Varieties of Religious Experience, are "so extreme as to enter into no good system [i.e., explanatory model] whatsoever." Some evil-doers (yeah, I know; the word has unfortunate connotations since being shanghaied by the President, but it's not inappropriate here) aren't thoughtless followers who swallow whatever normative pill their power structure tells them to swallow. Some enjoy hurting other people. They get a kick out of it. They dig on it. Their evil, welling up from some deep and horrible brokenness in them, is extraordinary, not banal.

I'd suggest that proximity is a decisive (although probably not the only) factor in distinguishing banal from malevolent evil. People who personally brutalize others "up close and personal"--torturers, concentration camp guards, death camp executioners--are more likely to be operating out of the malevolent than the banal mode. If you read interviews with these kinds of people, you'll discover that they enjoy it, even if they're also wracked by guilt. They recognize full well that their actions don't reflect the normative, either in the moral or the quotidian sense of the word. They recognize that they're doing something quite out of the ordinary, totally off the beaten path, and this is part of what excites them about it. They may insist that they're simply "following orders," but this is little more than a lie to escape justice.

Bottom line: the actual act of inflicting intense physical and psychological pain on another human being can never be "normalized." People who do it regularly aren't banal. They're malevolent. Torturers aren't ordinary people. Ordinary people, recruited into torture squads, may participate once or twice. But they'll soon crack from the sheer nonordinary horror of what they're doing.

But the distant acceptance of torture--well, that's a different matter. Those of us who believe (reluctantly, of course; after all, we're good, decent, moral people, aren't we?) that sometimes torture--or, rather, "enhanced interrogation"--is necessary for our security are indulging in evil of the banal kind. Our moral landscape legitimates actions such as "soft" and "ticking bomb" torture. They're acceptable--but only because we never really get too close to them. They're abstractions for us. We never see bleeding flesh or hear screams, much less directly cause them. We don't even run across too many walking zombies who've been crushed by torture. The general public which allows its leaders to sanction torture; the apparatchiks, from the President on down, who sign abstract orders allowing it; the legislators, who pass abstract resolutions legalizing it; the attorneys who crunch precedents to defend the laws: we are all the perpetrators of torture as a banal form of evil.

But banal evil is evil nonetheless.

torture, enhanced interrogation, human rights, detainees, gitmo, cheney, bush

Bush delendus est

2007-07-17T04:44:00.000-07:00

(Hat tip to Latinist Joe! Thanks!)

Over on reidblog, Joy Reid outlines the case for impeaching The Decider. One of her articles of impeachment charges that the President has violated Article VI, paragraph 2 of the US Constitution, and it relates directly to torture. Here's the pertinent section from Reid's post. After you read it, scoot over to reidblog to read the whole thing.

Count II: Engaging the United States in violations of international law:
Article VI, paragraph 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under theAuthority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding.
And according to Amnesty International:
The past five years have seen the USA engage in systematic violations of international law, with a distressing impact on thousands of detainees and their families. Human rights violations have included:
Secret detention
Enforced disappearance
Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
Outrages upon personal dignity, including humiliating treatment
Denial and restriction of habeas corpus
Indefinite detention without charge or trial
Prolonged incommunicado detention
Arbitrary detention
Unfair trial procedures
The specific violations here, are of the United Nations Charter, and of the Geneva Conventions, something this administration and its attorney general have characterized as "quaint," but both of which constitute the "supreme law of the land" under the Constitution. In addition, the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody both in Guantanamo Bay, and at secret CIA prisons around the world, may have violated U.S. anti-torture laws.
torture, human rights, politics

Torture in the News

2007-07-17T03:27:00.000-07:00

Top Story

From the "Right. Let's see how utterly banal we can make torture" Department.

Tristar, an Australian car parts manufacturer, is in hot water. Seems that Tristar is scaling back operations, and has reduced its number of workers from 350 to 35. These 35 are long-standing employees, and their severance and redundancy packages run into the millions. So Tristar has kept them on the payroll to save itself a bundle until their contract expires. Only problem is that there's no work left for the guys to do. So they show up at the Tristar factory each day, punch in, and sit around playing cards or reading newspapers until it's time to knock off.

The 35 are suing Tristar, claiming that the boredom they're enduring on the job is "mental torture" and "their version of Guantanamo Bay." A representative of the 35 notes that they're left "essentially undirected and idle" and "left to amuse themselves," and concludes that this is "harsh treatment."

Tristar is obviously trying to screw the employees out of their rightful severance packages. It's also obvious that meaningless, degrading, and uncreative work--the kind most workers endure, unfortunately--is psychologically and morally bad. But to compare getting paid for sitting around and playing cards with torture is an outrageous trivialization of what torture is and does to its victims. It's worse than just plain stupid (not to mention mawkishly self-pitying). It's downright dangerous.

Likening the unpleasantries in our lives to torture has become popular in the last three or four years. But such comparisons normalize torture by trivializing it, and they condition us to suppose that tortured prisoners around the world are really only enduring inconvenient but and minor and transitory psychological and physical pain. And once we think of torture in this way, it's very easy for us to allow it as an "interrogatory technique." The Maiden's hunch is that most people who condone torture don't do so because they're thugs or idiots. They do so because they misunderstand what torture really is.

Other News

Hamas & Torture. The "Popular Committee," a Fatah organization formerly known as the "Popular Resistance Committee," has accused Hamas of abducting and torturing Fatah supporters in the Gaza Strip. In the meantime, the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights alleges that Hamas brutally tortured to death 45 -year old Waleed Abu Dalfa. Khalil Salman Abu Dalfa, Waleed's 41-year old brother, was also tortured. The torture was allegedly perfomed by the Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas infamous for its willingness to torture detainees.

Blinded & Muted. In July 2003, Shahin Portofeh sewed shut his lips and eyes to protest the plans of the UK to deport him back to his native Iran. Portofeh, a gay man, feared what awaited him if returned to Iran. But returned he was, and this BBC story is the first of a three-part series recounting his torture at the hands of Iranian jailers. Caution: not for the squeamish.

Nepal & Torture. The Collective Campaign for Peace is lobbying the Nepalese government to sign on to the International Criminal Court charter. The ICC defines torture as a crime against humanity. Torture is on the rise in Nepal, with 1,300 new cases reported since last April, when democracy was supposedly restored there.

torture, human rights, politics

In the Grasp of the Whiteness

2007-07-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

Hattie of Hattie's Web reminds me of a torture technique that requires no high-tech gadgetry, is user-friendly, leaves no tell-tale bruises or cuts on torture victims, and is extremely effective in malfiguring healthy, vibrant human beings into broken-willed shells. It's generally called "white torture."

White torture is radical sensory deprivation. We know from Harry Harlow's primate isolation experiments and various sensory deprivation experiments conducted around the world--not to mention testimony of prisoners in solitary confinement and our own everyday experiences of boredom and loneliness--that systematic isolation and minimization of sensory stimulation can cause extreme anxiety, hallucinations, ideation, and depression. When experienced too long, they can lead to permanent psychosis. If you're a torturer, you want your victim to become as malleable as possible. White torture gives you what you want, without the hassle of having to beat the stuffing out of him or her.

Hooding is, of course, a poor man's version of white torture, as is sleep deprivation, noise-bombardment, or wall-standing (being forced to stand, usually in a leaning stress position, looking at nothing but a bare wall). But it takes but a little effort to do white torture up right. Small cells, preferably with whitewashed walls, ceiling, and floor; no furniture--not even a cot; brilliant 24/7 lighting; a white noise machine to drown out background noise: and voila! a perfect torture chamber. Insert prisoner, bake for a week or two, and out comes a zombie.*

Apparently Iran is an expert in white torture (in Persian, "white torture" is Shekanjeh-e Sefid, "in the grasp of the whiteness." An incredibly poetic name for an incredibly barbaric torture). One survivor of Shekanjeh-e Sefid describes its long-term consequences:

I have not been able to sleep without sleeping pills. It is terrible. The loneliness never leaves you, long after you are “free.” Every door that is closed on you, it affects you. This is why we call it “white torture.” They get what they want without having to hit you. They know enough about you to control the information that you get: they can make you believe that the president has resigned, that they have your wife, that someone you trust has told them lies about you. You begin to break. And once you break, they have control. And then you begin to confess. Ebrihim Nabavi, Iranian journalist

Although Iran has perfected white torture, the technique is used worldwide and is becoming a favorite way of disciplining "unruly" inmates in prisons, especially in privately-run supermax ones. Some of the techniques associated with white torture--isolation, sleep deprivation, noise bombardment--are reportedly used at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

_______

* German artist Gregor Schneider chillingly captures something of the experience of white torture in his exhibit Weisse Folter in Dusseldorf's K21 Museum. Hattie--many thanks for the link!

________

Photo: one of Harry Harlow's primate subjects reduced to psychosis after a few weeks of isolation and sensory deprivation. Harlow's experiments, needlessly duplicated over a period of years, are shameful.

torture, human rights, politics

Fuck 'em!

2007-07-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

From Alberto Gonzales' Memorandum to the President, 25 January 2002, entitled "Decision re Application of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War to the Conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban"

...the war against terrorism is a new kind of war...In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners...[A] determination that GPW [Geneva Convention III on the Treatment of Prisoners of War] does not apply to al Qaeda and the Taliban elminates any argument regarding the need for case-by-case determinations of POW status." Two advantages to denying POW status to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees: "some of the language of the GPW is undefined (it prohibits, for example, 'outrages upon personal dignity' and 'inhuman treatment'), and it is difficult to predict with confidence what actions might be deemed to constitute violations of the relevant provisions of GPW." And: "...it is difficult to predict the needs and circumstances that could arise in the course of the war on terrorism.
torture, human rights, politics

The Torture Trade

2007-07-12T02:11:00.000-07:00

It's common knowledge that torture takes place throughout the world. What may not be as well known is that there's a thriving international market in torture instruments. Moreover, the production and merchandising of these devices is perfectly legal in many countries, including the US. For years now, Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have called on governments to shut down or at least regulate the torture trade. By and large, though, it still flourishes.

Some examples:

Legcuffs, shackles, and handcuffs, all legally sold in and exported by the US. One of the major buyers is Saudi Arabia.

Leg irons. One of the world's major manufacturers is the Spanish Larranaga y Elorza, which exports leg irons to the US and elsewhere under a code which refers to them as "padlocks." By the way, the photo of leg irons is an actual ad used by Florida-based Kejo, Ltd.

Thumbcuffs, often with serrated edges. Offered for sale in China, France, Germany, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the UK, and the US.

Restraint chairs. These chairs secure prisoners at four points: ankles, wrists, shoulders, and chest. The restraints can be progressively tightened. They're used to subdue "unruly" prisoners, but also to interrogate them. In the US, at least one death of a prisoner (Scott Norberg, Madison Jail, Maricopa County, Arizona, 1996) is attributed to them. The UN Committee Against Torture has expressed concern about their use. The chairs are manufactured by Oregon-based AEDEC International, whose CEO told Amnesty International "We're kind of ticklish about selling them to third world countries that don't have human rights because then there is a possibility that they might be abused." But he declined to specify any clients other than the United Arab Emirates (which has a long history of prisoner torture).

High voltage electro-shock stun batons. These are quickly becoming torture instruments of choice. Electric baton and stun gun technology was initially developed in the US, but has now spread across the world. Stun belts, which can deliver an eight-second shock of 50,000 volts, have recently been added to the arsenal. Their jolt pales in comparison to state-of-the-art stun guns, which can hammer out up to 200,000 volts. Stun belts have run across some legal hurtles in the US, but the sale of stun guns are virtually unrestricted in the US, China, Israel, South Africa, and Taiwan. They're sold under misleading codes or labels in European Union nations that have otherwise outlawed them such as the UK and Sweden. The US remains the largest supplier of electro-shock technology to the world. At least 86 US companies manufacture and market these torture devices, selling them legally to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, the United Arab Emirates, and Croatia.

Good work if you can get it. And, given slack or nonexistent laws on the manufacture and sale of torture instruments, you can get it if you try.

torture, human rights, politics

Why Jack Bauer (and Judge Scalia) Aren't Canadian

2007-07-10T03:20:00.000-07:00

Ten days ago I reported on Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Antonin Scalia's impromptu defense of fictional torturer Jack Bauer before an Ottawa gathering of judges. Yesterday's Globe and Mail editorializes about the bizarre and embarrassing outburst. In response to Scalia's passionate "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer for using torture to save Los Angeles?!", the G&M responds: "Uh, yes."

O Canada!

_______

Photo credit: courtesy of the mass entertainment idiots who glamorize violence and make heroes out of thuggish torturers.

torture, human rights, terrorism, politics

Torture and the That's Nothin'! Fallacy

2007-07-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

Remember when you were a kid and swapped stories with your mates about horrible things that had happened to you? The competition typically went something like this. Kid A would tell about getting stung by a bee. Then Kid B would counter with a "That's nothin'! I got stung by two bees once!" Then Kid C would top them both: "Ahhh, that's nothin'! One time, a whole hive of bees came after me!" And so on.

I want to introduce a fallacy in reasoning called the "That's nothin'!" Fallacy (TNF) The TNF is committed when the presumption is made that event A is no longer horrific simply because it's topped in brutality by horrific event B. Getting stung by two bees doesn't mean that getting stung by one isn't bad. But TNF falsely concludes otherwise.

This is such an obvious fallacy that it scarcely needs pointing out--except for the fact that too many people invoke it when it comes to torture. A perfect example of this is in a recent post over at the blog GraniteGrok. The author pooh-poohs claims that stress positions, sexual humiliation, psych ops, and intense heat or cold are forms of torture. Why? Because other techniques are harsher:

"Beatings make my list of torture techniques. So does the chopping off of fingers, limbs and other body parts, gouging of eyes, rape, electric shocks, poisons, medical experimentation, and the like."

When compared to finger-chopping, what's a little sexual humiliation? That's nothin'!

The author then goes on to show that what al-Qaeda does is even worse than this, citing a story about an Iraqi family being forced to eat their own roasted son. "THIS," he concludes, "is true evil. This is true torture." Compared to this, what's a little electric shock or eye-gouging? Nothin'!

One has to ask: what happens to forced cannibalism when something comes along on the horror scale to top it? Eatin' your own kid? That's nothin'!...

The point is that torture ought not to be defined in terms of particular techniques--stress positions aren't torture, but eye-gouging is--because this way of classifying what counts and what doesn't is always susceptible to the TNF slippery slope. Torture is better defined in terms of function--what it does to the victim and what the torturer intends it to do--than in terms of specific ways of torturing. If stress positioning functions as torture, it's torture. Period. This doesn't deny, of course, that the technique of eye-gouging is horrific, much less the forced eating of a child. But it does ensure that some actions aren't disqualified as torturous violations of human rights simply because they're less horrific than others.

torture, al qaida, torture techniques, politics, human rights

Torture in the News

2007-07-09T01:48:00.000-07:00

Lead Story

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. James Taranto warns that granting constitutional protections to Gitmo detainees will actually trample on constitutional rights. (Honest to God, I'm not making this up.) (Hat tip to Comments from Left Field.)

Other News

"Today, you will learn how to torture." Zimbabwean graduate of Robert Mugabe's torture academy recounts his training.

Disappeared. The Kenya-based Muslim Human Rights Forum reports that nearly 80 refugees from the Somalian war are being secretly held in Ethiopia and subject to torture. For a series of films on CIA rendition in the Horn of Africa, click here. (Hat tip to Dear Kitty. Some blog.)

Torture in your own back yard. Human rights coalition in Chicago calls for an end to torture by city cops. Chicago Reader reporter John Conroy chronicles the infliction of torture on criminal suspects here as well as in his book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. It's a sordid, sorry story. Kudos to Conroy for tracking it for almost two decades.

Ugandan blight. The Gulu African Centre for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims reports that it treated nearly 1,200 torture survivors during the past year (May 2006-June 2007). Many of them suffer from PTSD.

A chip off the old ax-block. Torture charges against Charles McArthur Emmanuel, son of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, have been upheld by a US federal judge. Emmanuel is accused of torturing a political detainee in 2002. In the meantime, Papa Charles is on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Justice delayed. Christian von Wernich, Roman Catholic priest and one-time chaplain to Argentine cops, went on trial late last week on charges of "primary complicity" in seven murders and dozens of tortures and abductions during Argentina's "time of trouble" (1976-83).

From the alternative press. "One thing you know for sure when you torture someone..."

torture, human rights, gitmo, terrorism, rendition, politics

Debating the Ethics of Torture Is Like Debating the Ethics of Rape

2007-07-07T02:06:00.000-07:00

There are certain acts which, once one understands their heinous nature, fall outside the boundaries of ethical debate. One can contrive classroom discussions about whether rape, say, or genocide, are always morally wrong--a madman kidnaps you and a woman you've never met. "Rape her!" he orders. "Or I'll kill her!" Or: aliens have landed on earth and given the planet a choice: voluntarily destroy every human being in Rhode Island, or the entire human species will be slaughtered--but these artificial ticking bomb scenarios have little philosophical merit and even less realworld significance. If we play around with them, we do so at our own peril, because even pretending that acts like rape or genocide are sometimes morally acceptable does damage to our deep intuitions that nothing whatsoever can make them so.
Once one understands what torture is, one clearly sees that debates as to whether it can ever be morally defended are stupid or worse. As I've argued in earlier posts,* torture is an act whose aim is to malfigure the self of the victim in the service of the power authorizing the torture. Torture isn't really about intelligence-gathering, although the latter is often a pretense. Torture is about crushing the will of an opponent, destroying her identity, stripping away who and what she is, layer by layer, until what comes out at the end of the process is either a dead corpse or a living one. If dead, no great loss. If living, the torture "survivor" serves the power structure by returning to society as a ghostly warning to all other potential dissenters. And since the living corpse never really leaves the torture chamber, there's very little danger that she'll be anything but compliant. Even after her "release," she'll remain in the hands of torturers: PTSD memories, stress-induced physical ailments, amnesia, panic disorder, and so on. The whole world, as Elaine Scarry points out, will become her torture chamber. Everything, even the simplest, most innocent event--the lighting of a cigarette, eye contact with a stranger, the sound of someone dropping a coffee cup at a bistro--can jumpstart the reliving of torture.
This destruction of the self, this disintegration of the soul, this willful disappearing of the very essence of an individual's personhood, is immoral. Debating the ethics of torture is, therefore, just as irrelevant as debating the ethics of rape or genocide. To not get this is either to misunderstand what torture is all about (stupidity), or to understand but be indifferent or cynically willing to defend torture out of self-interest (moral bankruptcy).
Some ethicists, notably Michael Walzer, Alan Dershowitz, Sam Harris, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, agree that torture is heinous but nonetheless morally justify it by appealing to what's come to be called the "dirty hands" defense. This position argues that the moral obligations of a national leader to protect her citizens may oblige her to authorize actions that are ethically wrong. She oughtn't to rationalize away their immorality. She must recognize that her hands are dirty, confess that her orders were necessary but immoral, and accept responsibility for them. This is what a good leader does: she steps up and takes care of business, even at the expense of her conscience.
But surely this is a pernicious sophistry. On the surface, it concurs with our deep moral repugnance to torture. But in actuality what it does is transform torture into something noble--a distasteful act done for the commonweal--and torturers into heroes who "sacrifice" their good conscience in order to save the rest of us. The dirtier the hands, the louder the confession of guilt, the nobler the sacrifice seems. And, as a bonus, the public confession of the torture-authorizing leader absolves the rest of us from complicity in the torture. We can know that our government is torturing without suffering from any inconvenient twinges of guilt. The President/the Prime Minister/the Generalissimo ordered it, not I! MY hands are clean...
Torture doesn't harvest reliable intelligence. There are other, better ways to gather information. Ticking bomb scenarios, almost always invoked to justify torture, are fictional, not realworld. The use of torture erodes the moral authority of the government that sanctions it, and unnecessarily creates enemies. The only purpose of torture is to destroy selves and demolish wills so that the power structure authorizing torture can maintain itself. And under what possible circumstances can this be morally defended?
Debating the ethics of torture is irrelevant, or worse.
________
*For example, Torture & Identity Malfiguration;
The Soul Is the Prison of the Body;
We Are the Priests of Power;
and The First Blow Changes Everything.

torture, morality, dirty hands, human rights, politics

Torture Perverts Even Hope

2007-07-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

Hope

By Ariel Dorfman

What I am asking is
how can it be
that a father's
joy
a mother's
joy
is knowing
that they
that they are still
torturing
their son?
Which means
that he was alive
five months later
and our greatest
hope
will be to find out
next year
that they're still torturing him
eight months later
_______
From Last Waltz in Santiago, p. 8.

Eine Vernehmung By Any Other Name...

2007-07-05T03:02:00.000-07:00

Americans who defend their President's embrace of "enhanced interrogation" either take a hard-ass approach--"hang the bastards by their balls" (an actual quote, by the way, taken from a comment by one PShannon, March 20, 2007, on the vile blog NewsBusters)--or a more sly doublespeak approach that righteously protests the identification of "enhanced interrogation techniques" with "torture." The bad guys torture, this line goes. Al Qaeda tortures. Saddam Hussein tortured. The Nazis tortured. We Americans--we don't torture. We use enhanced interrogation techniques.

A recent column in Andrew Sullivan's "The Daily Dish" puts the lie to this bit of sophistry. Sullivan notes that just before WWII erupted, the Nazis dreamed up a kind of interrogation they called Vershaefte Vernehmung. It was designed to leave no visible marks on the bodies of its victims, and included techniques such as starvation, sleep deprivation, stress positions and exhaustion exercises, isolation, and dunking in frigid water. If these interrogatory techniques sound familiar, they should. Vershaefte Vernehmung, after all, translates as "enhanced," "intensified," or "sharpened" interrogation.

The next time you hear somebody claim that US-approved "enhanced interrogation" isn't torture, tell them about Vershaefte Vernehmung and ask them if they're really comfortable endorsing techniques used by Nazis.

torture, enhanced interrogation, human rights, detainees, gitmo, cheney, bush

A July 4th Reminder to the Pathetic Moral Dwarves Who Run the United States

2007-07-04T03:42:00.000-07:00

The Founding Fathers weren't the demi-gods American mythology has made them. They were human, with their full share of personal warts and wrinkles and generational blindspots. But one thing's for damn sure: they took honor seriously. If Washington or Adams or Jefferson could see how Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have embraced euphemism-disguised torture as national policy, they'd vomit.
So should we all.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published a wonderful essay in the LA Times back in December 2005, well worth re-reading on this Independence Day, that reminds us of something we ought not forget. During the War of Independence, General Washington, repulsed by the atrocities the British Army was inflicting on soldiers and civilians alike, made the deliberate decision to treat captured British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries decently. "Treat them with humanity," Washington ordered, "and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren."
One Colonel Charles Stuart, stationed in the colonies during the war and witness to the torture and ill-use practiced by the army in which he served, reflected on its backwash in a letter to his father: "Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate."
If honor isn't a motive for Bush, Cheney, Ltd., you'd think national self-interest would be. But apparently the moral deafness of American leaders is matched by their stupidity.
Happy fourth of July. And in between hot dogs and beer and fireworks, pause to consider whether the current national policy of torture is planting an irrevocable hatred of all things American around the world "which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate." And if, like Bush and Cheney, you don't give a damn, pause to think about the kind of future the policy is bequeathing to your kids.
________
Photo: July 4th parade, Copenhagen, Denmark
torture, human rights, bush, cheney, gitmo
fourth of july, july fourth, july 4th

Torture in the News

2007-07-03T03:38:00.000-07:00

Lead Story

U.S. Scares Europeans (& young Americans)

For the 12th time in a year, a significant percentage of polled Europeans see the U.S. as the single biggest threat to world stability.

The latest survey, conducted last month by Harris Research for London Financial Times, revealed that 32% of respondents in Spain, England, Germany, France, and Italy believe that the U.S. is more dangerous than China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Russia. Spain led the pack with 46% giving the U.S. the number one spot.

An idential poll conducted in the States revealed that 35% of American youth in the 16 to 24 age range agree.

Reasons for the high rating included the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture and denial of due process for detainees in U.S. custody. This comes in the wake of revelations that the CIA tried to silence European Union objections to "extraordinary renditions" taking place from European airports and in European airspace.

Other News

A military judge (no less) drops charges against Omar Khadr, held prisoner at Gitmo since he was 15 years old. A pissed-off Pentagon requests a review of the decision.
Trinidad journalist Basil Ince offers a good reflection on Gitmo as the "Achilles heel" of U.S. foreign policy.
Nat Hentoff on President Bush, U.S. generals, an ex-CIA director, and torture.
The ACLU urges Congress to create an "independent and bipartisan" commission to investigate torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody.
UK Telegraph's Tim Shipman reports that even supporters of Vice President Cheney admit he's become the world's "comic book villain" because of his torture policies and contempt for process. An unrepentant Cheney couldn't care less.
Tortured Sri Lankan youth tries to kill himself--take note, everyone who believes that torture stops at the torture chamber.
Chen Guangcheng, blind Chinese pro-life activist, may be close to death after imprisonment and torture.
Ghanian columnist Prize F. W. McApreko asks "Who cares about torture, ill-treatment, and degrading punishment?"
And UK Guardian commentator Peter Thatchell wonders why the European Union plans to roll out the red carpet at an upcoming summit for Zimbabwe's head torturer Robert Mugabe.

torture, gitmo, human rights, politics, terrorism

Torture: A Perverse Mysticism

2007-07-02T04:16:00.000-07:00

Here's the thing about torture: it's a perversion, a caricature, a horrific parody, of reality. It takes the ordinary world in which you and I live and it turns it upside down. In the process, it's not only human beings that get tortured. Intimacy gets tortured too. So does language. Truth. Morality. Democracy. The natural world. Collective memory.

Shockingly, the noblest spiritual aspirations of humans, found in spiritual traditions across the globe, are likewise parodied and perverted by torture. Torture has its own perverse mysticism.

Mystical traditions encourage practitioners to strip away illusion and self-deception in order to discover who they really are. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, for example, distinguished in his writings on mysticism between the "true" self and the "false" self. The false self, Merton said, is composed of layers of cultural conditioning, subjectivisms, temperamental dispositions, egoisms, habits, and social and personal delusions that we frequently associate with the word "personality." Personality, who we are on the surface, is obviously important. But we ought not to identify ourselves totally with it. Underneath it, insists Merton, is the true self: the likeness of the Divine with which we're born, and which constitutes our real identity. This is who we essentially are, he says, although our grasp of this truth is all too frequently blocked because we fail to dig deeper in our self-understanding than personality.

The distinction between true and false self is embraced to one extent or another by all mystical traditions. In order to help aspirants liberate themselves from delusion, mystical schools teach various spiritual disciplines, all of which aim at the annihilation of the false self--or "spiritual poverty," as it's sometimes called--so that awareness of the true self can be attained. The various yogas, meditative and contemplative techniques, solitude and silence, prayerful service to others: these are some of the methods by which Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Hassids, Christians, and Sufis spiritually discipline themselves. Moreover, most mystical traditions stress the importance of gurus--teachers or mentors. Spiritual discipline or ascesis undertaken without guidance is cautioned against as useless or even harmful.

The twentieth-century French mystic Simone Weil calls the disciplined spiritual annihilation of false self "decreation." Decreation is the process of making something created (the contingent personality) pass into the uncreated (the innate likeness of eternal God). She contrasts it with "destruction," the process of making something created pass into "nothingness," and calls it a "blameworthy substitute" for decreation. By "nothingness," Weil seems to mean the reduction of a human being into the status of an inert object. This can be done most obviously through killing, which instantly transforms a person into a corpse-thing. But it can also be done by torture. Torture is a destructive parody of decreation.

In previous posts (here, here, here, here, and here), I've explored the ways in which torture aims at the "malformation" of its victims. The torturer is a perverse spiritual guide or guru whose goal is to lead the torture victim to "truth" and "freedom." "Just tell us what you know. Unburden yourself. Free yourself from the secrets that are causing you so much grief." The "ascesis" through which this perverse freedom is attained--an ascesis in which the torturer-guru is a master--is physical and psychological torment: the brutal stripping away of the self, layer by layer, until the victim loses all sense of time and place, self-identity, trust in other humans and in existence itself. "There is no God, no you, no way out--no liberation--except total oblivion."

Step by step, the victim-initiate is led deeper into the mystery of torture, ever closer to that vanishing point in which the self destructs and is replaced by nothingness. The torturer-guru is too experienced to rush things. He knows that the spiritual discipline he practices must proceed gradually, lest it be too much too soon for the victim. Better to destruct by killing the soul than the body. Body death is clumsy. But soul-death--ah, soul-death, utter destruction: this perverse mockery of the mystical annihilation of self is the masterpiece toward which he aims. So with every new "interrogation," the pain is ratcheted up a bit until eventually all that's left is a human caricature, a shell, a nothingness, an unself.

"You're a fucking piece of shit. You're nothing. You're dead." The mantra of the torturer, proclaiming the nirvana of the destroyed, the destiny of the tortured.

_______

Merton speaks about true and false self throughout his entire corpus. A good introduction is James Martin's recent Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints. Weil discusses decreation and destruction especially in Grace and Gravity. Photo credit: Davis Lisboa, Fragmented Self Portrait, 2000. www.davislisboa.com

torture, gitmo, human rights, politics, terrorism

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thinks the Scales of Justice Tip in Favor of Torture

2007-06-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

For pity's sake. How much longer will the people of the United States of America continue to tolerate the suited thugs that run their government and the gowned thugs that claim to dispense justice?!*

Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, the highest and last court of appeal in the land, got into a revealing verbal scuffle with a Canadian judge at a recent Ottawa conference. During a panel on terrorism, torture, and the law, the Canadian judge quipped: "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra 'What would Jack Bauer do?'" (This, of course, refers to the hero of the popular television show 24. Agent Jack Bauer regularly tortures bad guys to save the U.S. from imminent disaster. The show could just as well be titled Ticking Bomb.)

Okay. To be honest, the Canadian judge's observation (although true enough) was probably also intended to provoke Scalia by criticizing the uber-conservative agenda he pushes on the bench. But does the good Justice rise above the dig? Nope. Instead, he incredibly defends Bauer's MO of torturing terrorists week in and week out. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles," Scalia retorted. "He saved thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer [for torturing]?" Scalia asked this question of his fellow jurists, but then (true to form) jumped in with his own answer. "I don't think so," he said. "So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes [for example, right to a jury trial]. And ought we to believe in these absolutes."

And so ends Torture Awareness Month, with an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court declaring that torture, if done under the "right" conditions and for the "right" reasons, ought not to be criminal. In fact, in the best Hollywood style, torture's downright heroic.

Holy Bill of Rights, Batman!

_______

*I don't mean to imply that all suited politicians and gowned jurists in the States are thugs. It just seems that, lately, many of them are--especially the ones in high places.

torture, gitmo, human rights, politics, terrorism

Torture Awareness Month Ends, and the Movers and Shakers Couldn't Care Less

2007-06-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the final day of June, designated by the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition International and Amnesty International as Torture Awareness Month. Embedded within the month (June 26) was the UN-appointed International Day in Support of Victims and Survivors of Torture.

Computer searches for references over the past 30 days to "torture awareness month" from major U.S. newspapers and heavily trafficked high-end blogs reveal just how much of a shit was given:

Baltimore Sun: 0 references

Boston Globe: 0 references

Chicago Tribune: 0 references

Christian Science Monitor: 0 references

Los Angeles Times: 0 references

Miami Herald: 0 references

New York Times: 0 references

Seattle Times: 0 references

Wall Street Journal: 0 references

Washington Post: 0 references

Okay. We expect silence like this from conventional media. That's why we have progressive bloggers to fill in the gaps. So here are some data from a random selection of big box left-leaning blogs:

Boing Boing: 0 references

Crooks & Liars: 0 references

Daily Kos: 0 references

Majikthise: 0 references (although Lindsay has been mourning the tragic loss of her father this week and hence not posting)

Pandagon: 0 references

The Thinking Blog: 0 references

Think Progress: 0 references (although two very good postings on torture-related news)

But there were a few organizations (almost all of them religious) that took Torture Awareness Month with the gravity it deserves. Kudos to organizations such as Pax Christi, Pace e bene, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Santa Clara Council of Churches, and the hundreds of low-end, small box bloggers who remembered and witnessed. You can get a good idea of who they are by googling "torture awareness month." They may be tiny blips on the blogosphere radar screen, but they're keepin' it real.

By the way: how many people do you reckon were tortured in the time it took to read this post? I dunno, because figures are obviously hard to get. But at least one or two is a safe bet, don't you think?

torture, gitmo, human rights, politics, terrorism

The Torturer Speaks

2007-06-29T04:04:00.000-07:00

"Torture is the most ancient of the fine arts, older than the so-called art of love, and certainly richer and more varied. The art of love is nothing but a dozen positions and a couple of dozen refinements, but torture has a thousand varieties. All animals can couple, but man is the only animal that tortures. The essential ingredient of torture could not be more simple: all you need is a collective, constituted group operating on a man in isolation. The group, as we know, is stronger than the individual, and torture is the first way of proving it. Torture is also the first of the experimental sciences. All it calls for is a pair of bare hands and a gang to hold the patient down and assist in the experiment. Furthermore it is an art which, like all the primitive arts, dance, song, story-telling, poetry, requires nothing but the body. As for the art of love, well, the zones of pleasure are very much fewer than the zones of pain, and pain is more intense and can last much longer. Pleasure is not the opposite of pain; it is a different thing altogether, poorer and more limited."
This excerpt (pp. 299-300) is from the sadly-neglected novel Incognito by Romanian author Petru Dumitriu. Dumitriu, who experienced WWII and the post-war Soviet bloc firsthand, published the novel in 1962. His novel is semi-autobiographical.
The speaker is one Major Bulz, described by the novel's protagonist as "the only torturer I have known at all well." Major Bulz's left hand is deformed: webbed and fused fingers. "He hated the world for having given him a hand like that."
In just a few lines, Dumitriu deftly captures some of the characteristic features of both torture and torturers: the utter simplicity of torture as an "art," the multiple ways to cause pain, the torturer's grudge against the world that fuels his activities in the torture chamber.
torture, gitmo, human rights, politics, terrorism

Torture in the News

2007-06-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

Top Story
President Blows Off Students Expressing Concern About Torture

"We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants." This from a letter presented to the President on Monday by 50 of the nation's brightest high school seniors. The students, selected as members of this year's national Presidential Scholars, handed the statement to President Bush during a photo op in the East Room. Bush, apparently taken by surprise, glanced through the letter and then dismissed it with the familiar mantra that "the United States does not torture and that we value human rights." (For more on "the United States does not torture," see the bottom story in this segment of Torture in the News.)
Three of the kids explain why they confronted the President in this CNN interview. Wow!

Also in the News

Torture Continues in Nepal, Zimbabwe, and the Ukraine

In a report released Tuesday, Advocacy Forum Nepal, a human rights NGO, announced that the Nepalese Army and Nepalese Maoist rebels are equal opportunity torturers. The AFN has recorded over 1,300 new cases since April 2006. In that same time period, nearly 28% of detainees claim they were tortured, with minors suffering the worse abuse.
According to the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, torture is on the upswing for the third straight year in Zimbabwe, with 300 alleged cases occuring so far this year. Along with Angola, Zimbabwe is the only Southern African Development Community (SADC) that refuses to sign the International Convention on Torture. There are 14 nations in the SADC.
You most definitely don't want to be arrested in the Ukraine. According to reports filed by the UN Committee Against Torture, the Council of Europe, and the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Ukrainians are regularly subjected to torture from the moment of their arrest to their subsequent conviction and imprisonment. As detainees, they're tortured to elicit "confessions." As convicted criminals, they're tortured just because guards enjoy ass-kicking.

UK Attorney General Calls for Investigation

Lord Goldsmith, the UK Attorney General who will soon vacate his post, earlier this week called for an inquiry into allegations that British troops stationed in Iraq have tortured detainees. Goldsmith's call comes on the heels of the acquittal of members of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment accused of prisoner abuse.

More Revelations of Cheney's Involvement in Prisoner Abuse

In Part II of their series on the Vice (and I do mean vice) Presidency of Dick Cheney, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker chronicle Cheney's hardline defense of torture in the war on terror that led to the administration's notorious distinction between illegal torture and permissible cruelty in the treatment of detainees.
(Hat tip to Kim)
torture, gitmo, human rights, politics, terrorism

Bloggers on Torture: Volume 2

2007-06-27T03:42:00.000-07:00

Dr. James Benjamin at a fantastic blog called The Left End of the Dial V2.0 offers an equally fantastic post entitled Torture: A Tentative Definition and Outline of Causative Factors. The post is an abbreviation of a longer scholarly article that's currently in press.

As an aggression researcher, James is interested in the psychological and social factors that contribute to the emergence of torture. He closely examines a number of causal possibilities, dividing them into "distal," or longterm background factors that influence one's readiness to engage in violence, and "proximate," or immediate, situational ones. Very insightful stuff!

Photographic Appendix

D.W. Horstkoetter, a seminarian at Union Theological and blogmaster of flying.farther, participated in public witness yesterday to commemorate the International Day in Support of Torture Victims. Check out the wonderful photos he took. (They may take some time to load, so be patient. They're well worth the wait.) Thanks, D.W.!

The Open Invitation to contribute to the

Bloggers on Torture Project

still stands!

Post your thoughts on the question

"What is torture, and is it necessarily immoral?"

(or any variant of said question),

let me know, and the Maiden will link to it.

Bloggers on Torture: Volume 1

torture, gitmo, human rights, politics, terrorism

Speaking of Disappear: Did you Know that Today Is Torture Awareness Day?

2007-06-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

What? You didn't know? You haven't heard?

Yeah. How 'bout that, huh?

Today's the tenth "International Day in Support of Victims of Torture." It was designated by the UN General Assembly as an annual commemoration of the ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture (20 years ago today). But apparently not too many, including the United Nations, give a rat's ass. You won't hear about it from the mainstream media, and the UN didn't even bother to put it on this year's calendar.

Disappeared. The International Day in Support of Desaparecidos is now itself a desaparecido.

Almost disappeared, that is. The good folks at Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition have events scheduled in Washington DC. Take a look at their web page and sign on to their petition to repeal the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

And after you do that, start making every day Torture Awareness Day in your local community. Check the links in the sidebar of this blog. They have lots of good ideas to help you get started. Don't let torture awareness slide down the chupadero.

torture, terrorism, human rights, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Military Commissions Act

Torturespeak: "To Be Disappeared"

2007-06-26T04:27:00.000-07:00

The language of torture is uncanny. As Marguerite Feitlowitz observes in her brilliant A Lexicon of Terror, torture rips "benign domestic nouns" from their conventional context and appropriates them as vocabulary for its own perverse discourse. Suddenly, words which are either neutral or positive take on sinister connotations. Hence the eeriness of torturespeak.

Take "disappear," for example.* In conventional discourse, it's a relatively innocent word. At most, it occasionally indicates frustration or puzzlement: "My keys have simply disappeared!" But in torturespeak, "disappear" becomes a fear-inspiring transitive verb. It's not simply something that happens to my car keys or my wallet. It becomes an act--or, even more uncannily, an unact--that's deliberately done to human beings: "She was disappeared."

Torturespeak's appropriation of "disappear" originated in Argentina during the horrible years of its Dirty War in which upwards of 30,000 people "disappeared." The military authorities used it to acknowledge that people were vanishing--they came to be called desaparecidos--but to deny any complicity. As Argentine Army general-in-chief Roberto Viola said, desaparecidos were people who were "absent forever." They vanished because it was their "destiny" to vanish. But everyone knew that this was mockery. What Viola clearly meant was that the miliary would create a destiny of disappearance for anyone who dared to get in its way. Malcontents would vanish into a chupadero, a vortex into which people get sucked. Anyone falling into a chupadero--a torture chamber--became a chupado, someone who has been sucked down a drain, someone who's been disappeared.

How strange, how unsettling, to hear this kind of language. How can a person be disappeared? The phrase connotes utter erasure, vanishment, dissolution, ceasing-to-be. And it suggests that the disappearance was sucked-down-a-drain sudden--poof! That a vibrant human being could be here one moment and totally gone the next without a trace: how can the human mind wrap itself around such a thing? The magician makes coins, rabbits, and scarfs disappear. We understand this. But to make humans disappear? This reduces them to inanimate, impotent objects, pliable stage props. We uneasily sense that some kind of category mistake is being made, that we're using language appropriate to objects to refer to persons. And the result is a jarring, uncanny dissonance.

And yet this is, of course, the whole point of torturespeak: to malform discourse, just as it malforms victims, in order to intimidate and terrorize. Language itself becomes a torture instrument, reminding those of us who haven't been disappeared to watch ourselves lest the same mysterious fate befall us. And for the torture victims themselves? Torturespeak adds psychological despair to their physical agony. Time and again, torturers tell their victims "You don't exist. You don't exist. You're no one. You've been forgotten by everyone on the outside. You don't exist."

This language erases the victim, slowly and painfully. Torturespeak's goal isn't merely to forestall the victim's future. It's to warp reality so that she never really existed at all. General Viola said it well. When a person is disappeared, she becomes "absent forever"--past, present, and future. She never was. Poof. Even if she manages to crawl out of the torture chamber, to claw her way back up the chupadero, her self, her personality, her memories--everything which identifies her--are gone. It's as if she never was.

______

*Today, in the U.S., examples of other once-benign words come to mind: interrogation, enhanced, extraordinary, rendition, habeas corpus, security, and so on.

torture, human rights, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, terrorism

Bloggers on Torture: Volume 1

2007-06-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, I wrote a number of bloggers inviting them to post on this question: "What is torture, and is it necessarily immoral?" Several have already posted reflections, and I want to share them with the rest of you. I'll link to more as they come in.

It's curious that almost all the bloggers who've responded so far come from a religious perspective. Only one "secular" blogger has weighed in. Wonder what that means...

Anyway, here are the first responses. They're really quite good. Thanks to everyone who's already contributed, and thanks in advance to those who will. It's an open invitation, so feel free to weigh in.

In one of the finest short pieces on torture from a Christian perspective I've ever read, Thom Stark of Semper Reformanda concludes that there's no converting the imperial pathology that gives rise to torture. But it can be creatively resisted by nurturing alternative communities with countercultural values. Following Bill Cavanaugh (who really ought to be required reading for all Christians), Tom sees this as "eucharistic resistance." (By the way, I've been a big fan of Thom's blog ever since I ran across it. It's prophetic, thoughtful, and technologically hip.)

Orthodox priest Father Stephen over at Glory to God for All Things condemns the act of torture as unequivocally contrary to Christian belief, especially when performed in the name of religion. But he makes a distinction between torture and torturer, insisting that while the act is sinful, the agent is never totally removed from contrition and salvation. Father Stephen's point is well worth remembering. Otherwise, it's too easy to demonize torturers, who in their own way are victims too.

In Anglican Resistance, Father Bill Carroll offers a hauntingly beautiful sermon-meditation on torture and idolatry. Also influenced by Bill Cavanaugh, Father Carroll argues that the Eucharist is a memorial (in part) of the torturous breaking of a man which in turn restores, rather than destroys, communicants.

Two bloggers, Ben Myers from Faith & Theology and Maha from Mahablog, chose to respond to my question with a comment rather than a full post. Since their comments are relatively short, I reproduce them both here.

Ben Myers:

I think the UN Convention Against Torture provides a reliable definition. In general terms, I'd describe torture as the state-sanctioned treatment of detainees in cruel, inhuman or degrading ways.From a human perspective and also from a Christian perspective, it's clear that torture can never be acceptable or justifiable under any circumstances whatsoever. The American theologian George Hunsinger has put it like this: "If torture is not evil, then nothing is evil." I think that sums it up precisely.

Maha:

For a definition, this is from a dictionary: "Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of coercion or punishment." I would add psychological pain as well, such as by means of sensory deprivation or isolation. Yes, it is immoral. One could make a "greater good" argument--that torture is not immoral if it saves other people--but all objective evidence I know about show that information by torture is nearly always wrong. People torture other people because they want to. They are gratified by it. That's sick.

torture, human rights, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, terrorism

Torture and the Gaze

2007-06-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

On January 12, 1977, Argentine student Alicia Partnoy was "disappeared." Uniformed Army personnel came to her home and whisked her away to a concentration camp named La Escuelita, the Little School. She was a prisoner there for nearly 4 months, and was then transferred to a "regular" prison, where she was held captive for two-and-a-half more years.

The Little School specialized in torture. One of its most destroying rules was that all prisoners had to be blindfolded at all times, 24/7. If a prisoner felt his or her blindfold slipping, a guard had to be summoned to tighten it. Failure to do so brought swift and harsh punishment.

Blindfolding or hooding is a commonplace technique of modern torture. It's been used on both political and criminal prisoners in almost all of the 150-plus countries that have been caught torturing during the last 15 years: in Northern Ireland, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo (although the US Army now "officially" bans hooding, the CIA doesn't), Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Mexico...the list goes on and on.

The obvious purpose of blindfolding or hooding is to cause psychological distress and physical discomfort. A blinded prisoner is disoriented spatially and temporally, experiences intense isolation, powerlessness, and anxiety, and in general feels utterly vulnerable. Additionally, hooding overheats the prisoner and makes it difficult for him or her to breathe--especially when the hooded head is drenched with multiple buckets of water (a common torture practice, refined recently by the technique of waterboarding).

Blinding tortured prisoners, then, makes them more pliable, less likely to revolt or rebel or resist interrogation. If prisoners are blindfolded around the clock, as at La Escuelita, it also has the bonus of protecting the identity of their tormentors.

But I think there's another reason torturers so frequently cover the eyes of their victims: shame. My guess is that all but the most hardened torturers--and occasionally, perhaps, even them--experience shame at what they do to other human beings. Usually, the shame is repressed, underneath consciousness. Sometimes, perhaps, it comes rushing to the surface, motivating the unexpected and surreal acts of kindness on the part of tormentors that many torture survivors write about: a stick of gum, a loosening of the rope, a murmured word of sympathy.

There's something about the human gaze that's inescapable, isn't there? We look into a human face, we note the vitality of the eyes staring back at us, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we stand in the presence of a being--a fellow human--to whom we owe respect and compassion. Her face, her eyes, bore into us, demanding from us an ethical response. Her face, as the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas puts it, traces "where God passes." Regardless of whether one takes Levinas literally or metaphorically, his point is clear: seeing the face of the other puts us in a profoundly ethical space that elicits from us recognition of the other as worthy of our moral consideration. If we fail to live up to this invitation, the other's eyes judge us. So the eyes are the windows of both the other's soul and ours. If we abuse her, we see the silent recrimination in them, and see ourselves as falling morally short. We feel shame. The gaze of the tormented in turn torments us. This may be part of the reason guards can fly into rages when prisoners, refusing to deferentially lower their gaze, stare straight into their eyes.

You don't need to be a philosopher to get the point. All of us have had the unpleasant experience of having to face people to whom we've been unfair or surly--a spouse, a child, a colleague--and we feel ourselves naked and exposed under their gaze. In fact, many of them notice our discomfort, and out of kindness turn their gaze away from us as we stumble through our apologies. Moreover, "conscience" is at least in part a "what if I'm seen by someone" constraint, akin to the uncanny experience of feeling watched ("I feel as if somebody's staring at the back of my head!") when we're doing something we know to be shameful. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who works with the criminally insane, notes that serial killers frequently mutilate the eyes of their victims because they can't stand being "seen" and judged by their victims. If Levinas is correct, all of us desire to avoid the look of the other whom we're mistreating.

Fortunately for our and society's moral health, most of us simply can't avoid the face to face encounter with the other. His or her gaze calls us to account. But torturers can. Torturers can transform persons with reproachful eyes into anonymous mannequins with erased faces. They become less than persons--creatures that no longer eyes that bore into our souls--and can therefore be beaten, mocked, fucked, humiliated, and if necessary killed without the torturer feeling the shame that under normal circumstances would paralyze him. And when the rest of us become bystanders who tolerate the torture of others, we protect ourselves from the gaze by hooding victims with labels: terrorist, scum, fanatic.

Is it any surprise that the hood has become the de facto international symbol for torture?

torture, human rights, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, terrorism

Torture in the News

2007-06-23T02:07:00.000-07:00

Holy Grail of Torture?

The Pentagon is set to start issuing a new nonlethal weapon, the "Active Denial System" (ADS) to troops. ADS is a cutting edge "crowd control" weapon that shoots out millimeter rays (similar to microwaves, but smaller) which penetrate the first 1/64th of an inch of skin. They cause intense pain to the target, but (according to the weapon's developers) no longterm damage. David Hambling, who monitors nonlethal weaponry, worries that there are all sorts of ways--aka torture--that a gizmo like this could be "misused."

(Hat tip to Pandagon)

Fort Bragg Meets Gitmo

There's now some hard evidence to link Fort Bragg's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school and Gitmo. In a document obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act, the former chief of interrogation at Gitmo (whose name has been blacked-out) says that his guys and gals were taught interrogation techniques by SERE instructors. This is a big deal, because SERE is a training program in which students (usually Army Rangers) are "captured" and "interrogated" by mock bad guys. The training is supposed to harden up future combat soldiers who one day might be captured by real enemies, and it includes techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions, and sexual humiliation. Carol Darby, spokesperson for Fort Bragg's Army Special Ops Command, denies that SERE teaches interrogation techniques, but admits that the SERE school training is "sensitive"--meaning that what goes on in it is secret.

(Hat tip to Salon)

Psychologists Do Their Bit for Freedom

A couple of psychologists working for the CIA and associated with SERE have been teaching how to "reverse-engineer" the "survival skills" taught at SERE--which basically means how to apply what's been learned about how to crack people through torture to the interrogation of "terrorists," "insurgents," and other enemies. Dozens of civilian psychologists have sent an official complaint to the American Psychological Association about the participation of these two members of the profession in "the development and migration of abusive interrogation techniques, techniques which the International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled 'tantamount to torture.'"

(Hat tip again to Salon)torture, human rights, terrorism

The Camel's Nose

2007-06-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

Somebody calling himself The Barefoot Bum and describing himself as an "anarcho-humanist" makes some shockingly nonhumanist observations about Muslims. I offer them here to illustrate how even "progressives" can go on rants that demonize their targets and legitimize disdainful attitudes that encourage torture. My bet is that the author of this post doesn't consciously condone torture. But when you characterize an entire group of people as "pedophile worshipers," "genital mutilators," and "hand choppers," you not only drop any pretense of finesse or fairness. (It's reminiscent of Bush's "evil-doer" blanket description, isn't it?) You also invite brutality.
With progressives like this, who needs neo-con imperialists?

Update: A commentator on The Barefoot Bum's red herring response to me complains that I treated The Barefoot Bum unfairly. "[I]t was improper...to have so selectively quoted you without a bit more context," he wrote. "She could've at least used a whole sentence." Okay. Below, I quote (with apologies to my readers for assaulting them with this) the concluding paragraphs of The Barefoot Bum's offending post. They're representative of the whole thing.
What's important in all this is not this single ranting post written by a single ranting blogger. What's important is that we now live in a culture that gives moral permission for this kind of vileness to be said publicly and unblushingly. In order for governments to torture with relative impunity, their citizenry must be reshaped to see as acceptable what an earlier generation would've (at least publicly) dismissed as reprehensible. I'll post more on this refashioning of moral constraints next week. But for now, a few "whole sentences."

"Get this straight: Until the vast majority of hand-choppers Muslims drag themselves into the twenty-first century (or even the eighteenth century), we're going to intentionally provoke them and show them disrespect. We're doing this intentionally because the mere existence of this misogynistic, totalitarian, gay-hating culture/religion is an offense against the sensibilities of the civilized world. We'd be just as happy to let the Muslim world rot in peace (keeping the doors of Western society open to anyone who develops that crucial second brain cell and realizes that Islam is a disgusting offense to human decency) until they drown in their own medieval bullshit, but that ain't gonna happen. We can't just cut the world in half. Protest and we'll laugh with glee, because we know we're getting your goat. Act with violence and we'll retaliate. Go to war andwe'll fight back.We're not going back to the ninth century. Period. We're not going back to intolerance, misogyny, sex-hatred, and religiously-mandated stupidity. We're not going to submit. Ever. We won't submit peacefully: You'll have to fight. And if you fight us and [sic] you'll lose: we're stronger and smarter, and you have not even begun to test our will. Mistake civilization and tolerance for softness at your peril. The contemptible slaves that are Muslims have no fucking clue what a free people are capable of."

_____
Hat tip to Siobhan!

torture, human rights, terrorism

Apparently, the House of Representatives Wants Educated Torturers

2007-06-22T05:31:00.001-07:00

Last night, the US House defeated the McGovern Amendment to cut funding to the School of the Americas.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the vote was 209 in favor and 214 against.

So it's Thanksgiving at the gates of Fort Benning once again this year!

Update: Over at Levellers, Michael Westmoreland-White has an excellent post about the vote, complete with a link to the rollcall. Take a look. Contact your representative.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Bloggers on Torture: An Open Invitation

2007-06-22T05:20:00.000-07:00

Seems to me that some of the best social, political, philosophical, and religious commentary going these days come from bloggers (okay, a lot of crap comes from bloggers too). So I've been wandering in blogland inviting their thoughts on this question:

"What is torture, and is it necessarily immoral?"

As the responses get posted, I'll link to them here at Death and the Maiden. This is an open invitation, so if I haven't yet got around to writing you a personal note, you shouldn't wait. Post your thoughts, and feel free to pass the invitation on to others. Since the politicians and the professional academics and the media talking heads for the most part don't want to deal with the topic of torture, let's start the conversation ourselves.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Torture as Policy

2007-06-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

In a September 2006 interview in the Oval Office, President Bush insists that what the rest of the world is calling "torture" in fact is legal. "What this government has done is to take steps to protect you and your family...Whatever we have done is legal...I'm not going to tell you specifically what's done, because I don't want the enemy to adjust...I'm comfortable the American people understand that..."
Watch the entire interview:

Torture as Porn

2007-06-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Isolation as Torture

2007-06-21T04:09:00.000-07:00

"...if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds -- physical or mental -- produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting."
George Monbiot argues that solitary confinement accomplishes the end towards which torturers strive.
torture, human rights, terrorism

Torture Is a Weapon, Not an Interrogation Technique

2007-06-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

How often must it be said? Torture isn't an effective interrogation technique. People who think otherwise are just plain wrong. They've been watching too many Diehard movies and 24 episodes. Information gleaned from torture is notoriously unreliable. Either it's fragmentary, or it's dated, or it's fiction.

So why do nations and terrorist groups and prison systems (keep in mind that the vast majority of torture victims are criminal, not political, prisoners) continue to torture? No doubt part of the reason is the mistaken assumption that torture is an efficient intelligence-gathering technique. But the primary reason, as Naomi Klein pointed out a couple of years ago, is intimidation. A nation that tortures sends out a clear signal: don't fuck with us, because we're crazy. We'll strap you down and shove an electric cattle prod up your ass. We're crazy.

Torture is a weapon of deterrence. The government that makes use of it hopes it will terrorize enemies foreign and domestic.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Today's the Day to Shut Down the School of the Americas! PLEASE: Call, Fax, E-mail Your Congressperson!

2007-06-20T04:42:00.000-07:00

From SOA WatchUrgent Action Alert! June 20, 2007
Congress Votes on a Funding Cut to the SOA/WHINSEC Today and We are Close to Winning!

Take Action - Call your Representative to ask her/him to

Vote YES on the SOA/WHINSEC Amendment Now!

As early as this afternoon, Representatives Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and John Lewis of Georgia will introduce an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill to cut funding for the School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC)! Tomorrow, this weekend, and next week you can relax, but we need you to make calls and send faxes NOW, even if you have already made a call. House Representatives often make decisions based on the volume of calls, so let's all call our Representatives and even call a few more!

The vote will happen today, possibly as late as 9 or 10 p.m. Keep an eye out for another email from SOA Watch - we'll let you know as soon as debate begins. You should be able to view or listen to that House debate on C-Span. (At the bottom of the page, click on "Live Stream")

It's very important that you continue to contact Congress today through telephone calls and faxes to let Members know they have constituents who support human rights and the closing of the SOA/ WHINSEC. See below for a sample script.

Click here to Email/Fax your Representative Now!

It only takes a minute! (Be sure to click the "Send a Fax" box to have the fax sent)Call Congress at 202-224-3121 Now!Please take a few minutes today to call the DC office of your Representative through the Capitol Hill Switchboard at 202-224-3121. Ask to speak with the foreign affairs legislative assistant. Calls to the DC office of your Representative are the most effective tool to make sure your voice is heard this week, so please take the time to call your Representative! We are hearing that the volume of calls you are making is overloading the House Switchboard number so if you cannot get through, please call their office directly. You can look up their phone number by accessing the Clerk of the House phone directory and note that all phone numbers have a "202" area code. Keep the calls coming and make a call every few hours before the vote happens on Wednesday afternoon!!!Here is a suggested message for you to convey:

"I am calling Representative ________ to urge her/him to vote YES on the McGovern amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill. This amendment is a cut in funding for the School of the Americas/ WHINSEC. New information indicates that WHINSEC has allowed known human rights abusers to instruct and receive training at the school. The governments of Costa Rica, Argentina and Uruguay have made public announcements they will no longer send students to the school, citing the negative image and history of this institution. Voting YES on this amendment sends a positive human rights message to Latin America and will help to improve the U.S. image abroad. As an elected official in Washington D.C., I hope you will represent me and vote YES on any amendment in the House that would cut funding for the school."

It's been a year since our last vote in Congress, and it's the work of so many people struggling for justice in the Americas that has gotten us to where we are today.

DON'T SLOW DOWN NOW! We are so close.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Torture in the News

2007-06-20T03:05:00.000-07:00

Seymour Hirsch explains how trying to investigate torture at Abu Ghraib killed the career of a U.S. Army general.

A recent LA Times editorial asks: Will the CIA continue to subject prisoners to what President Bush demurely calls "alternative" interrogation techniques that may border on torture?"

Mark Danner reflects on the rhetoric of torture.

Freshman Senator (D-OH) Sherrod Brown regrets voting last year to approve the Military Commissions Act, or Torture Bill.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Seriously: It's Time to Shut Down the School of the Assassins

2007-06-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

Once again, US Rep. James P. McGovern is trying to push through federal legislation that will close the notorious School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC, in a clumsy bureaucratic attempt to salvage its reputation). The School of the Americas, located at Georgia's Fort Benning, has been training thugs for a couple of generations now in the fine art of "enhanced interrogation." Its graduates have gone on to man death squads and torture teams throughout Central and South America, and now the Middle East.

Please click here to send your congressperson a letter urging him or her to support McGovern's latest effort to close down this horrible place. Its existence is just one more example of state-sponsored--and tax-funded--torture.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Torture & Property Rights

2007-06-19T04:53:00.001-07:00

If we listen to the testimony of torture survivors, remarkable patterns emerge. It makes no difference if the setting is in Asia, the Americas, Europe, or Africa: torturers frequently refer to their victims as "property." "Nobody knows where you are. You've been disappeared. Even God doesn't know where you are. You belong to us now. You're ours!"

I was reminded of this again by SteveG, who operates an interesting blog called Philosophers' Playground. Yesterday, SteveG asked his readers what they thought of a passage from John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government that bestows property rights on anyone who manipulates natural resources. For example, hunters have a natural right to their quarry because (1) they've taken great pains to bag it, and (2) the quarry, in its "natural state," is common--that is, no one's possession--and thus rightfully belongs to anyone willing to exert himself. Here's the full passage SteveG quotes:

Thus this law of reason makes the deer that Indian's who hath killed it; it is allowed to be his goods, who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before it was the common right of every one. And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind, who have made and multiplied positive laws to determine property, this original law of nature, for the beginning of property, in what was before common, still takes place; and by virtue thereof, what fish any one catches in the ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind; or what ambergrise any one takes up here, is by the labour that removes it out of that common state nature left it in, made his property, who takes that pains about it. And even amongst us, the hare that any one is hunting, is thought his who pursues her during the chase: for being a beast that is still looked upon as common, and no man's private possession; whoever has employed so much labour about any of that kind, as to find and pursue her, has thereby removed her from the state of nature, wherein she was common, and hath begun a property.

Now, I'm certainly no philosopher, and I have only a laymaiden's acquaintance with Locke. But this passage got me thinking about the torturer's claim to "own" his victim. At first glance, it seems both preposterous and wicked: preposterous because human beings aren't raw material for the taking. Individuals "own" themselves. They have exclusive property rights over their own destinies; wicked, because it treats individuals as if they were objects, thereby violating their autonomy.

But from the torturer's perverse perspective, an appeal to Locke's claim makes good sense. People are common property, there for the plucking by any authority or state with the gumption to take them and mold them into good, productive commodities--or, er, "citizens." They are raw material which become state property when the state goes to the labor of manipulating them for the "common good"--security, harmony, peace, strength, power, and so on. Most of the raw material is tractable and easily manipulated by conventional means such as the media and public education. But some of it is resistant. That's where the peculiar skills of the torturer come in. He's a specialist. It's his job to fashion recalcitrant raw human material into something that's of value to the authority or state for which he works. When he does this, acting as he does as an agent of the state, he exercises a vicarious ownership over the raw material his labor is malforming. He is, if you will, a steward.

The curious thing, though, is that the way in which the torturer adds value to and establishes ownership over the raw material he works with is by destructing it. Physical and psychological fragmentation, erosion of will, breaking of the spirit, and haunting of the memory are the means by which the commodity he hopes to end up with--an utterly compliant "citizen" whose wraith-like presence in the general public is an uncanny and unsettling warning to others--comes off the assembly line.

______

Photo credit: George Segal, "The Tunnel"

torture, human rights, terrorism

Torture Fucking

2007-06-18T01:25:00.000-07:00

Torture is a caricature of the everyday world. Everything in the world of torture gets inverted. A coerced confession of something you didn't do becomes truth. Guilt rather than innocence becomes the normative presumption. Torturers become heroes, because they do what they do to protect the rest of us. The tortured become villains, either because they're guilty (the normative presumption) or because, if "exonerated" and released, they are unwelcome reminders of something dark and dirty we don't want to think about. Their sheer presence haunts us.

One of the most troubling caricatures in the world of torture centers around intimacy. The language and act of physical love are twisted into the language of brutality and agonizing, humiliating physical treatment. Torture victims are inflicted with overt sexual abuse--cattle prods up the anus, gang-rape, sodomization--or more vaguely threatened with tough guy sexual metaphors--"we're going to fuck you up real good."

And the threats are, generally, good. Women and men--but especially women--are repeatedly raped and sodomized with both male penises and inanimate objects. Prisoners are bound in sexually humiliating positions. Algerian prisoners tortured in Paris in 1958, for example, were regularly "spitted": wrists bound to ankles, a metal bar behind knees, ass-up (and vulnerable), suspended in mid-air. "We're going to test your blood pressure before buggering you," one of them was told by a torturer.[1]

Torturers, like perverse lovers, pay special attention to the genitalia, especially when shocking their victims. Ostensibly, this is because the genitals are especially sensitive to pain. But there are other parts of the body just as easily hurt. Attention to the genitals is obsessional with torturers. It's fueled by a far deeper motive than maximizing pain.

Prisoners who escape physical rape are often psychically raped through sexual humiliation. The Abu Ghraib revelations of coerced simulations of coitus and sodomy among prisoners, panties draped over prisoners' heads, female guards mockingly grabbing prisoners' penises or baring their breasts: the foreplay, the cocktease, the 2nd base, of torture. Argentine torture survivor Jacobo Timerman recalls that prisoners were often forced to shout "I masturbate!" [2]

Incredibly, favored prisoners are sometimes offered sex as rewards for their cooperation or as bizarre gestures of pity. Timerman remembers an occasion when he received such an invitation from a "benevolent" guard: "Everything about him transmits generosity...He tells me there are some female prisoners on the grounds, if I'd care to go to bed with one of them. I tell him no. This gets him angry because he wants to help me and, by not allowing him to, I upset his plan."[3] Another Argentine survivor, Mario Villani, tells a similar story. One of his guards thought he was sweet on a female prisoner--"Skinny, you like the blond, don't you?"--and arranged for the two to be together in the same cell for an entire night.[4]

How to understand this?

At one level, what comes into play is the raw energy that torture can stir up in the torturer. The torturer realizes that the person before him--a person who may be sexually desirable but totally beyond the torturer's range of partners in the normal world--is utterly powerless, utterly his to do with what he will. Juvenile sexual fantasties of fucking whoever one wants to fuck are suddenly thrust into the realm of live possibility. Faces and limbs contorted in agony resemble ones contorted in ecstacy. Radical vulnerability and imagined invitation: one needn't be a de Sade to find these potent motivators. Roberto, the torturer in Ariel Dorman's play Death and the Maiden, describes the fascination that eventually leads to his rape of torture victims:

How much can this woman take? More than the other one? How's her sex? Does her sex dry up when you put the current through her? Can she have an orgasm under those circumstances? She is entirely in your power, you can carry out all your fantasies, you can do what you want with her...Everything they have forbidden you since ever, whatever your mother ever urgently whispered you were never to do. You begin to dream with her, with all those women... [5]

But of course a torturer never "makes love" with his victims. He always "fucks" them. The etymology of the word "fuck" is ambiguous, but two of its uses, current up through the 17th century, were "to strike" and "to penetrate." Fucking someone is assaulting them, invading their body, entering and conquering them. Bedroom talk between genuine intimates sometimes uses this assaultive language as harmless turn-ons: "Fuck me hard!" But in the lexicon of the torturer, the striking, penetrative function is taken with deadly seriousness.

This is because the torturer really is out to conquer the victim. Physical brutality is one of his tools. Psychical dismemberment and abject humiliation are two more. And sexual mastery is an especially effective way to accomplish all these goals. Kate Millet:

Torture is conquest through irresistible force. It is to destroy opposition through causing it to destroy itself: in despair, in self-hatred for its own vulnerability, impotence. It is to defile, degrade, overwhelm with shame, to ravage. In this it resembles rape. And the tortured come to experience not only the condition of the animal caged by man, but the predicament of woman before man as well. A thing male prisoners discover, a thing female prisoners rediscover. Torture is based upon traditional ideas of domination: patriarchal order and masculine rank. The sexual is invoked to emphasize the power of the tormentor, the vulnerability of the victim; sexuality itself is confined inside an ancient apprehension and repression: shame, sin, weakness. The victim tortured sexually is tortured twice as it were, first by being deliberately harmed, second by being harmed in a way regarded as the most humiliating of all humiliations. [6]

From the torturer's perspective, perhaps the most ironic inversion of physical love is this: that the body which the genuine lover wishes only to please becomes one which the torturer-lover wishes only to fuck and thereby turn into yet another instrument with which to torture the victim.

________

[1] The Gangrene, trans. Robert Silvers (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960), p. 79.

[2] Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (New York: Alfred A. Knopt, 1981), p. 83.

[3] Ibid., p. 40.

[4] Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 79.

[5] Ariel Dorman, Death and the Maiden (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 59, 60.

[6] Kate Millet, "The Politics of Cruelty," in William F. Schulz (ed), The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1007), p. 165.

torture, human rights, terrorism

The Ethical Test of Our Time: How Will We Respond?

2007-06-17T03:23:00.000-07:00

There are certain issues that serve as ethical and religious tests for each generation. Torture is our test now, here, in the United States. How we respond to it will reveal a great deal about who we actually are.

Of course our government has sanctioned torture for years now. The sorry existence of the School of the Americas testifies to that. But the torture was clandestine, under the radar, inaccessible to average citizens.

Abu Ghraib changed all that. Now everyone in the country knows that our government tortures (although "torture" now becomes "enhanced interrogation techniques") or outsources torture ("extraordinary rendition"), and this knowledge demands a moral decision from us. Neither a plea of ignorance nor fence-sitting is an option. As individuals and as a society, we're called forth to respond to the test.

One step--a necessary but not sufficient step--is to demand that presidential aspirants respond to these five questions from Human Rights First:

5 Key Questions for Presidential Candidates

1. Do you think it should ever be lawful for American personnel to subject prisoners to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment?

2. President Bush is reportedly going to issue an Executive Order shortly that will lay out the permissible interrogation techniques for CIA intelligence operations. What standards do you believe the Executive Order should adhere to?

3. Do you believe that the United States should engage in the kidnapping and transfer of individuals to the custody of other governments for interrogation? What if there is a substantial risk those prisoners will be tortured?

4. The Military Commissions Act suspends the statutory right to habeas corpus for those battlefield captives detained as enemy combatants. What is your view of this provision?

5. If you were elected President tomorrow, what orders would you give your Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State regarding the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba?

torture, human rights, terrorism

A Forgotten Case of Torture: La gangrene

2007-06-16T03:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I ran across a reference to an obscure book that's been out of print for a generation. The book, La gangrene, was originally published in France in June, 1959. It collects the accounts of seven Algerians tortured by Paris DST (Direction de surveillance territoire) police (The DST is roughly analogous to the FBI.) The prisoners were abused in late 1958 in a police building less than 300 yards from Paris' Elysee Palace, the French White House.
The De Gaulle government, which claimed that the book was "a tissue of lies and Communist propaganda," confiscated all unsold copies of La gangrene four days after its publication. Three days later, the French cops smashed the plates, preventing the publication of a second edition. Still, over 30,000 copies of the book had sold in less than two days, and the book was later reprinted in journals such as Jean-Paul Sartre's Les temps modernes. But the furor died down quickly, and today the story told in La gangrene is all but forgotten.

An English translation of La gangrene--The Gangrene--appeared in 1960, published by an alternative and obscure press. I located a copy through an internet secondhand book dealer. When it arrived yesterday in the original dust cover, it looked virtually unread. The pages were yellowed and a bit brittle, but otherwise the book was in mint condition.

Sad. Because this suggests that the story of the horrible tortures committed in the heart of Paris in December 1958 went virtually unnoticed on our side of the Atlantic. If things had gone otherwise, if the firsthand accounts of torture documented in The Gangrene had received more attention, perhaps a revulsion against torture might've been generated in this country that could've forestalled US torture in Vietnam, SOA-linked torture in Central America, and the current round of enhanced interrogations, unlawful imprisonments, and outsourced torture in the war against terrorism.

Some background: between 1954 and 1962, Algeria, then a French colony, waged a war of independence largely spearheaded by the FLN, the Front de liberation nationale. As the war escalated, the Algerian nationalists painted the French as oppressors and fascists, and the French painted the Algerians as terrorists. Both sides appear to have committed atrocities at times. The Algerians bombed civilian targets, not only to intimidate the French but also to eliminate rival liberation factions (the so-called cafe wars). The French tortured suspects and engineered the infamous 1961 Paris Massacre.

Racist-based dislike of dark-skinned North Africans, coupled with the panic generated of a society that believes itself under the treat of terrorist attack and the anger fueled by war, weakened the French body politic, making it susceptible to the gangrene of torture.

The victims whose testimony is collected in The Gangrene were Mustapha Francis, 29, a dental student; Benaissa Souami, 27, a political science student; Abd el Kader Belhadj, 31, a science student; Moussa Khebaili, 26, a student in the School of Public Works; Bechir Boumaza, 31, a salesman; Ali Hadj, 42, a journalist; and Khider Seghir, 25, a pharmaceutical assistant. Rounded up separately, they were all accused of membership in the FLN, which French authorities had designated a terrorist organization. They were taken to DST Headquarters on the rue de Saussaies for questioning.

While in the hands of the DST, the prisoners were systematically beaten with repeated kicks and punches, particularly in the region of the abdomen; forced to perform exhausting physical exercises, and then beaten when they reached the point of collapse; suspended horizontally on a spit and tortured with electric shock, especially on the genitalia; waterboarded in a mixture of urine and vomit; tied to hot radiators; threatened with death and sexual abuse; and forced to sign pre-written confessions. Two of them required extensive hospitalization afterwards.

The seven men subsequently filed a civil suit against the DST Director, accusing him of "complicity in inficting beatings and wounds." As of the 1960 publication of the English translation of their story, none of them had been given his day in court.

One of the legal machinations that led to the abuse of the Algerian men ought to give citizens in the United States special pause for thought. A special powers act was legislated in October 1958 that suspended Articles 63 and 64 of the French Code of Penal Procedure for prisoners suspected of terrorist connections. These articles basically correspond to the English common law right of habeas corpus. The special powers act permited terrorist suspects to be held at specified domiciles for indefinite periods of time, and then astoundingly designated police buildings in which suspects are interrogated as "specified domiciles." This legalized the fog-and-night disappearance of French political prisoners, much as American ones are today disappeared in Gitmo and elsewhere.

Benaissa Souami describes in The Gangrene one of the tactics he used to get through his torture: "I constantly repeated to myself that one can be covered with filth and yet remain clean." Would that societies that sanction torture could say the same.

torture, human rights, terrorism

The First Blow Changes Everything - Jean Amery on Torture

2007-06-15T04:26:00.000-07:00

Why is torture so abominable? One of the standard responses is that it denies human dignity. But torture survivor Jean Amery tells us that he doesn't know what the expression "human dignity" means. He does know, however, that the first blow forever changes the torture victim's world. His attempt to make sense of his own experience in At the Mind's Limits* is one of the most sensitive and insightful treatments of torture I know. Amery was a Viennese Jew (his birth name was Hans Mayer; he changed it after WWII to dissociate himself from all things German) who was arrested by the Gestapo in the summer of 1943 because of his involvement in the Belgian Resistance. He was taken to Breendonk, an old fortress near Antwerp that had been commandeered by the SS, and questioned under torture. Eventually he was sent to Auschwitz.
Generally, says Amery, we relentlessly cerebral humans tend to filter and codify even everyday experiences and events through abstractions. "Only in rare moments of life do we truly stand face to face with the event and, with it, reality." Torture is one of those moments. Torture, from the Latin torquere, "to twist," wrenches the victim out of the world of safe abstraction and hurtles him into brutal reality.
In that malformative moment, the victim begins the devolution from person to body. There occurs a "border violation of self by the other which can be neither neutralized by the expectation of help nor rectified through resistance." The boundaries of my body, asserts Amery, are also the boundaries of my self. "My skin surface shields me against the external world." So long as other people respect my body boundaries, my self likewise experiences itself as autonomous.
But when my body is attacked--and, furthermore, when I have neither the ability to defend myself nor any expectation of help from another person--then my self is attacked. The torturer "forces his own corporeality on me... He is on me and thereby destroys me. It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners." The other becomes "absolute sovereign" with the power "to inflict suffering and destroy," and the victim becomes nothing but hurting body, agonized flesh. "Only in torture does the transformation of the person into flesh become complete. Frail in the face of violence, yelling out in pain, awaiting no help, capable of no resistance, the tortured person is only a body, and nothing else beside that."
In the brutal experience of being tortured, the victim collapses under the weight of desolate isolation, hopelessness, helplessness, and physical pain that reduces him to quivering flesh. There is no future, no chance of reprieve or rescue, no familiar landmark in this utterly foreign land that's beyond the mind's limits. Torture robs the victim of "trust in the world," the certainty that his self is inviolate and that others will respect the boundaries of his self.
Once lost, this fundamental trust in the world can never be regained. Torture, says Amery, has an "indelible character. Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him," and he will live forever in astonishment at a world in which some people boundlessly assert themselves by reducing others to body. "With the first blow from a policeman's fist, against which there can be no defense and which no helping hand will ward off, a part of our life ends and it can never again be revived."
Jean Amery killed himself in 1978, 35 years after the first blow that shattered his world.
______
*All quotations used here are taken from the essay "Torture" in Amery's book.

torture, human rights, terrorism

The Torturer's Theme Song

2007-06-14T00:26:00.000-07:00

(hummed softly as blows fall and bones break)
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
______
From Leonard Cohen's "The Future"
torture, human rights, terrorism

Torturing Nature

2007-06-13T01:52:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon, the same guy who coined the pugilistic "knowledge is power" slogan, was a 17th century cheerleader for the subjugation of nature in the service of humankind. Although not a particularly religious man, Bacon wasn't above doing some sloppy exegesis to press home the claim that God gave humans sovereignty over the natural order. But he also more brutally--and revealingly--insisted that nature was like an wilely, artificially coy trollop who promises pleasure but ultimately must be seized by the forelock, thrown on her back, and dealt with forcefully. Nature is perverse and insolent, and requires being "bound into service..., put in constraint, molded and made as it were new by art and the hand of man." Nature must learn to "take orders from man and work under his authority." (Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature is a brilliant study of the way that Bacon used gender domination images in reference to nature.)

Bacon's perverse declaration of war against nature, along with its misogynist tempo, became the standard metaphor through the Enlightenment period up to the present day. Science (what Bacon meant by the "art" that constrains, molds, and remakes nature) is the instrumental reason that properly objectifies, dissects, conquers, and utilizes the natural world. Minerals, plants, water, nonhuman animals, the elements and atmosphere themselves: all are subordinate to instrumental reason and the will of humans. It's the right and the duty of humanity to subdue nature.

All this sounds remarkably like the language of torture, doesn't it?

Some torture is spontaneous and ill-conceived, but effective torture is methodical, premeditated, and semi-scientific (after all, you don't want to kill the victim before you've achieved your goal). The purposes of torture are to derive something you want, to break the will of the victim, and to assert total dominion over her. An adversarial relationship in which the victim is totally passive and the torturer totally active is established from the get-go. Yet despite this belligerence, there can also be elements of a perverse eroticism in torture that usually displays as sexual sadism. The torture victim becomes the torturer's "bitch."

Torture survivors are marked for life by their ordeal. They tend to be disfunctional, ridden with anxieties and fears, unable to adapt themselves to social situations, uneasy with intimacy, prone to intense mood swings, alternately explosive and withdrawn. It can take years for them to begin to regain some sort of equilibrium, and even then they need the help of trained therapists and a loving, compassionate support network.

I know that the word "torture" is over-used these days (I recently ran across a blog post in which the author referred to the "Abu Ghraib-like" nature of his quarterly visit to his dentist!). But I wonder if "torture" might not be appropriate, or at least worth thinking about, when it comes to describing the on-going devastation of our environment. Our scientific hubris as well as our self-indulgent lifestyles have turned the planet into our bitch (there's a strange "misogaiaism" going on here). We're confident that the planet still has something of value to cough up for us if we only tighten the screws a bit more. We don't care how much we abuse and humiliate the ecosphere. In fact, abuse and humiliation only symbolize our dominion over the natural order and trumpet the breaking of its will. And if we're called on our torture, we trash both the whistle-blower--"tree-hugger! alarmist! Al Gore dumbass!" and the victim--"just a fucking snail darter!"--or we deny that the torture is going on--"science has yet to establish that human actions contribute to global warming." At the same time, there's a curious and creepy pseudo-eroticism running throughout our torture of Gaia. We drive our gas-guzzling SUVs out to national parks so that we can be sentimentally gush about how much we love nature and how close we feel to nature.

And the planet, our torture victim? Well, she's doing exactly what torture victims do. Because of her trauma, her wounds, her humiliation and degradation and fragmentation, she's exhibiting anxiety and downright panic attacks, erratic behavior, mood swings, and inability to cope. She's breaking down, and is badly in need of patient therapy and a support network.

Global warming isn't merely about "things getting hotter." Global warming is about the shattering of the delicate eco-balance such that climate change becomes violent and erratic. It's about the breaking of the ecosystem's will to such an extent that it spins out of control. And global warming is also about destruction. Just as the torturer destroys himself in tormenting his victim, so we're destroying ourselves in our torture of nature.

____

(Hat tip to a discussion at Father Jake Stops the World for inspiring this post.)

torture, human rights, terrorism

When Democracies Torture

2007-06-12T01:48:00.000-07:00

The world expects notoriously repressive political regimes to torture. That's part of what makes them so infamous. Since the torture and murder are open secrets, it's not difficult for liberated citizens, once the repressive regimes have fallen, to publicly acknowledge that torture was committed, denounce it, bring the perpetrators to justice, and (sometimes) offer reparations of sorts to torture survivors and families of torture victims who have disappeared. This open and honest acknowledgment and denunciation of officially sanctioned torture is a necessary condition for the healing of a traumatized body politic. Without it, no reconciliation is possible.

The world doesn't expect democracies to torture. Their heritage of affirming basic human rights is precisely what makes democracies so admirable. Citizens of democratic nations are proud of their traditions of fairness, legal protection, and respect for human dignity which are the envy of those who suffer under repressive regimes.

But here's the rub: democracies do occasionally torture. In periods of crisis, democracies torture "the enemy": British torture Irish, Israelis torture Palestinians, Americans torture Iraqis. In normal times, criminal prisoners in many democracies are also physically and psychologically brutalized. As Amnesty International notes, most torture in the world is inflicted on criminal, not political, prisoners.

Since the self-image of a democratic society is so intimately bound up with respect for human rights and a sense of fairness, the torture perpetrated by democracies, unlike the torture perpetrated by repressive regimes, is stealthy. It's done secretly, or it's outsourced. Rumors of torture may circulate, but unless there's an indisputable public revelation (such as the April 2004 60 Minutes' story on Abu Ghraib), it's easy for political authorities to deny them and for citizens to disbelieve them.

Even after indisputable evidence of torture goes public, democracies have a difficult time admitting its truth or accepting responsibility for it. Citizens of a repressive regime can always (with a fair measure of justification) blame the government for torture. But citizens of a democracy are participants, at least theoretically, in their own governing. They share the burden of responsibility. And torture is a tough burden to shoulder.

So both citizens and elected officials in democracies caught torturing typically hem and haw and rationalize, not only to protect their image around the world but also--and perhaps more importantly--to protect their own self-perception. There generally isn't the public confession of torture one finds in nations liberated from repressive regimes. It's as if democracies just can't bring themselves to speak their shame before the world. Consequently, the national wounds inflicted by torturing aren't healed, because they don't get publicly or honestly acknowledged. The bad conscience continues to nag, the wounds to fester.

In his excellent book on torture, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, John Conroy suggests that the process of rationalization and denial democracies that torture go through has nine thematic (not necessarily chronological) stages. Please note that Conroy's book was published in 2000, well before the Abu Ghraib mess. I underscore this, because Conroy's nine stages so uncannily chart the course the U.S. has followed since Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

Stage 1. Absolute and complete denial.
Stage 2. Admission that some abuse has gone down, but minimization of both its scope and intensity.
Stage 3. Disparagement of the victims as dangerous thugs.
Stage 4. Insistence that the abuse (what "little" there was of it) was effective or appropriate under the circumstances.
Stage 5. Insistence that anyone taking up the cause of the tortured is aiding the enemies and undermining the security of the state.
Stage 6. Insistence that torture isn't occuring any more anyway, and that there's no point in keeping on about it.
Stage 7. If, however, the topic just won't go away, insistence that the torture wasn't official policy, but rather the shenanigans of a few bad apples.
Stage 8. Insistence that whatever abuse might've taken place isn't at all as horrible as the abuse perpetrated by repressive regimes.
Stage 9. Insistence that the victims of whatever abuse there might've been will get over it. All they suffered was a bit of temporary pain or humiliation.

Sounds all-too-familiar, doesn't it?

torture, human rights, terrorism

BIG-T TORTURE IS BAD, But little-t torture is good?!

2007-06-11T04:46:00.001-07:00

Defenders of "enhanced interrogation techniques" like presidential hopeful Rudy Guiliani (not to mention the sitting President) are gun-shy when it comes to using the word "torture." They don't like to hear it or speak it. They of course deplore torture. They find it offensive and un-American. But in a crisis situation--the famous ticking bomb scenario--they would authorize their people to use any technique at their disposal--water-boarding, sleep deprivation, physical blows, starvation, threats, psych-ops, sexual humiliation, and so on--to extract intelligence that might save American lives.

Is it just me, or does this strike anyone else as a difference that makes no difference? Too frequently there seems to be a wink-wink, nudge-nudge game going on in this kind of rhetoric. "I don't approve of torture, but I do approve (*wink-wink*) of whatever it takes (*nudge-nudge*) to get the info we need to know (*snicker*)."

What's going on with euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation techniques" is, I think, a specious division of torture into two sorts: Torture (big T) and torture (little t). Big-T Torture is what the bad guys do. Little-t torture is what the good guys do. What distinguishes the two kinds is their gruesomeness. Acts such as eye-gouging and electric shock to the genitals are Torture, but water-boarding (at least according to the White House and Justice Department) and sleep deprivation are torture. This way of thinking is so honestly (and creepily) summed up in a recent comment on the excellent blog The Fire and the Rose that it's worth quoting. What I'm calling "little-t torture" and the White House calls "enhanced interrogation," the commentator calls "pro-torture."

Pro-torture means within certain limits strongly coercing intelligence out of criminals or those who know and protect them. It does not sadistically seek their permanent harm or death like the TORTURE of tyrants and despotic regimes. Can we have some nuance please...? No one wants to burn people alive and chuckle, ram hot iron up people rears, rape their wives in front of them, or drag their dead bodies through the streets in humiliation. We want info desperately bad. Once it is given the techniques terminate. Other torture victims are given no exit option. They are there to be tortured, disciplined. Different ends in view.

The Torture/torture distinction, which (unlike in the passage just quoted) usually goes unspoken, is both naive and downright dangerous for a number of reasons.

In the first place, it perpetuates the myth that the primary purpose of torture is to extract intelligence. But most torture performed throughout the world has no interrogatory purpose whatsoever. According to Amnesty International, already-incarcerated "criminals," not captured terrorist suspects, are the main victims of torture. Criminal prisoners are powerless, looked-down-upon, and reviled, all of which are open invitations to physical and psychological abuse. In the U.S., because of the scandals involving Abu Ghraib and Gitmo--not to mention pernicious television shows like "24"--torture is thought of almost exclusively as interrogatory. But in reality, it's a way of subduing dissent, exercising authority, and expressing contempt.

Another reason for doubting the distinction is that official sanctioning of some kinds of physical abuse opens the door to ever-escalating levels of physical abuse. It makes sense. Physical abuse of prisoners or captives is rarely good-blooded (forget all the B-movies you've seen). Torturers almost always work themselves up into intense anger and even rage; they need this volcanic energy to sustain them. The conceit that physical abuse can be controlled or managed simply isn't in keeping with everything we know about the pattern of torture.

Moreover, the Torture/torture distinction is dangerous is because it's irrelevant. Intelligence and military experts in interrogation concur: information gathered by physically and psychologically abusive interrogation, regardless of whether it's the T or t variety, is rarely reliable. Sooner or later, torture victims will say whatever their torturers want them to. Most victims of interrogatory torture don't know anything of value anyway. The tragedy is that their torturers continue the abuse in the false expectation that eventually they'll hit paydirt. But this isn't likely. Ask yourself this: if the Gitmo prisoners had actually given U.S. intelligence any useful information, would they still be sequestered in that God-forsaken camp?

But perhaps the most obvious reason why the Torture/torture distinction is crazy is that it falsely presumes that the presence or absence of "morally unacceptable" Torture is determined by the degree of brutality. Obviously some techniques used by torturers will be more brutal than others. But this doesn't mean that some abusive techniques are either not torturous or are "morally acceptable" forms of torture. Nobody wants to say that sleep deprivation is as horrible a technique as eye-gouging. But to deny that it's a form of torture? Incredible.

Torture is better defined in functional terms. Instead of toting up lists of acceptable vs unacceptable techniques, we'd be better off thinking of torture in terms of what it does to the person upon whom it's inflicted. Earlier posts have mentioned the all-too-predictable consequences of torture: fragmentation of identity, regression, amnesia, PTSD. Contrary to our quoted defender of little-t torture, the torment doesn't have a terminus. Even if they manage to walk out of their torture cells back into the normal world, torture victims remain torture victims for the rest of their lives. It takes only a passing familiarity with their memoirs to recognize this.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Good Soldier Powell Says Torture Sends the Wrong Message (Duh)

2007-06-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

Given the pathetic fairy tale he spun to the United Nations about WMDs in Iraq, it's astounding that anyone pays any attention to anything Colin Powell has to say. But, apparently, some still do, preferring to think of him as the Good Soldier duped by the Evil President rather than a moron or a self-serving politician.
This morning, Good Soldier Powell was invited to speak on NBC's "Meet the Press," and decided to weigh in on the torture issue--albeit, as the blog And, yes, I DO take it personally (from which I learned this--hat tip!) noted, kinda late. GSP argued that Gitmo should be closed and that prisoners relocated to the United States and placed under federal jurisdiction. "[W]e have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open...We don't need it, and it's causing us far more damage than any good we get for it."
The final sentence is the heart of GSP's objection to unlawful detention, selective habeas corpus, and enhanced interrogation: they're bad PR, major problems for the American image.
Okay. Granted. But are there any other reasons to close down Gitmo? Like, it's an ethical abomination? Immoral? Wrong? Ungodly? Is the only criterion utility? If the US could torture human rights without getting caught, would GSP be playing the alarmed elder statesman on "Meet the Press"? Or would he sit tight and stay silent?
I dunno. But his remarks sound pretty familiar, because most of the the nation's leaders decrying Gitmo and everything it stands for are studiously avoiding moral or religious objections, and focusing instead on policy ones. It's as if they have a blindspot when it comes to old-fashioned decency. And it's shameful.
torture, human rights, terrorism

Shame on Them & Shame On Us Department: Rudy Guiliani & Mitt Romney Endorse Torture (Er, Um, "Enhanced Interrogation." Sorry)--To LOUD Applause

2007-06-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

One more reason to put Kucinich in the White House

2007-06-09T06:35:00.000-07:00

An April 2006 Statement:
How can a President say: "We do not torture" but reserve the right to do so? This type of deception and brutality is losing us essential and necessary friends all over the world. We are also losing our souls in exchange for an imaginary, short-term gain. In fact, some of the "intelligence" obtained by torture that there were WMDs in Iraq demonstrates that people who are being tormented will say anything to make the pain go away. We know of at least 28 prisoners that were killed during interrogation during our recent wars. One was a high-ranking Iraqi officer who, apparently, was not providing enough "actionable intelligence" on WMDs. While God may forgive us for our actions, others nations are not as generous.
The reality is that the United States has employed torture and has transported people to certain torture -- and perhaps death. Torture is not an American value, and the President's signing statement reserving the right to torture is a clear violation of international and U.S. law that makes all of us -- and especially our soldiers -- less safe. The dismissal of the Geneva Convention as "quaint" and the legal gymnastics performed by this administration to justify brutalizing another human should shock all of us.
The failure of Congress to confront the President over the lawless signing statement is another disturbing chapter in its failure to exercise oversight of an "out of control" administration.
For the head of the C.I.A. to testify in front of Congress that "water boarding" is a "professional interrogation technique" is horrifying. In essence, the American people are being told that Thomas de Torquemada and the rest of the Spanish Inquisitors were not torturers when they used the "aselli," the water torment; they were merely professional and forceful questioners. Let us be candid, water boarding is a war crime. And following the administration's legal analysis, the Spanish inquisitors were not guilty of torture because their goal was not to inflict pain, it was merely to save souls. The fact that people would suffer pain was just an unfortunate by-product of saving souls.
Nothing is more misleading -- or immoral -- than the use of the "ticking time bomb" scenario. Even if such a scenario existed -- which has yet to be documented -- does it justify wholesale torture and the brutalization of people we suspect could or might do something in the future? As we have learned, framing all threats as "imminent" is a convenient way to anaesthetize people's consciences to agree that the ends do justify the means.
The America that people around the world have come to love and admire is being destroyed by degrees by messianic militarists who believe that torture and force are the tools God has given them to use. Clearly, if they simply employ them to merely save lives, why not employ them to save immortal souls?
Torture degrades us as a people. History has shown that when torture is employed, interrogators become lazy and brutal, and many, many innocent people die or are destroyed for life. Our humanity is the first death in the process.
My reasons for opposing torture are not just the clear moral prohibition, but a more practical reason: What would you do if your child was tortured -- especially if they were innocent, as so many tortured people are?
Torture breeds torture and brutality. Torture is a slope no American should step onto.

Kucinich for President website

Death and the Maiden

The Maiden Returns

Saturday at the Movies

Another Bad Apple

Padilla and Perverse Justice

Bush Delendum Est

How Do I Torture Thee? Let Me Count the Ways...

The Maiden Stands Corrected

A Question for Torture Apologists

A Question for the Lawyers

Torture in the News

Torture Expands

Silence of the Peaceniks

Marc Ash of "Truthout" Interviews Fr. Louis Vitale

Bush delendum est: Impeach The Decider

A Good Resource on Torture

Torturespeak and Language Rules

Neutralizing the Language of Murder and Torture

From the Why-Do-I-Even-Bother? Department

Why US Torturers Get Away With It

Why Bush & Co. Are Criminals

Torture in the News

We Are Hibakusha

"Every country has its own way of torturing people..."

Until Next Week...

Torture, Ticking Time Bombs, and the Part of the Report that WAS Read

Torture, Moral Disengagement, and the Report That Wasn't Read

Torture, US-Style: Slip-Ups in Mike McConnell's "Meet the Press" Interview

Torturers as Dementors

Torture in the News

The Un-Long-term Effects of Un-Torture (which, according to Mr. McConnell, we STILL don't want to inflict on US citizens)

Have You No Shame, Sir?

Let's Hear It for Torture! A Letter from a Christian Patriot Yahoo

New Bush Directive Forbids Torture (*wink-wink*)

Guilt and Self-Loathing on the Torture Trail

Is Torture Banal?

Bush delendus est

Torture in the News

In the Grasp of the Whiteness

Fuck 'em!

The Torture Trade

Why Jack Bauer (and Judge Scalia) Aren't Canadian

Torture and the That's Nothin'! Fallacy

Torture in the News

Debating the Ethics of Torture Is Like Debating the Ethics of Rape

Torture Perverts Even Hope

Eine Vernehmung By Any Other Name...

A July 4th Reminder to the Pathetic Moral Dwarves Who Run the United States

Torture in the News

Torture: A Perverse Mysticism

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thinks the Scales of Justice Tip in Favor of Torture

Torture Awareness Month Ends, and the Movers and Shakers Couldn't Care Less

The Torturer Speaks

Torture in the News

Bloggers on Torture: Volume 2

Speaking of Disappear: Did you Know that Today Is Torture Awareness Day?

Torturespeak: "To Be Disappeared"

Bloggers on Torture: Volume 1

Torture and the Gaze

Torture in the News

The Camel's Nose

Apparently, the House of Representatives Wants Educated Torturers

Bloggers on Torture: An Open Invitation

Torture as Policy

Torture as Porn

Isolation as Torture

Torture Is a Weapon, Not an Interrogation Technique

Today's the Day to Shut Down the School of the Americas! PLEASE: Call, Fax, E-mail Your Congressperson!

Torture in the News

Seriously: It's Time to Shut Down the School of the Assassins

Torture & Property Rights

Torture Fucking

The Ethical Test of Our Time: How Will We Respond?

A Forgotten Case of Torture: La gangrene

The First Blow Changes Everything - Jean Amery on Torture

The Torturer's Theme Song

Torturing Nature

When Democracies Torture

BIG-T TORTURE IS BAD, But little-t torture is good?!

Good Soldier Powell Says Torture Sends the Wrong Message (Duh)

New Bush Directive Forbids Torture (wink-wink)