Torture, Civilization, and the Need to Hold Torturers Accountable

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Sat Jun-27-09 09:30 PM
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Torture, Civilization, and the Need to Hold Torturers Accountable

If history has ever a lesson to teach us, it is to warn us against being overawed by the clattering of a bully�s saber� The essential greatness of a country does not depend on the extent of its empire nor on the number of its armed forces nor on the efficiency of its military machine, but on the free spirit of enquiry which enables the patrimony of the past to be retained� The example of Spain is enough to warn us that it matters not that a nation gain the whole world if it lose its soul � From �The Spanish Inquisition�, by Cecil Roth

Of all the terrible things that my country has done over the past several years, its descent into torture is what bothers me most. That is why I�ve written on that subject on DU more than on any other subject. The torture perpetrated by our country over the past several years was neither the work of �a few bad apples�, nor were its victims confined to a few bad terrorists. Rather, it was authorized by the highest levels of our government, and its practice was widespread and often indiscriminate. I discuss some of the evidence for that in detail in this post.

So why is it that there is not more outrage in our country about this? Are not most Americans decent people? Well, for one thing we have been constantly told by our government that the �enhanced interrogations�, or whatever you want to call it, were carried out only with the best intentions, against some of the �worst of the worst� people to ever walk the earth.

Torturers ALWAYS claim good and pure motives for their torture

But the first thing that we all need to understand about torture is that those who practice it, order it, or supervise it ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS claim that it is done with best of intentions and for the best of reasons. Dick Cheney and George Bush remind us over and over again that they did what they did to protect the American people, which they considered their sacred responsibility. So have torturers throughout the history of the world told their citizenry similar things. George Riley Scott makes this point in his book, �A History of Torture:

Justification on the ground of its efficiency, which was so often attempted in relation to torture as a means of securing confessions of guilt from those charged with heresy and sorcery, is actually conditioned by the need for finding a victim upon which to wreak the vengeance of society, and, vicariously, the vengeance of God. Such justification acts also as a means of suppressing� any sense of injustice in society as a whole, and in those individual (torturers)� On these lines it is easy to justify any form of barbarity, and it is in this way that, through the ages, the most monstrous inquisitions and persecutions have been vindicated. Thus the justification, in our own time, of Negro lynchings, of Bolshevist atrocities� of brutal floggings�

Torture almost ALWAYS does far more harm than good

All the torture that we carried out during the past several years (or at any other time in our history) has done us far more harm than good. I discuss some of the evidence for that in this post. For one thing, the �confession� tortured out of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi served as a major excuse for our invasion of Iraq: Jonathan Schell explains:

The centerpiece of (Colin) Powell's speech before the UN Security Council justifying the invasion of Iraq devoted a full nine paragraphs to a "senior terrorist operative" who "fortunately...is now detained." Libi, though unnamed, was the star of the performance. Powell unwound a long tale of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction (all subsequently disavowed by Libi as well as otherwise discredited). Al Qaeda, Powell said, had been pursuing weapons of mass destruction in Afghanistan but, finding the resources inadequate, had needed "to look outside of Afghanistan for help." So "they went to Iraq," where they received "chemical or biological weapons training." Thus did Powell weave together the two main fabrications about Iraq � that it was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and was cooperating with Al Qaeda. And Iraq's avowals to the contrary? "It is all a web of lies," he said.

The moment is worth dwelling on. In the most dramatic and widely watched presentation of the case for war, the secretary of state, a man of high reputation at home and abroad, was conveying perjured testimony exacted by torture to the entire world� The war, as we learned later from the photos of Abu Ghraib, produced torture. But before that happened, torture had produced the war.

Matthew Alexander, former senior interrogator with an elite task force in Iraq, sheds further light on the subject. He explains that not only did none of our torture save lives, but it cost us hundreds, or maybe thousands of American lives. From his interviews of al Qaeda prisoners captured in Iraq, he found that the number one reason for them coming to Iraq to fight U.S. forces was the fact that we tortured their fellow Muslims.

Torture is almost NEVER done with good intentions

But these specific examples are almost besides the point. The fact is that, despite the fact that torturers ALWAYS claim the best of reasons for their torturing, in fact they almost always do it for the worst of reasons. Let me put it this way. If anyone is aware of any examples of a nation that used torture as an instrument of policy where that practice produced more good than harm, then please let me know. I am not aware of any.

Let�s consider a recent article by David Swanson as just one of a multitude of examples:

I was reading yesterday about a boy who was probably 12 years old when our nation imprisoned him in 2002. We held him in Afghanistan� We put a hood on him, stripped him, shackled him and shoved him down stairs. We brought him to Guantanamo, kicked him, beat him, broke his nose, pepper sprayed him, and deprived him of sleep for many days. In 2003 he tried to kill himself by slamming his head against a wall. This boy, like most Gitmo captives, does not stand accused of international terrorism. And the evidence that this boy had, at 12 years old, fought back against the illegal aggressors in his country comes from torture, so our government is seeking to hold him forever without putting him on trial. He's now 19, having spent his entire teenage years in a death camp, in a place where the only way out appears to be death�

Striking evidence of the malign intentions of our torture policies is shown especially by a 2005 analysis of 44 autopsies reported by the ACLU, of men who died in our detention facilities. That study found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.

Keep in mind that that study involved only a small fraction of the total number of detainees dying in the largely secret U.S. prison system since September 11, 2001. We will probably never know for sure the full extent of these barbaric homicides.

Torture and civilization

Schell explains why torture is so closely associated with barbaric civilizations:

In the moral and affective vacuum that has been generated, sympathy, empathy, pity, understanding � every form of fellow-feeling � have been reduced to absolute zero. That is why torture is always � an "undoing of civilization," and, probably more reliably than anything, it foretells the descent of a civilization into barbarism.� The degradation of civilization is real.

George Scott expands on this by describing torture as a means of expressing power:

In this vengeance inherent in all forms of torture lies the key to its use as an expression, by the individual, of the will to power, and, by the State, of authority and autocratic domination. The expression or satisfaction of this demand for vengeance� has formed a part of the policy adopted by every leader of mankind, starting with the chief, the king, or the emperor, and descending, through various stages, to the mob leader� or the gangster chief� Nothing was, and nothing is, better calculated to enhance the prestige and authority of the leader than the handing over to his followers, for punishment, of their enemy�

Paul Grenier, a former Russian interpreter for the U.S. State Department and U.S. Army, and a graduate of the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Soviet Studies (Columbia University) recently discussed with me the views that many Sovietologists have expressed to him in private on the implications of current U.S. policy regarding preventive incarceration and torture. Paul told me that, whereas most Americans are generally not at all prone to recognize this, all of the Sovietologists whom he is aware of see a striking similarity between these policies and the policies of the former Soviet Union under Stalin.

He also touched on this issue during a recent meeting that he and I had with the staff of our Congressman, Chris Van Hollen, in which we urged him to support measures to investigate and hold the Bush administration responsible for their crimes. For that meeting, Paul presented the following prepared remarks:

A number of characteristic features of the Soviet system clearly marked it as a nation which flagrantly violated the most basic principles of the rule of law. For example, under the Soviet system, individuals could be detained and mistreated indefinitely on the mere say so of the nation�s chief executive. All that was needed was for the government to declare, without any evidence presented in a fair and open court proceeding, that someone was an �enemy of the people.�

Under the rule of law, by contrast, attaching a label to a person is insufficient grounds to deny said person access to the protection of the law.

Under the Bush administration, numerous individuals have been swept up, imprisoned indefinitely, tortured by the CIA directly or rendered to third countries for detention and torture, on the sole basis that the executive branch defined these persons as �unlawful enemy combatants� or �terrorists.� It is no secret that many of these persons later turned out to be innocent of any and all criminal action or even intent.

The ostrich syndrome and its consequences

In the preface to his book, George Scott discusses how people who live in a nation that tortures tend to close their eyes to what their country does in their name:

There are people who persistently refuse to discuss or to witness anything that is unpalatable. They contend that it is much better to look upon the bright, the pleasant� The world is full of people who persistently subscribe to this doctrine� In this way they encourage the evils that are all too prevalent in modern society. Smugly and complacently, they shut their eyes to anything that is disturbing, repellent, or offensive, affecting to believe it does not exist� This attitude of the public is one of the greatest enemies to reform.

I would add to this important insight that, not only is the wish to avoid unpleasantness at work in this phenomenon. Just as important in today�s United States is the great aversity to view our country in unfavorable light, compounded by a great fear of being branded as �unpatriotic� if we accuse our country of acting in a barbaric manner.

Jonathan Schell explains the evil consequences to our civilization of acquiescing to torture. After discussing the association between torture and barbaric civilizations, he says:

Those symptoms (of barbarism) are brought on, of course, not just by the torture but by society�s reaction to it. The people face their choice when reports of (torture) are made public, as is happening (today in our country). If the people choose denial, the pathology of torture tends to reproduce itself in the society at large. The result is a kind of cognitive dislocation, which can be more or less severe. Fundamental human capacities begin to atrophy� The words that name the deed fog over, or are driven from the language. Refusal to face the fact of torture has cost us the very word �torture,� now widely referred to� as �enhanced interrogation techniques� or �harsh methods.�

The consequences of President Obama�s refusal to hold torturers accountable

Schell addresses a common excuse that our government uses to ignore torture that happened in the past, and he explains why it is so important to hold torturers accountable:

Consider the frequently made charge that indictment of those who performed or ordered torture would amount to "criminalizing policy decisions." In this accusation, those who really criminalized policy � that is, those who ordered crimes as a matter of policy � are given immunity by charging those who would prosecute the crimes with "criminalizing."� (But) the application of law no more "criminalizes" any deed than a prosecutor criminalizes bank robbery when he indicts a bank robber�.

It is in this context that our new president's determination to get things right in the future by ignoring what went wrong in the past is troubling� The danger is most obvious in the legal system, where it is precisely the past that determines the future to be taken. Someone brought into court for dealing drugs is not invited to say to the judge, "Let's not look at the past; let's concentrate on getting the future right." But more than the legal system is at stake. For whatever else civilization may be, it is surely intercourse between past, present and future. Without the past to guide it, judgment about the future is reduced to clueless conjecture�

The organization IndictBushNow suggests why President Obama reversed his earlier decision to release torture photos:

The world now knows why President Obama reversed his earlier decision to release the 2,000 photos of prisoners barbarically tortured, abused, and humiliated under the direction of the Bush/Cheney gang.

Some of the photos of the prisoners show U.S. personnel torturing, sexual assaulting and raping male and female detainees, including children. The existence of these photos was confirmed by former Major General Antonio Taguba.

Most recently, the CIA has postponed the release of a report that could shed a great deal of light on torture crimes committed during the Bush administration, and expose Dick Cheney�s claims that torture saved lives for the lies that they are. Our CIA appears to be fighting to permanently prevent release of that report.

Jonathan Schell ends his article on torture by telling us what we need to do to get our nation back on track:

Better to look the torture in the face and having looked, to remember, and having remembered, to respond, and having responded, to call those responsible to account so that we never do this again.

The American people need to let President Obama know what we think about this.