Note to readers: I started out several days ago writing a post about the Bush administration's admission that at least one prisoner at Guantanamo Bay was tortured. I wanted to write something about how so much of the discussion of torture in the mainstream media misses what I feel are the main points. In writing this post, I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject, so this post is VERY lengthy. However, I hope you will be patient and read to the end, since I'd sincerely like to know your thoughts.
For what seems like the millionth time since 9/11, torture is back in the news again. Not one day after I published my first post about the potential closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, this appeared.
First of all, does anyone but me find something a little bit shady about a senior Pentagon official admitting the US used torture at Guantanamo...five days before Bush is about to leave office? After years of denying allegations of torture in Afghanistan, Iraq, secret CIA prisons, and Guantanamo, isn't this a bit of a "mumblemumble oh yeah, we tortured that guy. RUN AWAY!!!!!" from the Bush team?
A cynical mind might think this was a calculated move to give the incoming administration just one more problem to deal with, along with the state of the Oval Office desk. But whatever the reasons, the Bush administration has officially used the t-word in connection with at least one prisoner at Guantanamo Bay--Mohammed al-Qahtani, the so-called "20th hijacker." In an interview with all-purpose crusading journalist Bob Woodward, Susan J. Crawford, the top official in charge of deciding whether Gitmo detainees go to trial, said that her review of Qahtani's case led her to conclude his treatment "met the legal definition of torture."
While the first reaction of many people who are familiar with the US's human rights record was probably "well, DUH!", this admission is interesting because it touches on several aspects of the torture debate that have bugged me for quite some time.
If you know me well, you may be aware that I know more about torture than any normal person should reasonably want to know. This is because I have studied numerous revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars, occupations, colonialism and anti-colonial rebellion, the rise of fascism, dictatorships and their resisters, and the US intelligence establishment, and because I have a mind that retains the gory details and a level of curiosity about violence that is perhaps not entirely healthy.
The point of this is not to make myself sound unbalanced. It's merely to demonstrate that I feel at least as qualified to contribute to the torture debate as the next pundit. And there are a few things about the terms of the debate that seem utterly ridiculous to me.
#1. The hair-splitting over what's torture and what isn't.
Waterboarding isn't torture. Yes it is. No it isn't. And so on with a litany of other techniques. It all sounds a bit Orwellian after a while, like if you don't label something with this particular word, then that makes it okay. Regardless of whether you call it torture or not, I highly doubt any members of the Bush administration or Congress would be willing to subject themselves to the conditions in Guantanamo Bay...or Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, a CIA black site, etc.
But if you still want to get technical about the matter, okay, let's go. I can do technical.
The Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual - 1983 is the most current CIA interrogation manual to be declassified. Thanks to the National Security Archives, is now available online in its entirety here. This is as close to a codification of the US intelligence community's theories on interrogation and torture as one is going to get without a security clearance.
The CIA loves their euphemisms, and the HRETM83 doesn't really use the word "torture" all that much. What it does do is differentiate between "non-coercive" techniques--which are presumably legal, and include many tactics of basic psychological manipulation used by your average (non-torturing) civilian police department--and "coercive" techniques--which are either illegal or "to be used with caution," depending on who's asking.
Guess what? Turns out pretty much everything the Bush administration claims loudly is NOT TORTURE (waterboarding for sure, but also isolation, exposure to extreme temperatures and loud noises, sleep deprivation, stress positions, manipulation of routines to create disorientation, forced nudity, and the myriad ways of insulting prisoners' religion/politics/masculinity that interrogators have developed) is considered "coercive" by the CIA. And they know from coercive.
The Bush administration has chosen to adopt an extremely narrow definition of torture that only includes things that involve unbearable pain or life-threatening injury. But even they don't adhere to their own definition. To illustrate my point, here's a simple exercise you can try in the convenience of your own home:
1. Squat on the ground. (It's easier if you widen your stance enough that your feet are flat on the ground.)
2. Put your arms behind your back and clasp your right wrist with your left hand, or vice versa.
3. Close your eyes (since you'd be blindfolded or hooded in real life.)
4. Don't move.
This is one of the most commonly used "stress positions," which the Bush administration has said are not torture. If you're very out of shape like me, a minute in this position is challenging. Even if you're in excellent shape and reasonably flexible, I challenge you to make it past five minutes.
Now imagine four hours of this and tell me if you think it's torture or not.
In a similiar vein, journalist Christopher Hitchens recently tried another kind of not-torture, and he's got plenty to say on the subject.
#2. The "does torture work?" debate.
This is an entirely false and specious debate, in my opinion, because the answer entirely depends on what you mean by "work."
If you mean "does torture produce reliable intelligence?" the answer is most definitely, "sometimes."
There are plenty of examples from history in which torture has been used quite effectively to gather accurate intelligence in war, civil war, or counterinsurgency situations.
Probably the most famous is the "Battle of Algiers" in 1956-7, when the French military used a concentrated campaign of torture (along with aggressive military occupation, spying, and other counterinsurgency measures) to almost completely destroy the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algiers. Using extremely brutal interrogation methods, they wiped out the highly compartmentalized FLN cell by cell in a relatively short period of time. (Of course, Algeria won its independence in 1962 anyway, and the Battle of Algiers is now viewed as a classic example of "winning the battle but losing the war.")
Other examples come from various European fascist regimes and from the repressive military dictatorships of Latin America (all supported by the US), particularly Chile and Argentina, where torture by secret police forces was institutionalized for a decade or more. Chile is a particularly clear case since the repression was dedicated to successfully rolling back a popular revolution that came reasonably close to taking power. In a matter of months, an organized left that had sent a self-described socialist to the presidency and had roots in virtually every workplace, university, and working-class neighborhood was decimated to the point where the government could proceed with introducing some of the most anti-worker economic policies in the world (now known as neoliberalism) without a whiff of protest.
These examples all have something in common, which is that in each case, the government or occupying force (whether they acknowledged it or not) had a secondary goal in addition to gathering intelligence: to terrorize and pacify the population with examples of the extreme violence they could face if they resisted.
This is where torture really comes in handy. There's one thing everyone agrees torture is really great for, which is getting false confessions from innocent people. Torture worked great on the Death Row 10--Chicago police got many innocent men to confess to murders they didn't commit. I think quite a number of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and various US detention facilities around the world would also fall into this category.
Frantz Fanon, who worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the Algerian war for independence, summed up the problem as this: "Those who know nothing will say anything, and those who know something will say nothing." In other words, use torture and you may or may not get some accurate intelligence, but you will almost definitely get some false intelligence.
This makes torture ideally suited for situations where some degree of false intelligence is inconsequential or even desirable. In civil war, police state or counterinsurgency situations, the oppressors may actually be okay with some "innocent" people being denounced as terrorists/traitors/insurgents/whatever, since this only adds to the climate of fear and the idea that anyone can be arrested and interrogated at any time, for a miniscule infraction or for nothing at all.
But the other half of Fanon's aphorism is important, too, because numerous examples from history show that the most effective weapon against torture (perhaps the only effective one) is political will. Those most likely to be capable of resisting torture are not those with the most physical strength or willpower in some abstract sense, but those who have a cause they firmly believe is worth fighting and dying for.
I have a little story to illustrate this point. It comes from an absolutely fantastic documentary, Vietnam: A Television History, which was made for PBS in the early 1980s. Filmed only a few years after the war ended, it included numerous interviews with combatants from all sides and is really worth checking out when you have eight hours to spare (although according to at least one review on Netflix, some material has been edited out of the DVD edition.)
At one point in this exhaustive chronicle of the war, we intercut between an American soldier and a female Vietnamese guerrilla who were both tortured as POWs. This section is interesting enough from a psychological perspective in terms of how people remember and communicate about trauma, because their stories are eerily similar. Both start by talking about how they were captured and then begin relating, in detail, what was done to them--pretty grisly in both cases.
The American ends his story by saying something like, "And finally they got me to a point where I told them more than name, rank, and serial number." The Vietnamese woman ends her story by saying something like, "But I would never tell them anything, no matter what they did, because I was fighting for my country and my freedom."
To me, this shows in a nutshell why the US, the greatest military power the world had ever seen, could not win the Vietnam War. It also demonstrates a fundamental law of repression: sometimes no amount of force is capable of crushing the desire for freedom.
If you apply this logic to the torture debate, you'll come to the same conclusion that many well-respected members of the intelligence community have: that the people against whom the Bush administration claims it is most necessary to use torture are the people against whom it is least likely to work. Let us accept for a moment the Bush administration's claim that it currently holds a number of "high-value" prisoners, hardened terrorists who wouldn't hesitate, if they got the chance, to blow the US to smithereens. These people, whether you agree with them or not, are extremely dedicated to a political cause--willing to leave home and undergo military training in remote and hostile locations, travel around the world, wait for long periods of time in sleeper cells, and often kill themselves to achieve the destruction of others.
And for every one of these "muscle hijackers" actually in US custody--people whose motives and methods most of us find abhorrent--I'm willing to bet there are three or four people whose motives and methods we might actually sympathize with: Afghanis or Iraqis who decided to defend their countries against foreign invasion by armed struggle, something many Americans feel they themselves would do if their country was invaded. Both of these types of people feel they are fighting for freedom against an oppressive imperialist force. And intelligence experts would probably tell you that torturing this kind of person has only a moderate chance of being productive, and a decent chance of actually hardening their resistance and being totally counterproductive.
But of course, this advice is never going to be taken by the US government, which brings me to the third ridiculous thing about the torture debate.
#3. The suggestion that you can have imperialism and war without torture.
All the debates around whether torture is justified, effective, necessary or right circle around a central supposition: that we can have it any other way. But those who think we can have a War on Terror, or a war in Afghanistan or Iraq or Palestine or anywhere else, without torture coming into the mix somewhere are fooling themselves.
Imperialism is the practice of powerful nations dominating weaker ones. (Yes, I know, it's also the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin wrote a book with that title, but this definition is sufficient for my argument.) In the past it took the form of direct colonialism; today, with a few exceptions, it is more indirect. The domination is economic most of the time and is often called corporate globalization. But it frequently escalates into military conflict as well, in which a rich nation with a large, well-equipped military pounds a poorer one into submission.
Torture is the replication of this relationship on the level of individuals. It is, by definition, a weapon of the strong against the weak. The torturer has the entire balance of force on his side. He has every weapon imaginable at his disposal: control of the environment; control of the prisoner's behavior (what he eats, what he wears, when he sleeps/showers/goes to the bathroom/does anything); and the ability to use physical force without being stopped. The prisoner has but one weapon available to him: his will to resist in the face of overwhelming violence.
This does not mean that anti-imperialist forces never use torture (Vietnam is a great example of that.) But it does mean that you can't wage an imperialist war without expecting these kind of things to happen, and the only way to stop them is to stop the war.
By the way, the fact that anyone even thinks of resisting in the face of such an asymmetry of violence--and history is full of people who did--I think reveals something very fundamental and deep-seated about human nature. Perhaps this is why I continue to be fascinated by situations of torture and resistance despite my awareness that it's kind of morbid. Watching someone resist when resistance seems utterly impossible is exciting, and, I think, incredibly inspiring. It is the theme of a lot of my writing. I guess I think showing that particular dramatic moment is ultimately worth all the gory details in between.
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