Uses of Torture

I should contain my anger and try to provide more information and analysis and a little less spleen. So I did a little research. My site references are at the end of this article.

The rationale behind President Bush’s authorization of “moderate pressure interrogation techniques” such as “water-boarding” is that we have to get as much information as possible from these people about threats to the security of the US and US assets worldwide.

Torture is torture - no matter the technique. Whether you chain a prisoner in a fetal position for days until his muscles cramp painfully or you use a whip to tear his flesh, the psychology of dehumanization, physical pain, and long-term damage inflicted by the State is pretty much unchanged. The results for the State are pretty much the same, as are the psychological effects on the prisoner. The only real difference is how long it takes to torture the prisoner to death.

But centuries of human experience and direct research has proven that torture is pretty much useless for the purposes of interrogation. Nazi doctors carefully documented the results of torture on controlled subjects and found exactly what the Holy Inquisition had revealed a few hundred years earlier. Under torture, a person will say anything he thinks his torturer wants to hear - anything to get the torture to stop.

Torture is, however, extremely effective for obtaining false confessions and for terrorizing populations into submission. For this to be most effective, torture victims should be psychologically reduced to supporting their torturer before they are returned to their communities. People who knew them should see a dramatic difference. There needs to be a random element to torture - people who are not obviously subversive should be tormented while some actual subversives (the loud and ineffective kind) go unscathed. It has to be a long term project to have real effect and it must be undergirded by a real threat of pervasive and almost omniscient surveillance of every moment of the life of every citizen.

George Orwell’s 1984 is a superb fictional exploration of this kind of society - so much so that the author’s name has become synonymous with the tactics and strategies of maintaining such a society and particularly with the use of language to conceal or whitewash the State’s actions and intentions. The Bush administration has been accused of “Orwellian” language. “Detainees” is one of dozens of examples. It evokes the image of passengers at an airport who have to wait for a few hours for their flight to arrive.

The Guantanamo Bay “detainees” have been waiting for years in isolated cells, sleep-deprived, removed from all human contact even with the people who feed them, chained, tortured by water and by temperature and subjected to sensory deprivation. Under this duress, even the strongest and most devout will eventually crack up. Whenever they are returned to their homes, they will be broken people - a compelling example of what happens to poor people when they even think about defying or just grumbling about the US. Isn’t that the point?

If not, then just what are we doing with the “detainees” in Guantanamo Bay? It cannot be justice. If it were justice, we would put them on trial. It cannot be information. If it were information, we would be using proven interrogation techniques of befriending these prisoners, making them believe we are sympathetic to their concerns and gaining their trust. They might not live in comfort, but we would not be seeing FBI reports detailing, and indeed Presidential memorandums authorizing torture (whatever Orwellian linguistic guise it is couched in).

Logically, therefore, we must be in the business of terrorizing large populations of poor people in the developing world into subjugation to American rule (or rule by American proxies). If so, perhaps the War on Terror should be renamed the War OF Terror. Below are websites with more information about the history of torture. Don’t take my word about the Nazi experiments and the Inquisition - or about the current status of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. I will gladly provide documents about their treatment - indeed I have posted some of these in the comments on my previous two posts. Look it up. Here are some websites you can start with:

http://lawofwar.org/Torture_Memos_analysis.htm
Memoranda regarding treatment of Afghan prisoners of war
This article contains links to complete texts of the memoranda analyzed within. It’s a good starting point because it summarizes the history of the legal briefs that undergird the Bush administration’s use of torture on prisoners both at Guantanamo Bay and by extension in the various secret American prisons world-wide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
A good starting place for information about the history of the US Guantanamo Bay facility. Everything I have been saying about the FBI documents is actually in this article. Wikipedia has identified this site as needing additional references and that there may be both unsupported assertions and possibly emotionally loaded language in this entry. But the entry does contain a lot of references and the details appear to coincide with the information I received from Brent Mickum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Torture
International definitions and prohibitions against State sponsored torture
This article is a great starting point. It contains articles about ethical arguments for torture, historical uses, the Nazi experimentation and a lot of links to related articles. While Wikipedia is never a definitive source for anything, since it is user-driven and user-created, it is a great resource for finding more definitive sources.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/
Amnesty International USA. At the top right of this page, select Torture from the drop-down menu under “What’s Going On Where”. As of this posting, that will take you directly to a menu that starts with Guantanamo Bay - a pressing issue for Amnesty International. There are ways to get involved. I am investigating them and I am determined to go further in my political advocacy.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr276/stone.htm
Analysis of George Orwell’s increasingly prophetic book 1984. I recommend you scroll down and read the segment on Newspeak.

And of course, there are the documents that were provided to me from the law firm of Spriggs and Hollingsworth in Washington DC. I will send these to anyone who asks for them. Please take just one small step and get involved. E-mail this blog to someone. Write a letter to your Congressional delegation. Give some money to Amnesty International. Start a blog. Comment on this one to let other readers know they are not the only readers. Send Brent Mickum a supportive e-mail for his work defending the prisoners (bmickum@spriggs.com). No hero is going to stop this. It will take several voices to make a change. Even the smallest action you take will help.

rbs