Another Bad Apple

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

Marc Ash of "Truthout" Interviews Fr. Louis Vitale

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.

Poetry, Torture, Truth

"Torture erupts out of a utilitarian or technocratic sense of efficiency. It provides the illusion of certainty favored by totalitarian regimes, typically yielding information less reliable than government propaganda. It also exposes as superficial the courage of leaders who rationalize its breach of human dignity as necessary for safeguarding people's lives and their freedoms, their democratic values and prosperity. It deceives those who practice it and dehumanizes all involved."

This from a profoundly insightful essay, "A Winter Sun: Writing Against Torture," by poet, essayist, novelist, teacher, and Neruda translator William O'Daly. The essay appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of Poets Against War Newsletter.

torture, human rights, terrorism

"The Soul Is the Prison of the Body"

So, says Foucault, is the guiding principle of the modern criminal system.* Its goal is to create docile bodies that conform to established social norms and work within established social institutions. But--and this the modern system considers a sign of its moral superiority to earlier ways of dealing with outlaws--the pathway to docility is through the soul. Indoctrination, re-education, rehabilitation: these are the officially preferred methods of the modern penal system. Take the soul where you want it to go, and the body necessarily follows.

Foucault argues that torture is incompatible with this goal of soul imprisonment, but I'm not so sure. Torture imprisons the body in a broken, memory-haunted soul. Physical agony, dread, somatic and psychological trauma, shame, remorse, guilt, fear, humiliation, exhaustion, sexual abuse: the tactics of torture aim at a brutal destruction--what I called "malfiguration" in an earlier post--of the psyche which paralyzes the will and hamstrings the body. The torture chamber is a citizen-factory. Raw, rebellious flesh--the raw material--goes in, and docile, broken-spirited citizens--the finished product--emerge. They not only are no longer threats to the state themselves; their wraith-like presence in our midst either intimidates other would-be rebels (the "admonitory" function) or reassures "good" citizens that the state apparatus is vigilant and indominable. In earlier times, public physical torture provided the "spectacle," to use Foucault's term, that admonished and reassured. Today, the souls of torture survivors are the spectacle.

______

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, see especially pp. 24-31.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Ticking Bombs & Real Unicorns

A must-read post on torture and ticking bombs from The Anonymous Liberal.
torture, human rights, terrorism

Torture & Identity Malfiguration

Forget most of what you think you know about torture. It's rubbish.

The common understanding of torture is that it's a long-standing practice which enlightened societies are gradually evolving out of, that it's condoned today only by extremely repressive governments or, in a pinch, by liberal societies that find themselves in desperate straits, and that its primary purpose is to extract information from subjects.

Not so.

Torture today is markedly different from torture in the past. It's a new phenomenon, not a continuation of an old one. Moreover, torture is condoned by half the world's governments. In 2006 alone, Amnesty International documented torture in 102 nations. Many of them are controlled by blatantly repressive governments. Some of them--such as the United States--aren't. Finally, although some torture is overtly inquisitional, much isn't. The purpose of torture today isn't to extract information so much as to affirm power by manipulating identities.

Historically, torture was an interrogatory technique used in situations where the discovery of truth was thought to be too difficult for ordinary measures. Both the ancients and the medievals saw torture as primarily a means of truth-extraction,* and this understanding continued right up to the Enlightenment era. In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that France on the eve of the Revolution still practiced interrogatory torture, typically performed in secret. But he also points out a new twist to torture, what one commentator has referred to as its "admonitory" function.** If found guilty, the accused might be subjected to public torture and execution as a warning or admonition to the populace: cross the line, and this is what awaits you. This function of torture both symbolized and reenforced the power of the sovereign or state.

This admonitory function of torture, which for previous generations was secondary to truth-extraction, is the primary goal of today's torturers. Granted, the popular myth is that torture is still an expedient way of extracting information during crisis situations. But we know that information and confessions coerced by torturers are notoriously unreliable: sooner or later, torture victims will say whatever it is their inquisitors want them to say.

Truth isn't the object; compliance, in which the power of the state and the powerlessness of the dissenter, is. To the extent that the state can reduce dissenters, rebels, political heretics, outlaws, disturbers of the peace--in short, anyone catalogued as an outsider--to impotence, it succeeds in an "identity-malfiguration." It malfigures the identity of the torture victim into pure evil, subhuman filth willing and in fact eager to disrupt society and destroy innocent lives. The "confession" of terrorism, criminality, treason, and so on that's extracted from the torture victim confirms his wickedness. At the same time, the identity of the state is malfigured into pure goodness, because it stands in opposition to the wicked other. Torture, then, both assumes and affirms a simplistic Manichean worldview--exactly the kind portrayed, for example, by the popular television show "24."*** And, just as in "24," the forces of good and the forces of evil usually get reversed in the process: torturers, racing against the clock to save innocent populations from cruel destruction, become the good guys (in fact, they're frequently the victims, because they heroically sacrifice their personal scruples for the commonweal); torture victims, bastards who know when and where the ticking bomb will explode, become the bad guys.

The goal of identity malfiguration shows that torture isn't an act of sadism inflicted on a few imprisoned individuals. In fact, governments that torture have little use for maverick sadists. Instead, as William Cavanaugh notes (p. 22), torture is "an assault on social bodies." Its purpose is to discourage dissent by intimidating potential outlaws and, at the same time, to stir up a sense of self-righteousness among insiders that condones torturing outsiders. This is just another way of saying that torture today is admonitory rather than interrogatory, and this means that it needs an audience.

Admittedly, this calls for some creative PR work. No government wants to come right out and actually admit that it tortures. Even governments caught red-handed deny it. (The "we don't torture" position made infamous by President Bush.) But it's in the interests of governments that torture for the world to know that they torture. So whispers, innuendoes, insinuations, undocumented accusations, and even full-fledged media stories are useful. All of them can be denied or, even better, spun in such a way that the official response is "We don't torture. But if we did--which (*wink-wink*) we don't--we'd do it only to protect our citizens against evil-doers who hate us and will stop at nothing to destroy us."

The admonitory function of torture is the key to understanding it as a means of perverse socialization. Too often discussions of torture get sidetracked by endless debate over where boundaries should be drawn between what is and what isn't an act of torture: name-calling isn't, electric shock is, water-boarding might be. These debates miss the point. Torture isn't a discrete list of interrogatory techniques to be haggled over. Torture is a strategem for malfiguring identities that just happens to use physical and psychological pain.

_________

*See, for example, Edward Peters' Torture.

**"Admonitory torture" is from Roger Paden's "Surveillance and Torture: Foucault and Orwell on the Methods of Discipline," Social Theory and Practice 10/3 (Fall 1984): 261-271.

***For more on "24," see this too.

torture, human rights, terrorism

Finally: Religious Bloggers Speak Out

A couple of overtly religious bloggers argue that torture ought to be a major issue in the race to the US presidency. From their keyboards to God's ear!

A Religious Liberal Blog

Levellers

Fly the Torture-Friendly Skies

From The Seattle Times:

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday accusing a Boeing subsidiary of helping the CIA to facilitate "the forced disappearance, torture and inhumane treatment" of three men the government suspected of terrorist involvement...

Torture Nation

From the Christian Science Monitor:

The White House is close to completing a new set of guidelines on the use of "enhanced interrogative techniques" by US agents, even as critics say such techniques are "immoral," "amateurish," and "indistinguishable" from Nazi war crimes...

(h/t to Ponderings on a Faith Journey)

Torture & Soul Death

What does the willingness to condone torture in the name of "national security" do to the soul of a nation? What is a torture-tolerant culture's state of moral health? These are the fundamental questions this blog seeks to explore.

The question is inspired by Dick McSorley, a longtime Jesuit peace activist who asked the same thing about our nation's willingness to build nuclear weapons. McSorley contended that building weapons of mass destruction whose purpose is to kill enormous numbers of human beings and destroy miles of infrastructure is in and of itself a wicked act. It makes little difference if the government building them insists that their purpose is to "act as deterrents," swears that they're necessary for national security, or promises that they'll never be used in a "first strike" capacity. Given their indiscriminately murderous nature, their very existence is evil, and the nation which not only tolerates but insists on having them has failed a fundamental moral test.

Today, the moral test is a nation's willingness to tolerate torture--the deliberate infliction of physical and psychological pain on other human beings in order to degrade, humiliate, and coerce information from them or to break their spirit so that they'll no longer pose a threat. Torture is practiced in over 15o countries, including the United States.

It won't do for citizens of countries that practice torture to take an "it's my government doing it, not me!" approach. If we know that our government tortures and we don't publicly condemn it, our hands are dirty. When it comes to torture, no bystander is innocent. And if we know that our government tortures, and we sanction the torture because we think it somehow makes us safer, our hands are more than just dirty. We become outright accomplices. We become thugs.

How to understand our willingness to condone and even embrace torture? How to grasp our willingness to participate in such evil? Beginning today, the first day of Torture Awareness Month, this blog, which takes its name from Ariel Dorfman's play about torture, will grapple with these and similar questions.

torture, human rights, terrorism