Is Torture Banal?

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

(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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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