We know torture exists, we know it happens, but since it rarely intrudes into our daily lives we’re wont to think along the lines of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. For the most part we remain oblivious to its contemporary pervasiveness and the steady erosion of international norms that has taken place over the last decade. We pay little attention to the fact that today torture is evermore becoming a tacitly and sometimes openly approved instrument of statecraft. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a host of other international treaties such as the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions III & IV, were established to prevent the use of torture. At present it unfortunately appears as though a concerted effort to both circumvent and downplay these international legal precedents has been undertaken by the uppermost echelons within the Bush Administration.
Only last month, after both houses of the US Congress passed a bill that would ban waterboarding and other so-called ‘aggressive interrogation techniques’, President Bush chose to invoke his veto, claiming that it would impose unacceptable limitations on the interrogation techniques relied on by the CIA.
The dangerous precedent was first established back in 2003 in a now infamous 81-page memorandum, issued by former US Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. Yoo, now a law professor at Berkeley, bears a significant brunt of the responsibility in providing the legal rational for the so-called ‘aggressive interrogation techniques’ used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.1
The gist of Yoo’s argument holds that military interrogators operating outside of the United States, could legally use a number of unspecified techniques as long as they didn’t violate his definition of torture: “intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result.” That the intentional infliction of pain just shy of death, organ failure or permanent damage and loss of bodily function has been given a legal rationalization is frankly a terrifying prospect. The reaction has been so strong in some quarters that a number of commentators, pundits and academics have called for Yoo to be arraigned for war crimes.
There is another side to this rather bleak picture. A BBC World Service poll of more than 27,000 people in 25 different countries in 2006 concluded that 59 percent of the world’s citizens are unwilling to compromise on the protection of human rights.2 Majorities in 19 out of 25 countries surveyed supported upholding the rule against torture. What’s more refreshing still is the fact that the survey encompassed a broad range of individuals separated by religion, nationality and culture and yet who despite such differences affirmed their commitment to human rights and their opposition to the use of torture.
The fact is, is that we don’t like to think that western governments could be either involved or complicit in torture; if anything it seems counterintuitive to suggest that liberal and democratic societies could be responsible for the heinous acts we usually associate with so-called third world dictatorships scattered throughout the Middle East and Africa. The conventional wisdom of late however has come under increasing attack in both the media and academia.
Last year for instance, Professor of Political Science at Reed College, Darius Rejali published his prolific and critically acclaimed tome Torture and Democracy, which argued for two central theses, which irrevocably transform the way we view the role and development of torture in modernity and democratic societies in particular. In the course of several hundred pages he proceeds to systematically map out how torture has existed within modern democracies, debunking claims that torture has solely been the province of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, though it’s of course frequently relied upon in such ‘closed’ societies.
In the course of his argument and with relative ease, Rejali undermines the image usually offered up for public consumption that the two, torture and democracy, are mutually exclusive practices, and so incompatible in principle. The second thesis, in many respects a corollary of the first, is that rather than interrogation techniques becoming more ‘civilized’ as a result of taking place in open societies, the development of torture techniques within democratic societies has in fact fomented a situation whereby the effects of torture are merely more difficult to discern and uncover after the event. The pain is all too real of course, but soon afterwards the torture victim bears none of the scars, gashes, scraps and broken bones, necessary to corroborate his claims. The horror of being tortured is thus compacted by the horror of nobody believing you were tortured.
How did this situation come to pass? What were the reasons and motivations for the development of so-called ‘clean techniques’ which though exceedingly painful, leave little to no trace of abuse only a short time after the event? In a nutshell, such techniques have developed in large part because of western public demands for openness and the watchful eye of the global human rights regiment which first gained momentum in the late 60s and 70s. Notably, it was during this period that we witnessed the election of the Carter Administration which was elected on a platform of human rights and the mandate to overhaul previous Administrations’ foreign policy bungles and incompetence in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
It was largely in response to the monitoring and cataloguing of abuses as exhibited in the painstaking work of organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that torturers have become increasingly adept at covering their tracks and developing techniques that ensure little to no verifiable evidence of torture can be uncovered.
An additional consequence which has been pursued with vigor by the Bush Administration is that of extraordinary rendition otherwise known as torture by proxy, whereby suspected ‘enemies of the state’ are whisked away to so-called ‘black sites’ around the globe in countries governed by regimes with a more lax attitude and legal lassitude toward the torture and coercion of detainees. The question of Guantanamo Bay is of course related to all this, but opens a whole other can of worms altogether, which we can’t adequately address here.3
The collusion of the CIA with the intelligence services of Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Uzbekistan in the practice of torture by proxy has been confirmed by multiple sources, including sources within the American intelligence establishment.4 Suspected terrorists including citizens of western governments have been for all intents and purposes kidnapped and flown to foreign ‘jails’ to be interrogated. Robert Baer, who worked as a CIA covert officer in the Middle East for 21 years has put it thus: “The ultimate destination of these flights are places that are involved in torture”. He continues: “If you send a prisoner to Jordan you get a better interrogation. If you send a prisoner to Egypt you will probably never see him again; the same with Syria.”5
Rejali and others in brief have provided us with the conceptual apparatus as well as empirical evidence to plot a trajectory from the monstrous techniques employed by the Nazis and the Soviet Union to the practice of water boarding in modern-day democracies; a development that is in large part indebted to the symbiosis of two, at least superficially, antithetical practices, torture and democracy. This of course doesn’t impugn democracy as the paramount model of political organization, even if it is our best worst option as Winston Churchill once quipped. What it does suggest is that despite a plethora of treaties and international agreements established to safeguard against and categorically condemn torture, such agreements are ultimately incapable of preventing governments from pursuing such a line if they decide, all but in name, to abrogate their international responsibilities.
Finally, numerous torture experts have been arguing for some time that torture is fundamentally incapable of providing actionable intelligence. Prior to the Iraq War key members of the Bush Administration cited proof of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and that the former had somehow been complicit in carrying out the 9/11 attacks. The ‘proof’ in question was extracted by means of torture and has since been shown to be baseless by the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. It was a Libyan by the name of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who was rendered to Egypt from Afghanistan and under protracted interrogation reported “that Iraq had provided chemical and biological weapons training to the terrorist organization [al-Qaeda].”6
The ticking time bomb scenario which is invariably invoked by torture’s defenders and apologists has virtually descended into myth in present-day culture, when in reality it’s highly unlikely that torture under such circumstances will provide genuine and actionable intelligence. Reliable intelligence, as evinced in the case of the London bombings, is afforded instead by the cultivation of strong communal ties and local informants, not torture or ‘torture lite’ as some like to refer to it.
The fact of the matter is that our cultural perception of the issue has been distorted and slanted as a result of the tragic events of 9/11, Madrid and London; and shows like 24, backed by the demagoguery of Fox News, have also played a significant role in ‘a dangerous shift of norms’7 which has been underway for several years and continues unabated under the current US Administration. In contrast to the poll mentioned at the outset of this essay, another poll conducted by AP-Ipsos makes it plain that we are gradually being acclimatized to view the issue of torture through the lens of a ticking digital clock with a mushroom cloud over LA, NYC or London upon the clock’s expiration. The practice of torture has thereby been framed and skewed so that we’re increasingly receptive to the idea of torture ‘in rare circumstances’. The problem we then find ourselves in of course is where do we draw the line and what exactly constitutes ‘rare circumstances’.8
Often we’re posed the question in explicitly personal terms: ‘What would you do if your wife or child were held hostage and you only had a matter of days if not hours to save them, and you suspected that a guy in captivity possibly knew something?’ Megan McArdle, at the Atlantic Monthly, posed the question is just these terms back in 2003 and replied with a candid, if not downright scary answer: “Now, are you going to give him back to the Feds to be sent to Gitmo in the hopes that a couple of years down the road, he might tell you something – if they haven’t already gassed your child, that is? Or are you going to whip out the toolbox and get to work?”9
The massive problem with all this is that torture is contagious and though initially sanctioned ‘under unique circumstances’ soon becomes rife, sullying everything it touches, as the scandal of Abu Ghraib back in April 2004 can testify.10 Techniques supposedly restricted for use by the CIA, get taken up by the army, and these in turn are adopted by private contractors working for companies like Blackwater, and basically the end result is that all hell breaks loose. It’s a dangerous ‘slippery slope’ which has ceased to be merely a hypothetical and has unfortunately become all too real.
Moreover and to simplify the matter somewhat, the repercussions of such actions for the US’s global standing are twofold: firstly: the US’s moral superiority and stature have taken a devastating hit, not just in the Arab and Muslim world, but even amongst the publics of some of the US’s staunchest western European allies.11 Second, and coming off the first point, resentment and anti-Americanism have been given even greater impetus, as if the invasion of Iraq hadn’t already done enough to confirm many people’s worst fears regarding US intentions for the region. The images at Abu Ghraib have been irrevocably seared into people’s memories and the degrading and dehumanizing tactics supposedly employed in order to garner intelligence have been exposed for the grotesque psycho-sexual manipulations and effronteries to human dignity they indisputably are.
The US practice of torture abroad has justifiably received a considerable amount of media attention in recent years. Apart from scores of articles and op-ed pieces in the mainstream press, the cinematic domain has shone a much needed light onto the US abuse of detainees; the film Rendition starring Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhall, and the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, awarded Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars, have pointed to the stark reality of both torture by proxy and the fate of many detainees held in US captivity who’ve been subject to arbitrary arrest and denied due process. Taxi to the Dark Side takes its point of departure from the death of a young Afghan man, Dilawar, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was consequently beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan.
The poll adduced at the opening of this piece shows that a clear majority of us, from disparate backgrounds, religions and ethnicities abhor the use of torture (when framed in clear terms not skewed to mesh with the nightmarish scenarios starring Jack Bauer & Co) and in light of such patent disapproval we must surely continue to draw attention to and criticize in no uncertain terms the practice of torture wherever it rears its ugly head and unmask the desensitized lexicon which lulls us into acceptance of a inhumane, morally reprehensible and degrading practice.
