By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – October 17, 2007
The US government use of torture is in the news once again,
and as long as BushCheney are in power it will be, off and on. For they
have made its use into US government policy. Of course, they describe
whatever it is that is being done as “not torture.” They then go on
to say that a) “we can’t give you any details because: a) it’s classified and
b) anyone who spills the beans will be “aiding and abetting terrorism and
terrorists” (as if such persons didn’t already know from first-hand experience
with Georgite torture at the hands of either US torturers or those of allies
such as Egypt). This is done, and was done in a picture-perfect version by the
White House Press Secretary in response to the revelations of the current
secret program of torture carried out after Bush said “we-don’t-torture,”
because that’s what they want to have the discussion on: “what’s
torture?”
They won’t reveal those secret Dept. of Justice memos (or at
least hadn’t as of this writing) because, again, they’re classified and release
would aid and abet and so on and so forth. So since the Regime won’t give
us (much less the Congressional Intelligence and Armed Services Committees) the
details, let us decide for ourselves and let’s find out what has been going on
from a former torturer himself. According to Tim Shipman of the Sydney
Morning Herald (that’s Sydney, Australia, folks; you wouldn’t expect to see
an article like this one [see the link at the end of this column] in a US
newspaper):
“A former US Army
torturer has described the traumatic effects of American interrogation
techniques in Iraq - on their victims and on the perpetrators themselves. Tony
Lagouranis said he conducted mock executions, forced men and boys into
agonizing stress positions, kept suspects awake for weeks on end, used dogs to
terrify prisoners and subjected others to hypothermia. . . . Between January
2004 and January 2005, first at Abu Ghraib prison and then in Mosul, in
northern Babil province, [Mr. Lagouranis] tortured suspects, most of whom he
said were innocent. He realized he had entered a moral dungeon when he found
himself reading a Holocaust memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from the
Nazis. . . . [He] said he never beat a prisoner. . . . [But, he said]
‘these coercive techniques - isolation, dogs, sleep deprivation, stress
positions, hypothermia - crossed a legal line because they violated the Geneva
Conventions.’ “He has written a book about his experiences entitled Fear up
Harsh. The quoted article appeared originally in the British
right-wing newspaper, The Telegraph.
So we know that
torture has been systematically carried out by US personnel in and out of the
military, and the US has sent prisoners to be tortured in third
countries. We know that the Vice-President thinks that water-boarding is
just a grand idea, but we also know that his regime denies that that is torture
and wants very much to keep the discussion on the question of whether it is or
isn’t. And so do most of the stories about torture, a few of which are
cited at the end of this column. Actually it doesn’t much matter whether
the Regime would ever agree that what they have officially authorized, first
through the Yoo memos and more recently through the secret Justice Department
legal memoranda recently leaked to the New York Times, is torture or
not. Unless I miss my guess, those persons who have been subjected to these
techniques would describe it as torture. At least one person who
administered the methods of “interrogation” describes it as torture, and he is
not likely to be unique among those administrators. Many people in this
country other than dyed-in-the-wool Georgites and Islamophobes would describe
it as torture and so would, and do, most other people around the world.
Thus regardless of what the Georgites say about it, in the public perception
they have instituted torture as official US policy, and in this case,
perception determines reality.
So the principal
question must become “why?” Why does the BushCheney Regime use torture as
a primary instrument for dealing with captives? Few observers in this
country are asking this question, because most of them have allowed themselves
to get caught up in the idiotic, BushCheney-sponsored “debate:” “yes, it is, no
it isn’t” and so on and so forth. Even if the Justice Department’s
apparently tortured (if I may use that term) legal reasoning were to prove that
it somehow isn’t, legalistically, in addition to the fact that most people
think it is, it is described by the Regime itself as “enhanced” methods.
After all, we are talking about water boarding, extreme isolation, piercing
sound, extreme cold, fake suffocations, prolonged confinement in rigid
positions, and etc. So even though this Regime would give us an argument,
let’s for the sake of argument and brevity call it “torture.”
Before we can
answer the question “why?” we can quickly dispose of what torture is not good for, based on the references from The New Yorker below.
According to many experts in the field, it is not good for gathering
intelligence from military captives. For the most part, tortured subjects
just give their torturers what they want to hear. Experts have testified
over and over again that sophisticated, non-torture psychological techniques
that were developed in the last century by both US and Soviet intelligence
agencies are much more effective than torture in gaining useful information
from military and paramilitary personnel. It is not useful in the
“ticking bomb” scenario either. Any asset highly enough placed in an
operation to know the details in enough detail to help any captors stop the
operation just before it is about to take place will a) know that they are
going to be killed anyway, and b) will be totally dedicated to achieving its
desired outcome.
But, as the
Gestapo, the Iranian Savak under that great US ally the Shah, the NKVD, the
Japanese fascist era Kempeitai, the Argentine Generals, the Pinochet
Regime, and the Spanish Francoists have proved over and over again, torture
does have its uses and they are manifold. First and foremost, it is a
major instrument of terror against one’s own population: it is a really good repressor
of dissent. A principal tool of Gestapo control in Nazi Germany was to
pick up someone who had been making mildly anti-Hitler remarks, give them a
good session or two of torture and then send them back to the
neighborhood. You can bet the neighbors got the message.
Second, it is indeed very useful in extracting information
from politically active civilian regime opponents who have no military training
or training in resisting torture, such as the civilian opponents of the
Pinochet Regime and the civilian targets of the Argentine “Dirty War.”
Third, it is a very good tool for extra-judicial punishment, just as long as
the regime using it makes sure that its details leak out, in a totally deniable
way of course to its own citizens. Do you think that Argentineans didn’t
know that their leftist loved ones were being tortured well before they were
dropped out airplanes into the South Atlantic, without a parachute?
Fourth, it is a very useful tool for repression in militarily occupied territories.
Just ask the Kempeitai that operated in Korea and Occupied China about that
one. Fifth, it is very helpful when a regime is out to change the culture
of its country, and to wipe out historical memory of anything that went before
it came to power. Doing so was perhaps the principal long-term goal of
the Spanish Francoists, once they had restored corporate-clerical control of
the country. Torture was one of their stocks-in-trade. Sixth, it is
really good at extracting false confessions, then to be used in show trials,
such as those of the Soviet Union of the late 1930s that killed off so many of
the good Communists who were already challenging Stalinism as the way not to
try to build socialism.
Sixth, in countries which use it but claim they do not, it helps
to establish a record of lawlessness, of total disregard for the rule of law,
as long as the Regime says things like, “We are doing what we are doing in
order to keep our people safe and fight terror,” and so on and so forth.
For this one we need look no farther than our own doorstep. The current
US regime is obviously out to change the culture here. “Torture [except
of course we don’t call it torture, just ‘enhanced interrogation’] is OK, that
is as long as we are doing the Deciding as to who gets it.” No rule of
law, no adherence to international treaties or our Constitution for which they
are a part, and etc., just as long as the Regime says “we’re doing to live up
to our responsibilities to keep the American people ‘safe from terrorism,” why
it’s OK. But of course to have a useful instrument of national policy, we
have to have torturers. Which is another reason for the BushCheney
torture program. Until they came to power, Americans didn’t do such
things, officially at least. So there weren’t very many, if any, trained
torturers amongst our armed and intelligence forces. But now they are
being trained, apparently by the carload. And if the Georgites stay in
power, they will be needing more of them. Further, BushCheney seem to be
converting the CIA from an intelligence gathering agency (after all, it so
often produces intelligence that they the Georgites just don’t want to hear) to
a torture agency which, given how little attention the Georgites pay to the
law, could be useful at home as well as abroad.
Finally, for BushCheney, the whole institution, its use, and
the whole
“we-don’t-have-to-tell-either-the-Congress-or-the-Courts-or-the-American-people-any-of-the-details-just-as-long-as-we-say-we-are-using-it-in-the-war-on-flanking-maneuvers-[I
mean terrorism]” tactic just strengthens their “Unitary Executive/F__k
Congress” (otherwise known as fascist) approach to governance and governing.
So, don’t tell me torture isn’t useful. It’s just not
useful for what the torturers tell us it’s useful for.
Sources for this Column include (not in order of citation or
use): Shane, S. and Mazzeti, M., “Advisers Fault Harsh Methods in
Interrogation, “ New York Times, 5/30/07; FEMA Concentration Camps:
Locations and Executive Orders, 9/4/04, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_concentration_camps, http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/FEMA-Concentration-Camps3sep04.htm;
Yoo, J, “How the Presidency Regained Its Balance,” New York Times,
9/17/06; ”AP Gets Shocking New Report on Gitmo,” 11/17/06; Mayer, J.,
“Whatever it Takes,” The New Yorker, 2/19-26/07; Mayer, J., “The Black
Sites,” The New Yorker, 2/19-26/07; McKelvey, “We Were Torturing People
for No Reason,” International Herald Tribune, 3/28/07; “Power Grab,” The
Progress Report, 6/26/07 (on Cheney and Torture); Hersh, S. M., “The
General’s Report,” The New Yorker, 6/26/07; Shipman, T., “We got it
wrong, says former torturer,” Sidney Morning Herald, 6/11/07, http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/we-got-it-wrong-says-former-torturer/2007/06/10/1181414139791.html;
Gellman, B. and Becker, J. “Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power,”
Washington Post, 6/25/07; Shane, S., Johnston, D., and Risen, J., “Secret U.S.
Endorsement of Severe Interrogations,” New York Times, 10/4/07;
Johnston, D., and Shane, S.,, “Debate Erupts on Techniques Used by C.I.A.,” New
York Times, 10/5/07.