Home > Torture’s Dirty Secret: It Works

Torture’s Dirty Secret: It Works

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 14 May 2005
14 comments

International Prison Attack-Terrorism USA

Torture’s true purpose is to terrorize. It may not work as an interrogation tool, but as an intimidation tactic, its success is clear.

I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an event honoring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world’s most famous victim of "rendition," the process by which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when U.S. interrogators detained him and "rendered" him to Syria, where he was held for ten months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings.

Arar was being honored for his courage by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organization. The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some speakers were unable even to mention the honored guest by name, as if he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: The tenuous "evidence"—later discredited—that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?

In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, "not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so." Fear of being the next Maher Arar.

The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: You are being watched, your neighbor may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you could disappear onto a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay," to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people being intimidated need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that they demand justice. This helps explain why the Defense Department will release certain kinds of seemingly incriminating information about Guantánamo—pictures of men in cages, for instance—at the same time that it acts to suppress photographs on a par with what escaped from Abu Ghraib. And it might also explain why the Pentagon approved the new book by a former military translator, including the passages about prisoners being sexually humiliated, but prevented him from writing about the widespread use of attack dogs. This strategic leaking of information, combined with official denials, induces a state of mind that Argentines describe as "knowing/not knowing," a vestige of their "dirty war."

"Obviously, intelligence agents have an incentive to hide the use of unlawful methods," says the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer. "On the other hand, when they use rendition and torture as a threat, it’s undeniable that they benefit, in some sense, from the fact that people know that intelligence agents are willing to act unlawfully. They benefit from the fact that people understand the threat and believe it to be credible."

And the threats have been received. In an affidavit filed with an ACLU court challenge to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, Nazih Hassan, president of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, Mich., describes this new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations are way down, board members have resigned—Hassan says his members fear doing anything that could get their names on lists. One member testified anonymously that he has "stopped speaking out on political and social issues" because he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.

This is torture’s true purpose: to terrorize—not only the people in Guantánamo’s cages and Syria’s isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist—the individual prisoner’s will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror. But there’s a problem: No one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool—least of all the people who practice it. Torture "doesn’t work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Feb. 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques." The army’s own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

And yet the abuses keep on coming—Uzbekistan as the new hot spot for renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported to Iraq. And the only sensible explanation for torture’s persistent popularity comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control them," she replied.

Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21997/

Forum posts

  • Sun Tzu, Art of War: "Kill one, terrorize one thousand."

    If a killer has information that would save Cleveland from being wiped out, every tool available must and should be used to extract that information. Period. Do you think for a moment the enemy would hesitate to do so?

    Gardis
    USA

    "Liberalism and Terrorism" Different stages of the Same Disease.

    • Jesus has been called a lot of things by you B-shits, but you’re the first to call him a disease. Next time you and Dubya claim that you each ’high-five’ that nasty little liberal named Jesus Christ, say "Hi" for me and all the other liberals in your Repukican World. Jesus knows who and what we are. You never will. It would be better for you that you, and all who would be just like you, would have killed yourselves rather than to worship your Antichrist while you blaspheme your liberal and loving Lord and damn his obedient children!

    • Gardis, why aren’t you in Iraq fightin’ for Dubya? You’re not a coward like your great leader are you? You know, all hat and no cows. And, BTW, torture doesn’t work you dummy. If I tortured you I can guarantee you would sell out your granny in ten minutes.

  • I think you are right. The box of Pandora is opened again. The middle age is coming back.

  • Ignore him, he only comes here for attention and his pat on the back from the GOP.

  • Gardis, Wrong is Wrong is wrong is wrong is wrong.

    There is no right in Torture------ Except maybe Right Wing!

    The danger you think is there is a fiction cooked up by the crooks in the Whitehouse.
    9/11 was a black op created as far back as 1980 and likely before that and the idea was cooked up as a war scenario by the US military at least 25 years ago as related on Black Op Radio Archive black200b 2004 Tim McNiven interview Discussion of his involvement of a Pentagon scenario of planes crashing into the Penatgon
    www.blackopradio.com
    You’ll have to purchase the disks to listen to this, but this man is very believable

    Also Read this. It’s from a recent Arctic Beacon issue:

    http://www.arcticbeacon.citymaker.com/articles/article/1518131/25592.htm

    In this article, THE BIN LADENS TRIED TO PREVENT 9/11 in 1987!

    Surely, with this and all the other obvious evidence, the evidence is so overwhelming that even you can see some of it peeking out from behind the mass of corruption, or are you just another disinformationalist put here to create doubt in the semi converted?

    The truth is that the mainstream press is bought, paid for and controlled in the USA and you’ll never see an article like this one in America unless it comes to you in a Truth column like this one.

    Wake up and smell the coffee.

    The latch is unlocked,
    The Nazis are at the door
    And the Fascists are pushing on their backs.
    We are all doomed to controlled subservience unless they are all stopped.

  • I agree with you Gardis, but instead of torturing the prisoner, we should do what the russians do; hold their family hostage and send those prisoners bits of family members until they talk. Also before we do that, we should make sure that the prisoner has information worth having and isn’t just the ordinary small fry foot soldier that’s been easily manipulated.

    • 151.***.148*** and 63.***.93.**, you are two sick father-fuckers. It’s clear that you both swap spit in each other’s assholes, as well. This liberal Veteran would prefer each of you with a bullet in your brain to help improve your vacant outlooks and give you a thousand-yard stare that will never go away. The VC were worthy enemies because they were honorable. Taking you two out would be equivalent to squashing a bug.

      By the way, I just love the way you two lisp, with that little lilt in your walks, while you write your symbiotic right-wing trash.

      Hoping to hose you,
      Grunt

  • LIke Richard Nixon, the Russians are not wrong about everything. You can believe when they want information, they don’t pick up the New York Times and find out what they can and cannot do, LOL! What a joke.

    Got a real rise out of the animals, didn’t I. Good. About time they had their little liberal echo chamber shaken up. Christ, I thought liberals were all about "diversity" ??

    Gardis
    USA
    "Liberals Love the USA, the way OJ Loved Nicole"

    LOL!

    • You sad little fascist. Can’t you read - your country needs idiot little patriots like you in Iraq. So get yourself down to that recruiting office and put your balls where your mouth is.

    • 151.***.148*** and 63.***.93.**, you are two sick father-fuckers. It’s clear that you both swap spit in each other’s assholes, as well. This liberal Veteran would prefer each of you with a bullet in your brain to help improve your vacant outlooks and give you a thousand-yard stare that will never go away. The VC were worthy enemies because they were honorable. Taking you two out would be equivalent to squashing a bug.

      By the way, I just love the way you two lisp, with that little lilt in your walks, while you write your symbiotic right-wing trash.

      Hoping to hose you,
      Grunt

  • Listen, "liberal vet" what are you a veteran of? The pro-homosexual marriage marches? Oh, the killing unborn children crusades??

    You would rather Clinton who allowed us to be attacked all over the world with no retribution whatsoever. Then 9/11 happened. Remember, idiots, they planned 9/11 starting in Malaysia in Feb. 2000, long before Bush ever got elected. They must be wiped out, and wipe them out we will. No thanks to you gutless cowards.

    • DAMNNN!!! I never realized just how really PASSIONATE you repukicans are! I thought the Jeff Guckert story was just a repukican wet dream, but it seems your dreams have COME.....well, you can finish that sentence ’passionately’, can’t you, 63.***.93.**. From now on I will address you and your asshole buddy fondly as 69.***.69.***.69.***.69.***.69.***.69.***..............Sweet dreams, little ones!

    • DAMNNN!!! I never realized just how really PASSIONATE you repukicans are! I thought the Jeff Guckert story was just a repukican wet dream, but it seems your dreams have COME.....well, you can finish that sentence ’passionately’, can’t you, 63.***.93.**. From now on I will address you and your asshole buddy fondly as 69.***.69.***.69.***.69.***.69.***.69.***..............