Home > On the Necessity of Torture
by Mark Engler
While it has been over a week since the scandal
concerning abuses of Iraqi prisoners erupted, our
country is only beginning to reckon with the issue of
torture. By now, most Americans have seen at least some
of the horrific photos from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
We know that more are yet to come.
In his testimony before Congress, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld warned that the government holds
pictures and video of a "sadistic, cruel and inhuman"
nature. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has seen
this material, warns that "We’re not just talking about
giving people a humiliating experience—we’re talking
about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
This is sad news. But perhaps it is for the best that
such evidence is coming to light. Based on our domestic
news coverage, many Americans have been persuaded that
the present scandal is "just" a matter of sexual
humiliation. This perception allows Rush Limbaugh to
liken the abuse to a fraternity prank, to argue that
the jailers’ actions were "understandable" given the
stresses of the Iraqi situation.
"You know," Limbaugh said in the soldiers’ defense,
"these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking
about people having a good time, these people, you ever
heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow
some steam off?" Limbaugh’s prescription is to "move
on."
The US army’s internal report, authored by General
Antonio M. Taguba, is not as cavalier. It describes
"sadistic, blatant and wanton" abuses of our country’s
captives, acts such as "Breaking chemical lights and
pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees," and
"sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and
perhaps a broom stick."
In the now-famous series of ten photos posted on-line
by the New Yorker magazine, the ninth image—which has
received far less attention than the depictions of
sexual humiliation—shows the dead body of an "abused"
prisoner, packed in ice, which Taguba’s report suggests
may have been killed during interrogation. At least ten
incidences of Iraqi prisoners dying while in US custody
are currently under investigation, according to the
Pentagon.
Much has already been said about how the abuses in Iraq
are not unique in the post-9/11 context—about how
human rights monitors have long decried acts of torture
taking place in US facilities in Guantanamo Bay, in
Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Likewise, it is
increasingly well-known that our country, in lieu of
conducting its own torturous interrogations, has grown
accustomed in past years to "rendering" detainees to
countries like Syria and Egypt, countries that will
perform torture for us and that we can continue to
regard as moral backwaters.
Our elected officials’ long-overdue denunciation of
these practices is vital, and may result in significant
reforms in the short term. But they are unlikely to
address the root of torture—the policies of military
control that have sustained the practice in the past,
and that make it necessary today.
Two days after the attacks of September 11, 2001,
columnist Ann Coulter famously argued in an article for
the National Review that "We should invade their
countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to
Christianity." Two and a half years later, the rhetoric
has cooled only slightly. In the newest fundraising
letter from the Heritage Foundation, trustee Steve
Forbes decries a survey showing that "79% of students
do not believe that Western culture is superior to Arab
culture." He champions the Foundation’s mission of
"standing up for Western civilization and proclaiming
it superior to a culture that allows no dissent, that
represses its women, and that worships death."
The Department of Defense is only somewhat less
explicit in its calls for a new crusade. Its strategy
papers call for "full-spectrum dominance" over any
foreign adversary, real or potential. Its
neoconservative staffers promote a world order of
"unquestioned US military preeminence."
How is our country’s unquestioned dominance to be
maintained, if not for torture? How would Coulter’s
conversions be accomplished without the coercion and
the humiliation unleashed in all previous crusades? Why
are we to believe that the occupation of Iraq will be
uniquely clean and humane, that it will not at all
resemble our nation’s sins from the Cold War, committed
in places like El Salvador and Vietnam? The abuses Abu
Ghraib take place in a historical context in which
government officials have tacitly acknowledged the use
of torture, yet we have preferred to remember their
official denials.
Perhaps it is not surprising, amidst a new war, that
Vietnam haunts the current Presidential campaigns. In
1971, John Kerry, then a young Vietnam veteran,
testified before a Senate hearing about a veteran’s
initiative called the "Winter Soldier" investigation.
Kerry explained that fellow soldiers "told stories that
at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut
off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to
human genitals and turned up the power... razed
villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot
cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and
generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in
addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and
very particular ravaging which is done by the applied
bombing power of this country."
In past months, this speech has become a liability to
candidate Kerry. His critics have suggested that this
testimony reflects poorly on the Senator’s patriotism
and that the soldiers were lying. When Kerry appeared
recently on Meet the Press, interviewer Tim Russert
echoed these criticisms when charging that many of the
allegations had been "discredited."
There is no arguing this point. It is self-denial. Any
person, any news organization, that cares to examine
the record will find that the charges are not only
credible, they are ubiquitous.
In the wake of terrorist attacks on the United States,
there came a moment where torture could again come to
light as public policy. "After 9/11 the gloves come
off," Cofer Black, former head of CIA Counterterrorism
Center, ominously warned. A CIA official speaking
anonymously to the Washington Post in 2002 said, "If
you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the
time, you probably aren’t doing your job." That same
year the US unsuccessfully tried to block UN amendments
to the Convention Against Torture. These aimed to
strengthen the original 1987 treaty by establishing an
international regime of random inspections of prisons
and other facilities.
Even in his Friday testimony Secretary Rumsfeld seemed
to express frustration at operating "with peace time
restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime
situation." He bemoaned a situation in which "people
are running around with digital cameras and taking
these unbelievable photographs and then passing them
off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise."
We will not end abuses by handing out court martials
and "moving on." At base, a foreign policy that
necessitates torture exists because we refuse to
conceive of a role for the United States in the world
that is not based on indisputable military might, nor
on using this power to pursue our country’s economic
interests. Change will come only by challenging the
central assumptions behind this imperial conception of
national purpose; it will happen only if we act in the
knowledge that there is more torture to come.
"They did not know or participate in any crimes," a
senior U.S. officer in Baghdad said of the officers
responsible for running the prison in Iraq. "They
should have known, but they did not." Applied to the
commanding officers about whom they were spoken, these
words are implausible. Applied to ourselves, they ring
true: We did not know. We should have known.
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