Intervention, torture, and pretense

There are strange splits in the U.S. political spectrum over our attack on Libya. This is one where the usual left/right divide doesn’t hold. Not that the usual left/right divide is all that useful, but it is how many people look at things. The case of Private Bradley Manning, the alleged source of all those diplomatic cables that ended up on Wikileaks, is more in keeping with the dominant paradigm. In a way, the two issues are linked.

A little review on Pvt. Manning: He joined the U.S. Army with as gung-ho an attitude as anybody could want, according to those who knew him. He ended up in Iraq, where he realized that he and his unit were assisting local militias in kidnapping, torturing, and killing innocent civilians. He did what a good soldier is supposed to do and brought this to the attention of those further up the command chain. The response he got was essentially, “Shut up and keep going.” After much internal debate he started downloading the files in question, including the infamous video of a U.S. attack helicopter knowingly gunning down a group of civilians. (Warning: Graphic violence) Say what you like about the effects of his actions, but recognize that he acted out of moral conviction and the hope of spurring reform. As far as we can tell from his communication with the government’s informant, Manning had no thought of personal gain and no intent of harming his country.

Now Manning is being held in the brig at Quantico Virginia. He is slowly, methodically being tortured. When someone mentions torture, most people think in terms of blood and antique mechanical devices. What researchers have found is that conditions of confinement, although slower, can work just as well. Isolation drives people insane. So do sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, repeated humiliation, and calibrated physical discomfort. Manning is being subjected to all of these. The excuse is that the conditions are to prevent him from committing suicide, but this is a self fulfilling prophecy. These conditions tend to push people towards suicide.

I can only theorize why the government is doing this, but in doing so I can fall back upon the general uses of torture. Torture is used to elicit false confessions in order to legitimize baseless prosecutions. In this case it is possible that the U.S. government wants Manning to implicate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a case of espionage. The other use of torture is as a tool of terrorism. Remember two things: 1) Torture is only supposed to be semi-secret. It works better when the target population knows only part of the story and lets imagination fill in the rest. 2) Terrorism is defined by what is done, not who does it.

As I have written before, terrorism is the use of violence to create fear in a population in order to achieve a political goal. The FBI uses a very similar formulation. Torture is a method governments often use to deter people from political activity. In this case it is directed at whistleblowers and those who would reform our military. The power and ruthlessness of our government is being demonstrated upon the body of Bradley Manning. He may well be guilty of a variety of crimes. That’s not the point. The point is that he is being punished, outside constitutional norms and without due process, in order to create fear in others. More specifically to you, dear reader, is that anything the government is allowed to do to Bradley Manning it can do to you. That’s the terrible, wonderful symmetry of the law.

The situation in Libya, viewed completely out of context, seems to invite intervention. Here we have a somewhat unhinged despot with four decades of oppression on his record, plus possible terrorist activity, facing a popular uprising with democratic tendencies. Our despot has bombed and shelled civilian areas and threatened a no-prisoners scorched earth policy towards his population in general. A no-fly zone seems the least we can do. Juan Cole in particular makes a compelling argument for our intervention. Phyllis Bennis offers an equally compelling rebuttal.

It’s somewhat academic now. We’re in there. We launched over a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. vessels in the Mediterranean, and U.S., British, and French warplanes have flown hundreds of bombing missions over Libya. The Libyan rebels seem to be making progress. Fine.

But not really. Many have pointed out the hypocrisy of our ongoing tolerance of oppression and killing elsewhere. Protesters are being shot in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, and yet we do nothing. We completely ignore civil and human rights crimes in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. This is not an argument to cease operations in Libya, but a heads-up about principles and pretense.

When we righteously denounce Gaddafi and his undemocratic security state, and yet ignore the crackdown in minority ruled Bahrain, our opportunism shows. Line up all the players, the House of Saud and their klepto-royal pals in Kuwait and U.A.E. on one side, Sadaam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi on the other. Make a third line for the rape-and-murder types from the Congo, Rwanda, and Sudan. It breaks down this way:

• Cooperative Despots in Oil-rich Countries
• Uncooperative Despots in Oil-rich Countries
• Irrelevant Despots in Countries Lacking Oil

It’s dead simple to predict our policies towards any government in these categories. Support-While-Admonishing-Gently, Overthrow, Mostly Ignore. Of course, it has nothing to do with moral principles. It won’t have anything to do with moral principles as long as we are dependent on imported oil. It won’t have anything to do with moral principles as long as huge military contractors (such as Raytheon and Boeing, who just listened to the music of the cruise missile cash register) can push money into our electoral system.

It’s all dependent on pretense. Nobody in government, aside from fictional villains, gets up in the morning and says “I’m going to do something EEEEEVIL today!” Same goes for the general population. Our policies have to be couched in terms of self protection, patriotism, or humanitarianism. Things you’ll never hear at a press conference:

“Private Manning really made us look bad, ok? We’re a multi-billion dollar department, but our computer security would be laughed at by the IT person at a small nonprofit. And yeah, we got caught carelessly, ok, deliberately shooting civilians, uh-gehn. And Wikileaks is totally beyond us. I mean, we’ve got sticky note instructions on our desktop monitors written by our teenage kids. But hey, brute force is our territory and the constitution is for people who haven’t pissed us off yet. Manning will eventually crack and then Assange will crack and then everybody else will tiptoe around saluting us. Um, as we protect democracy and human rights, sorta.”

“The State Department really isn’t interested in any of those diddly land locked countries in sub-Saharan Africa. They’re on the way from nowhere to nowhere and they have squat. The Saudis, however, are a great bunch of guys. They throw a terrific diplomatic reception. Never any women there for some reason, but whatever. Ok, ok, they’re a thieving bunch of overfed dicks, but they keep pumping oil and buying fighter planes, so we smile and eat their canapés and try not to notice when they send money to bin Laden.”

You can write your own. The point is that our policies towards Manning and the Middle East are based on pretense and their continuation relies on the general belief in that pretense. It’s all about control over the flow of information, resources, and money. It’s skinned over with a very thin layer of false virtue, so control over the flow of information is a prerequisite for the other two. Manning is caught up in a roiling, multiplexed feedback loop, a cover-up of a cover-up of a lie about a pretense. I don’t hold out much hope for him. I wouldn’t hold out any hope at all, except that the whitewash is getting very thin.

Inalienable rights, unacceptable wrongs

First, it bothers me that I feel the need to write this at all. I suppose the work of humanism is never done. You’d think that the issue of torture, what it is and why it is wrong in all cases, would have been laid to rest a few years ago, if not a century ago, but some people still seem to need reminding.

Torture, as defined by Merriam Webster: the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure. (from Latin tortus, past participle of torquēre to twist)

The United Nations Torture Convention of 1984 defines it as: "Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." Why the definition is restricted to public officials is beyond me.

The Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture, a treaty among nations of the Organization of American States, is broader in its definition: For the purposes of this Convention, torture shall be understood to be any act intentionally performed whereby physical or mental pain or suffering is inflicted on a person for purposes of criminal investigation, as a means of intimidation, as personal punishment, as a preventive measure, as a penalty, or for any other purpose. Torture shall also be understood to be the use of methods upon a person intended to obliterate the personality of the victim or to diminish his physical or mental capacities, even if they do not cause physical pain or mental anguish.

The treaty also notes that, “The fact of having acted under orders of a superior shall not provide exemption from the corresponding criminal liability.”

Also: “The existence of circumstances such as a state of war, threat of war, state of siege or of emergency, domestic disturbance or strife, suspension of constitutional guarantees, domestic political instability, or other public emergencies or disasters shall not be invoked or admitted as justification for the crime of torture. Neither the dangerous character of the detainee or prisoner, nor the lack of security of the prison establishment or penitentiary shall justify torture.” I should note that the U.S. is not a signatory to this treaty.

This definition makes sense. Torture can be gory and immediate, or subtle, long term, and mostly psychological. The definition is inherent in the act, not the victim, not the perpetrator, and not the situation. Pared down to its clinical extreme, torture could be defined as the deliberate application of aversive stimuli to degrade a person’s physical and/or mental state.

The two latter definitions I mentioned above also have clauses exempting incidental suffering resulting from lawful penalties such as imprisonment. Doing time for armed robbery is unpleasant, but it isn’t torture.

It is the understandably broad sweep of these definitions that makes former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s evasiveness about waterboarding so vile. It also renders the present debate offensive. It is all torture, from the sleep deprivation and stress positions to waterboarding and worse. There are varying degrees of severity, but one standard of immorality.

Having laid out internationally accepted definitions of torture, I’d like to discuss why it is wrong in terms of its purpose and our constitution.

History has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of torture as a means to obtain accurate information. People under torture, or just the threat of torture, have confessed to a variety of things they never did, and have accused others similarly. The era of persecution of people for witchcraft, roughly 1480 to 1710, saw endless confessions of supernatural deeds, sexual intercourse with the devil, and the naming of innocent persons as accomplices. Military and intelligence service experts who have been studying and practicing interrogation for decades have declared repeatedly that coercive methods are not only ineffective but counterproductive in obtaining accurate information.

So if it doesn’t produce accurate information, then what is the purpose of torture? As I have written previously, it is a form of terrorism. Terrorism is the use of violence (or threat of violence) to induce fear in order to achieve a political goal. Torture is intended to become public, despite the pseudo-secrecy surrounding it. If the innocent suffer along with the guilty, it is all the more effective at suppressing opposition. And that is its primary function: making people afraid to oppose a government or political movement. It has a secondary function as well; eliciting false confessions to justify government actions. Frank Rich wrote recently in the New York Times about the Bush administration effort to connect Iraq with Al Qaeda, using torture when legitimate methods didn’t produce the desired results.

The use of torture strikes at the heart of our Bill of Rights. The fifth amendment to the constitution states, in part, “…nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” The framers of the constitution put in the clause against self incrimination particularly because of their abhorrence of torture. They were not far removed from the widespread use of torture in Europe, especially during religious conflicts. If defendants could be required to confess, then there would be an open invitation to coercion. Torture also circumvents our right to due process. The eighth amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment would bar torture by itself, but torture is punishment before proof of guilt. Presumption of innocence and due process are principles vital to our judicial system, and torture annihilates them.

We have heard much quibbling about the status of detainees. Are they prisoners of war, or “unlawful combatants,” or just prisoners? This debate is irrelevant. The principles enumerated in the fifth and eighth amendments are not right because they are in the constitution. They are in the constitution because they are right. They were right yesterday, last year, a century ago, and before the Egyptians built pyramids. They are right in Guantanamo Bay, in Kabul, and down at your local police station. They are right for all 6.2 billion people on the planet, including those Guantanamo detainees and you.

That is why we need to prosecute torturers and all the people in the hierarchy who gave orders to the torturers. Torture is not new to this country, but in the past it had to be done off the books, with deniability for upper level personnel. The Bush administration was the first to try to justify the practice. The Yoo and Bybee memos were attempts to legitimize the unacceptable, to institutionalize the unconstitutional. It is not enough that they are out of power. Senator Leahy’s concept of a truth commission is inadequate. The Department of Justice under the Obama administration must drive the concept of legitimized torture into the ground and firmly reestablish the rule of law.

If we allow the constitution to be trampled and the torturers to go free, then who are we as a nation, really? A nation of laws, or of men? If we are a nation governed by the whims of those in power, and whose laws are enforced according to political expediency, then our conflict with despots and terrorists is one of tribalism, not principle. At this moment we are merely the Taliban with better plumbing. .