Friday, Aug 29, 2008
It gives its practitioners a drug-like rush. But it leaves a legacy of destruction that takes generations to undo.
Jun 18, 2004 | Few things give a rush quite like having unlimited power over another human being. A sure sign the rush is coming is pasty saliva and a strange taste in one's mouth, according to a French soldier attached to a torture unit in Algeria. That powerful rush can be seen on the faces of some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, a rush that undoubtedly changed them forever. The history of slavery tells us that one can't feel such a rush without being corrupted by it. And the history of modern torture tells us that governments can't license this corruption -- even in the cause of spreading democracy -- without reducing the quality of their intelligence, compromising their allies and damaging their military and bureaucratic capabilities.
The abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison were originally blamed on a few American soldiers. Various investigations into the exact chain of command are underway, but they already point to policy decisions made at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Indeed, the recently revealed memos written by Justice Department lawyers in August 2002, at the request of the CIA and the White House, concerning treatment of al-Qaida suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by Pentagon lawyers in March 2003 (in which it was argued that the president and those he has empowered to conduct torture of foreign prisoners are immune from prosecution under international law) are evidence that the government was seeking ways to legally circumvent the Geneva Conventions. "The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it" is how Anne Applebaum put it in the Washington Post Wednesday. It turns out that many of the severest interrogation techniques used in Iraq were sanctioned by top military officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the former commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. And this week, we learned that Rumsfeld had ordered a "high-value" detainee in Iraq held in secret, in part to keep him from being seen by the International Red Cross.
I learned how torture fit into modern life while growing up in Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose government relied on Savak, a secret intelligence agency formed with the help of the CIA in 1957. Savak arrested and detained indefinitely people suspected of opposing the shah and tortured and executed thousands of political prisoners during his rule.
In the course of 20 years of research on modern torture and the bureaucracies that sponsored and practiced it in Germany, Japan, France and Britain, I have studied the "stealthy" methods, those that leave few visible marks (i.e., blood or scars) on the victim. I noticed that stealthy techniques appeared more often in the wars of democracies than in those of dictatorships. Democratic states that use torture to gain intelligence or as punishment obviously prefer methods -- such as electroshock, torture by water and ice, tying victims in agonizing postures, sonic devices and drugs -- that cause pain but do not result in lasting injury, so that the torture cannot be verified by journalists, human rights monitors or congressional committees. The advantage of stealth torture is that it reduces adverse publicity and finesses democratic oversight.
After 9/11, the warning signs of what the United States was up to were there, but then the events from Abu Ghraib brought all of it to the surface, revealing that the U.S. military was employing some of these stealthy techniques in Afghanistan and Iraq.
My research shows, however, that torture during interrogations rarely yields better information than traditional human intelligence, partly because no one has figured out a precise, reliable way to break human beings or any adequate method to evaluate whether what prisoners say when they do talk is true. Nor can torture be done in a professional way -- anyone who tortures is necessarily corrupted by the experience and is often turned into a sadist. The psychic damage to the soldiers who conducted the torture at Abu Ghraib is likely to be permanent.
What's more, a democracy that legalizes the use of torture in its desperation to gain information loses something more important -- the trust of its people, the foundation of a democracy. In Iraq, the United States was desperate as it sought to find and stop those responsible for the insurgency. When "intelligence" was not forthcoming from prisoners, senior U.S. Army officials decided to turn over interrogation to military intelligence personnel, who were instructed to use aggressive, even brutal techniques. These methods were rationalized as necessary in the overall global war on terrorism, but as my research has shown, institutionalizing torture in such a manner only ends up destroying all the individuals involved -- and the military and political goals of the government in whose name torture is carried out.
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