IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH: Torture and Deception

Early in George Orwell's 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith looks out his window and sees a sign with the ruling Party's three main slogans:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

The last of these phrases is in fact true in a totalitarian society. The ignorance of the masses strengthens the rulers. And the willful ignorance of a majority of the ruled may strengthen them as well-- that is to say, they may derive comfort, profit, and even some measure of power by going along with the government's lies, in the face of widespread evidence that they are lies. Of course it greatly weakens and ultimately kills dissenters, constitutions, and the whole concept of a government under law. Ignorance implies deception, and in the deceptions practiced by our government, those concerning torture play a central role.

I have just discovered, as I was bound to given my major concerns, a scholar whose work is essential to an understanding of the role of deception as practiced by our government. Although I have not yet read Darius Rejali's most recent book, Torture and Democracy (it's on order from Amazon), I have read his article "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology" and an interview with him by "Democracy Now" (http://academic.reed.edu/poli_sci/faculty/rejali/rejali/articles/History_of_ElectricTorture...; http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/12/torture_and_democracy_scholar_darius_rejali)
The first opens with a startling assertion: "We all remember how badly Rodney King was beaten by the L.A. police, but not how often he was shocked nor the voltage he received." Further on he asserts, "Southern police were armed with electric cattle prods in the 1950s and used these extensively in struggles with civil rights activists... but remarkably, none of the historical studies of the civil rights movement speak of these weapons." This is a devastating fact, and we can be grateful to Rejali for alerting us to how easy it is for people to overlook a form of inflicting pain which they cannot see. Rejali sums up what seems to be the essence of his theory of torture and democracy in the following passage:

"The spread of electric torture is part and parcel of the spread of democratization. In an age where globalization is linked to abuse and exploitation and democratization is touted as the province of all that's right, it is striking to see that electric torture is more linked to the latter than to authoritarian regimes. It arises and spreads as police forces reinvent themselves in the face of democratization and international human rights scrutiny and as well-to-do democratic consumers increasingly fear for their security."

In this he is absolutely right. Having written a scholarly book concerning a Nazi leader, I know that the prevalent notion that the CIA got its techniques of torture from the Nazis is false. The Nazis were quite crude in the methods of torture they used. They cannot hold a candle to the CIA's systematic development of PSYWAR, a form of mind control through torture which of course has a history which predates the CIA, and as Rejali says, involves mainly democracies or those governments which were for whatever reason concerned about public opinion. But the conclusion that Rejali draws (and I hope I'm not being unfair to him here-- I'll soon know), that torture is an inevitable concomitant of democracy, is false. What he cannot see is that history is an ongoing process. What we today call democracy is in fact just a transitional phase in the development of a very different society--one in which the masses may feel that they are in control but in which individual liberty and the concept of a government under law have been extinguished. This is not just a theory that I got from James Burnham: it is a fact: today, due to the adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, protection for individual liberty exists only on paper and very soon will not exist at all.

Rejali also fails to see that the use of torture by our government may not just involve deception (through methods which leave no marks, such as electrical torture) but also further deception-- that indeed, its very purpose may be deception. Rejali's ignorance is indicated by the following comment: "We know the thing that works best for getting intelligence. We know that there are people out there who want to hurt us. And the thing that works best in getting intelligence is public cooperation. And when you torture, you not only just get bad intelligence, you undermine the willingness of... people who like America to come forward and help us... My favorite example of this... is July 21st, a bunch of guys got on buses in London with bombs, and they escaped. The British police got them all in ten days, and the break in the case came when the parents of Muktar Said Ibrahim, loyal British Muslims, turned in their son when they saw the security video. Would they have turned him in if they knew their son was going to be tortured? Obviously not." Leaving aside the obvious question of how they knew that their son was not going to be tortured, given that Britain is one of those transitional democracies which use exactly the kind of "sneaky" methods with which Rejali is concerned, he is dead wrong to think that the "people who want to hurt us" are someone outside the mainstream of our society-- Muslim extremists etc. However much some foreigners may hate America and other Western countries, they cannot possibly do the damage to us that the West's own governments, all of them following America's lead, are doing to both life and liberty-- they just don't have the means.

The people in our government who torture are not stupid. They know very well what they are doing. The methods used in the War on Terror are designed to do more than hide the fact that the government is torturing. They are designed to hide other facts as well. Their goal is not the investigation of truth, but the erection of falsehood: false confessions, and false identities. That is why no one of the thousands of detainees in U.S. custody has been or ever will be given a fair trial. They are being "worked over" to make them into exactly what the government wants them to be. Colin Ross, M.D., in his book The CIA Doctors, demonstrates persuasively that the CIA spent decades perfecting methods of producing "manchurian candidates": now it is working on producing phony terrorists. In that connection, the false confession of Ibn Al Shiekh al Libi, given under torture and later retracted by him, that Iraq was giving Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction, was not a failure but the CIA's greatest recent success. As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan says in his new book, What Happened Inside the White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, President Bush managed the furor over the question of WMDs in Iraq "in a way that guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option..." Top Bush aides "carefully orchestrated the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war..." It is hard to escape the conclusion that the false confession tortured out of Al-Libi was part of this campaign. By deceiving the American people about the connection between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda, it gave our government exactly what it wanted-- a war.

An equally persuasive illustration of the way our government uses deception, and one very appropriate in this election year, is the Detainee Treatment Amendment of 2005. This has often been called the "McCain Anti-Torture Amendment", but that is only a form of doublethink. Presidential candidate John McCain has not "flip-flopped" on the issue of torture-- he has always been in favor of it, and torture is exactly what his amendment was designed to facilitate. For one thing, although it constrains the military in its methods of interrogation, it places no such constraints upon the CIA. This is like saying, "We're going to go after organized crime, except for the Mafia." The CIA is the foremost torturing institution in American life, and the one which taught all the others (as well as many foreign dictatorships) how to do it. In an effort to close this loophole, Congress passed legislation to include the CIA in its strictures but McCain himself voted against this bill and recommended that President Bush veto it. He did so. Recently a similar bill went down to defeat and once again Congress was unable to muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override the presidential veto. The Detainee Treatment Act was also weakened by the Graham-Levin Amendment, which leaves detainees no legal recourse if they are tortured. Hearing McCain's fine words, that "torture is not US", and seeing his friend Lindsay Graham on the PBS docmentary "The Torture Question", his comments framed by photos of statues which evoke the sacrifice of American troops and everything noble and patriotic leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of those of us who know that these men are in fact contemptible hypocrites. That is no doubt why the DTA was ultimately accepted by the Administration-- in fact, its introduction was most likely part of a strategy agreed upon by the Administration, the CIA and Republican Senators, to provide a "fig leaf" for the torturing that they were determined to permit. Excuse me, Professor Rejali, but this is not "democracy"!

Nonetheless, McCain will in all likelihood be our next president, because ignorance-- or more specifically, willful ignorance-- is the strength of the masses in the new form of totalitarianism. But even before that, we may witness an attack upon Darius Rejali's homeland, Iran, and a consequent declaration of martial law in this country to forestall the inevitable protests. Those Americans who have faced the truth openly and spoken out about it will be rounded up and put in the concentration camps which are now being built by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, and all that will be left will be the willfully ignorant. The best argument against Rejali's thesis that torture and democracy go together is the regime under which he grew up, that of the Shah, a vicious dictatorship erected by the CIA over the ruins of the relatively democratic government of Mossadegh. Rejali says, "Nothing got more people on Khomeini's side than [SAVAK]'s torturing." But if he thinks that the advent of an extremist government in Teheran was a real blow to the American government, the sale of arms to that country during the Iran-Contra scandal should have taught him better. The fascists in our government need enemies just as much as they need client dictators. And to that end, Ahmadinejad-- like Saddam Hussein- fits the bill perfectly.