Thursday, June 26, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
A CAUTION: REMEMBER DAMIENS
I thought I needed to add a word of caution to the blog I wrote this morning, "DAY OF GLORY", concerning yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush et.al. The concept of the separation of powers, upon which the justices relied heavily in this decision, comes to us from the French jurist Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et Montesquieu, who advocated it in his The Spirit of the Laws, a best-seller in the eighteenth century. Montesquieu was a member of the parlementaires, group of nobles who held largely hereditary positions in the French parlements, which were not legislative bodies like the English parliament, but rather judicial ones. They held a unique place in French life in the eighteenth century because like our Supreme Court, they were the only institution which could declare an edict of the King to be unconstitutional-- in the language of the time, contrary to the fundamental laws of France, issuing a remonstrance to that effect. This right was of course contested by the absolutist monarchy of France. The struggle between the supporters of the monarchy and the supporters of the parlements was an on-going one, and after Montesquieu's death, it resulted in one perfectly hideous incident. In 1757, a half-mad individual named Robert-Francois Damiens, taking the parlementaire literature a bit too far, attempted to assassinate Louis XV. He was punished according to the law of the time by being publicly drawn and quartered. A sickening description of his death was put into the mouth of the Marquis de Sade by Peter Weiss in his play Marat/Sade. The king could of course have moderated the punishment and the fact that he did not was widely interpreted as a blow against the parlementaires, who accordingly were cowed into silence for some years, until the French Revolution swept away the whole system-- unfortunately the good as well as the bad-- in 1789.
Make no mistake about it, the executive branch of our government is every bit as vicious as the French monarchy and will take similar, if not so public, revenge for yesterday's ruling. Do not let it provoke you! If I have at times seemed in these pages to be advocating revolution, yesterday's decision has changed everything. It has restored our government of law, and until we find out how the executive is going to react we must make no moves in this direction. The only sort of violence which would be permissible under the circumstances is in personal self-defense, should the government attempt to apprehend us for illegal reasons, such as being Muslim or a dissenter, and that only because it has shown itself unwilling to permit those it takes into its custody for political reasons to have a fair trial. To learn more about the decision, I recommend that people go to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has published an excellent analysis of it (see http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/legal-analysis:-boumediene-v.-bush...)
Make no mistake about it, the executive branch of our government is every bit as vicious as the French monarchy and will take similar, if not so public, revenge for yesterday's ruling. Do not let it provoke you! If I have at times seemed in these pages to be advocating revolution, yesterday's decision has changed everything. It has restored our government of law, and until we find out how the executive is going to react we must make no moves in this direction. The only sort of violence which would be permissible under the circumstances is in personal self-defense, should the government attempt to apprehend us for illegal reasons, such as being Muslim or a dissenter, and that only because it has shown itself unwilling to permit those it takes into its custody for political reasons to have a fair trial. To learn more about the decision, I recommend that people go to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has published an excellent analysis of it (see http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/legal-analysis:-boumediene-v.-bush...)
DAY OF GLORY
Yesterday, June 12, 2008, seven months after it had been heard the appeal, the Supreme Court of the United States finally handed down its decision in the case of Boumediene et. al. v. Bush et. al. I have not yet had a chance to read the decision in full, but judging from the reactions of prominent opponents of the Constitution, it represents a tremendous step forward in the struggle to restore the rule of law in this country. And I will admit that it surprised me. I had not expected the justices to strike down any part of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, as the attorneys for the appellants had fallen into the insidious trap laid for them by Justice Scalia and argued for their clients on the basis of Guantanamo's status as U.S. territory. Any decision which concerns the Guantanamo inmates alone will accomplish little. After all, there are vast numbers of people in detention as "unlawful enemy combatants" now and their numbers may come to include ourselves. Furthermore, the inmates at Guantanamo may simply be moved to another location. That there are plans to do exactly that is suggested by the support manifested by prominent opponents of the U.S. Constitution, such as Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and John McCain, for closing down the base. Until the rights of all persons detained as terrorist suspects have been assured, closing down Guantanamo is not a thing to be desired. As the most visible manifestation of the injustice of our government's policy in the so-called "War on Terror", and the one most accessible to civilian attorneys and journalists, it is vital that it remain there to remind us of the outrage that is being perpetrated. To close it alone would only move the problem from the realm of the visible and accessible into the realm of the secret and inaccessible.
Let us not deceive ourselves. The struggle is not over. Faced with an Iraqi government which seems, despite all U.S. efforts, to truly be embracing democracy, a presidential candidate (Obama) who seems to truly want change, and this ruling, the administration, CIA and military-industrial complex are likely to get nasty. This may indeed be the trigger which will cause them to stage another "terrorist attack", call off the presidential elections, and declare martial law. In fact, it puts the American people in more danger than ever before in the history of this nation, not because it is wrong but because it is right and the people who hold the supreme power in this country are evil men who have no respect for the rule of law. They cannot afford to have terrorist suspects released because their testimony will most likely incriminate them as accomplices in 9/11 and masterminds of a system of torture designed not to elicit intelligence but rather to produce "phony terrorists" who will take the rap for their own crimes. They could end up not only impeached, but in prison themselves. And so they will fight tooth and claw to thwart implementation of the decision, and a significant number of Americans will no doubt, as always, believe their lies. Yet despite the danger, I welcome the decision.
We must remember that the justices who handed down this decision-- Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens-- are conservatives, strict constructionists. A liberal majority would have gone much further and struck down the entire Military Commissions Act. But given the dangerous strides which out-and-out fascism has made in this country, conservatives look good by comparison. We must be grateful to the tradition which has made a strong Supreme Court a vital component of our free government. It began when Montesquieu, himself a French jurist, offered his conception of the British constitution in his Spirit of the Laws, the most widely-read political treatise of the eighteenth century. It was he who clearly defined the three branches of government-- executive, legislative and judicial-- and asserted that they must be separate and equal, although in fact the England of his time had a unitary government in which all power was vested in the legislative branch, Parliament. And fortunately our Founding Fathers followed him. They did not originally intend that the Supreme Court should have such power, being naively unaware of how great the threat to liberty would prove to be. That it today has the power to declare laws or parts of laws unconstitutional is due to Chief Justice John Marshall, who claimed that power in the historic Marbury v. Madison decision. And today, we can be very grateful to him.
Given the fact that the people who hold supreme power in the country today are not conservatives of either the old or new variety but fascists who have no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, and that all too many Americans have sunk to a level of servility unimaginable to the Founders, the most likely outcome of this decision will be civil war. But however terrible that may be, it is infinitely preferable to an unopposed totalitarianism. This will probably be the last decision rendered by an independent Supreme Court: already four of the justices are mere placemen and Justice John Paul Stevens is elderly-- when he is replaced the court will no longer constitute a power which can defend liberty. But the victory in Boumediene v. Bush can serve as a banner in the battles to come. With some intentional mockery of the man who set in motion the totalitarian grab for power of which 9/11 is the hallmark, we might call it our "line drawn in the sand". Those who oppose it are not conservatives-- they are fascists who have no place in the government of a free republic (of course, like the Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, they will always have the right to spew forth their filth, which however no self-respecting citizen should take seriously). Those who follow them are enemies of the Constitution, who deserve the fate of the defenders of slavery in the First Civil War. Let us now proclaim by our actions that even if brute force can overcome individuals and democracies, the spirit of freedom lives forever!
Let us not deceive ourselves. The struggle is not over. Faced with an Iraqi government which seems, despite all U.S. efforts, to truly be embracing democracy, a presidential candidate (Obama) who seems to truly want change, and this ruling, the administration, CIA and military-industrial complex are likely to get nasty. This may indeed be the trigger which will cause them to stage another "terrorist attack", call off the presidential elections, and declare martial law. In fact, it puts the American people in more danger than ever before in the history of this nation, not because it is wrong but because it is right and the people who hold the supreme power in this country are evil men who have no respect for the rule of law. They cannot afford to have terrorist suspects released because their testimony will most likely incriminate them as accomplices in 9/11 and masterminds of a system of torture designed not to elicit intelligence but rather to produce "phony terrorists" who will take the rap for their own crimes. They could end up not only impeached, but in prison themselves. And so they will fight tooth and claw to thwart implementation of the decision, and a significant number of Americans will no doubt, as always, believe their lies. Yet despite the danger, I welcome the decision.
We must remember that the justices who handed down this decision-- Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens-- are conservatives, strict constructionists. A liberal majority would have gone much further and struck down the entire Military Commissions Act. But given the dangerous strides which out-and-out fascism has made in this country, conservatives look good by comparison. We must be grateful to the tradition which has made a strong Supreme Court a vital component of our free government. It began when Montesquieu, himself a French jurist, offered his conception of the British constitution in his Spirit of the Laws, the most widely-read political treatise of the eighteenth century. It was he who clearly defined the three branches of government-- executive, legislative and judicial-- and asserted that they must be separate and equal, although in fact the England of his time had a unitary government in which all power was vested in the legislative branch, Parliament. And fortunately our Founding Fathers followed him. They did not originally intend that the Supreme Court should have such power, being naively unaware of how great the threat to liberty would prove to be. That it today has the power to declare laws or parts of laws unconstitutional is due to Chief Justice John Marshall, who claimed that power in the historic Marbury v. Madison decision. And today, we can be very grateful to him.
Given the fact that the people who hold supreme power in the country today are not conservatives of either the old or new variety but fascists who have no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, and that all too many Americans have sunk to a level of servility unimaginable to the Founders, the most likely outcome of this decision will be civil war. But however terrible that may be, it is infinitely preferable to an unopposed totalitarianism. This will probably be the last decision rendered by an independent Supreme Court: already four of the justices are mere placemen and Justice John Paul Stevens is elderly-- when he is replaced the court will no longer constitute a power which can defend liberty. But the victory in Boumediene v. Bush can serve as a banner in the battles to come. With some intentional mockery of the man who set in motion the totalitarian grab for power of which 9/11 is the hallmark, we might call it our "line drawn in the sand". Those who oppose it are not conservatives-- they are fascists who have no place in the government of a free republic (of course, like the Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, they will always have the right to spew forth their filth, which however no self-respecting citizen should take seriously). Those who follow them are enemies of the Constitution, who deserve the fate of the defenders of slavery in the First Civil War. Let us now proclaim by our actions that even if brute force can overcome individuals and democracies, the spirit of freedom lives forever!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
WHAT DID THE MAN WHO WAS BEING WATERBOARDED SAY?
I am still looking for Darius Rejali's e-mail address. His personal website is "under construction" and so I cannot contact him through it. If he or anyone who knows how he can be reached reads this, they are welcome to write to me and let me know. Indeed, it might be best to drop a line to my own personal e-mail address, because I am getting scarcely any comments on my blogs and suspect that something is wrong with the system employed by my blogspot host. And it really bothers me that someone is going around trashing democracy in its hour of greatest danger, when it is threatened more profoundly than it ever has been since its birth fifteen hundred years ago in Athens of the fifth century BCE.
Rejali has said that when democracies torture, they do so stealthfully. And as I have said, that is an assertion which cannot be contested. After all, a genuine democracy has both a constitution it must respect (or at least appear to respect) and a concerned citizenry which would be outraged by allegations of torture. Indeed, among those of us who have been studying this subject for some time, his central assertion is so obvious as to be a truism. The question is, does it have any relevance to the United States of America in 2008?
Certainly it did when I was growing up. I first heard about waterboarding when I was a teenager, in the nineteen-sixties. The victim was a Vietnamese boy. I thought, "How can our government support a government (that of South Vietnam) which does such things?" I never realized that the South Vietnamese had in fact been trained to torture by Americans through the CIA operation PHOENIX. Although such information was available to those who did some research, it was not common knowledge. But all that has changed.
Today, in the wake of 9/11, it is no secret that our government tortures. Even when it has attempted to cover up evidence of torture by destroying interrogation tapes, notes etc., it makes no secret of it. That we know about such things cannot be due to the zeal of reporters in ferreting out the truth. As Dan Rather said in the speech I discussed in my last blog, if anything journalists are far more timid today than they were during say, the era of the War in Vietnam. Rather the government is allowing the information to be leaked, no doubt in order to inspire terror in its opponents. For instance, when the CIA wanted an exemption from the McCain Anti-Torture Amendment (the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005) weak as that is, it sent its head, Porter Goss, quite publicly with Vice President Dick Cheney to negotiate with McCain. In a Newsweek article which I have repeatedly quoted, a CIA official admitted that the agency is now waterboarding people who no longer have any intelligence value (October 8, 2007 issue, p. 66). This raises the possibility that torture by our government may have some purpose other than the acquisition of intelligence, and that methods which appear "stealthy" may indeed be in use for reasons other than secrecy. Not long ago, during one of the many controversies over waterboarding discussed openly in the media, Jim Lehrer of PBS' News Hour reported that an unnamed source who had been present at an "interrogation" saw a man waterboarded and "he talked, immediately." Unfortunately, no one asked what he talked about. Did his words constitute actionable intelligence which could save lives? Or a confession, possibly false? And what did his torturers want him to say?
The problem with Rejali's thesis is that methods which appear stealthy may in fact have a very different purpose than secrecy. Dan Mitrione, an FBI agent and AID official who tortured four innocent beggars to death in a torture demonstration in Montevideo and was ultimately captured and killed by the Tupameros, said, "A premature death means a failure by the technician" (see A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About US Police Operations in Latin America, pp. 309-313). And indeed, when the Spanish Inquisition waterboarded people, as it often did, it was not because it was trying to hide its actions from a democratic people. Indeed, the government of Ferdinand and Isabella was quite the opposite, thoroughly authoritarian and almost totalitarian in its obsession with "thought crime" (heresy). It was trying to get alleged heretics to confess before it killed them. Similarly, George Orwell's famous 1984-- undoubtedly the most persuasive indictment of totalitarianism ever written-- has an extended segment in which the protagonist, Winston, is tortured by the ruling Party's representative, O'Brien. The torture is electrical-- one of Rejali's favorite examples of a "stealthy" torture-- and includes ECT (electroconvulsive treatment). It is done in the presence of a doctor, who periodically checks Winston to see that he is still alive and well enough to withstand more torture. But its purpose is not secrecy. As O'Brien tells Winston:
"We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days, the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out... no one whom we bring to this place ever stands against us. Everyone is washed clean." (Signet edition, pp. 210-211)
"This place" of course refers to the Ministry of Love. But such places may actually exist today in CIA prisons. For the CIA, which could have taken Orwell's "perfect" totalitarianism as its model, as it certainly did the Soviet and Chinese forms, has been developing methods of torture to serve the same purpose-- the transformation of the subject's personality. A case in point is ECT. In his essay, "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology", Rejali mentions the CIA's interest in ECT, but fails to draw the obvious conclusion. ECT has no conceivable use to the interrogator who is seeking real intelligence, because it is notorious for inducing amnesia. And indeed, it was valued by the CIA for precisely this reason. With the assistance of unscrupulous psychiatrists, the agency developed methods not for interrogation but for the eradication of a person's true personality and its replacement by a personality of the torturer's choosing. These combined ECT with drug-induced hypnosis. Colin Ross, M.D., who has exposed the unethical deeds of those of his colleagues who participated in the program, quotes a CIA source as saying concerning ECT: "Quite often amnesia occurs for events just prior to the convulsion, during the convulsion and during the post seizure state. It is possible that hypnosis or hypnotic activity induced during the post-seizure state might be lost in amnesia. This would be very valuable." (Ross, The CIA Doctors, p. 48)
The notion that the CIA was developing these techniques in order to create "super-spies" can be easily dismissed, for what self-respecting spy would submit to a brutal regime of "depatterning" to an infantile state in which they were "incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date" (Ross, p. 124)? Of course no one would. Such methods were obviously designed to be used upon people against their will, and it is possible that they are being so used right now. To be sure, although many terrorist suspects have reported being subjected to some of the methods experimented with by the Agency-- such as extreme sensory and sleep deprivation-- none have (to my knowledge) said anything about hypnosis or ECT. But of course they wouldn't, for the amnesia which so often accompanies ECT would conceal-- even from themselves-- the fact that they had been subject to these procedures. However, the testimony of one of the "Guantánamo Six", Mohammed Al Qahtani, who has reported being given frequent intravenous injections during interrogation may point to the use of narco-hypnosis (see factsheet on Al Qahtani on the Center for Constitutional Rights website). Why does the CIA use such methods? Of course concealment is part of the answer: if a terrorist suspect is to confess before a military commission to having been involved in the events of 9/11, it must not be known that his "confession" is a false one, stemming from a memory which was deliberately implanted in him by his torturers. But the other reason is the same as that of the Spanish Inquisition: our government does not want people to die until they have been "re-fashioned" into the form it wants.
I would therefore maintain that a government which 1. tortures routinely; 2. tortures for reasons other than the acquisition of intelligence; and 3. does not conceal the fact that it is torturing, is no longer a democracy-- even if it has been in the past-- but is instead in the fast lane on the road to totalitarianism. Such a regime may use methods which are apparently more stealthy than traditionally authoritarian regimes. But its main purpose is not stealth-- it is to avoid killing the victim before he confesses. For the most stealthy methods-- that is to say, those which leave no marks-- also have the advantage of being non-lethal.
No doubt the waterboarded man to whom Jim Lehrer referred did indeed talk. I would too-- as would most people. No doubt he said what he thought his interrogators wanted to hear. Most likely it was a false confession. And most likely that was precisely what they were trying to get from him.
Rejali has said that when democracies torture, they do so stealthfully. And as I have said, that is an assertion which cannot be contested. After all, a genuine democracy has both a constitution it must respect (or at least appear to respect) and a concerned citizenry which would be outraged by allegations of torture. Indeed, among those of us who have been studying this subject for some time, his central assertion is so obvious as to be a truism. The question is, does it have any relevance to the United States of America in 2008?
Certainly it did when I was growing up. I first heard about waterboarding when I was a teenager, in the nineteen-sixties. The victim was a Vietnamese boy. I thought, "How can our government support a government (that of South Vietnam) which does such things?" I never realized that the South Vietnamese had in fact been trained to torture by Americans through the CIA operation PHOENIX. Although such information was available to those who did some research, it was not common knowledge. But all that has changed.
Today, in the wake of 9/11, it is no secret that our government tortures. Even when it has attempted to cover up evidence of torture by destroying interrogation tapes, notes etc., it makes no secret of it. That we know about such things cannot be due to the zeal of reporters in ferreting out the truth. As Dan Rather said in the speech I discussed in my last blog, if anything journalists are far more timid today than they were during say, the era of the War in Vietnam. Rather the government is allowing the information to be leaked, no doubt in order to inspire terror in its opponents. For instance, when the CIA wanted an exemption from the McCain Anti-Torture Amendment (the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005) weak as that is, it sent its head, Porter Goss, quite publicly with Vice President Dick Cheney to negotiate with McCain. In a Newsweek article which I have repeatedly quoted, a CIA official admitted that the agency is now waterboarding people who no longer have any intelligence value (October 8, 2007 issue, p. 66). This raises the possibility that torture by our government may have some purpose other than the acquisition of intelligence, and that methods which appear "stealthy" may indeed be in use for reasons other than secrecy. Not long ago, during one of the many controversies over waterboarding discussed openly in the media, Jim Lehrer of PBS' News Hour reported that an unnamed source who had been present at an "interrogation" saw a man waterboarded and "he talked, immediately." Unfortunately, no one asked what he talked about. Did his words constitute actionable intelligence which could save lives? Or a confession, possibly false? And what did his torturers want him to say?
The problem with Rejali's thesis is that methods which appear stealthy may in fact have a very different purpose than secrecy. Dan Mitrione, an FBI agent and AID official who tortured four innocent beggars to death in a torture demonstration in Montevideo and was ultimately captured and killed by the Tupameros, said, "A premature death means a failure by the technician" (see A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About US Police Operations in Latin America, pp. 309-313). And indeed, when the Spanish Inquisition waterboarded people, as it often did, it was not because it was trying to hide its actions from a democratic people. Indeed, the government of Ferdinand and Isabella was quite the opposite, thoroughly authoritarian and almost totalitarian in its obsession with "thought crime" (heresy). It was trying to get alleged heretics to confess before it killed them. Similarly, George Orwell's famous 1984-- undoubtedly the most persuasive indictment of totalitarianism ever written-- has an extended segment in which the protagonist, Winston, is tortured by the ruling Party's representative, O'Brien. The torture is electrical-- one of Rejali's favorite examples of a "stealthy" torture-- and includes ECT (electroconvulsive treatment). It is done in the presence of a doctor, who periodically checks Winston to see that he is still alive and well enough to withstand more torture. But its purpose is not secrecy. As O'Brien tells Winston:
"We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days, the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out... no one whom we bring to this place ever stands against us. Everyone is washed clean." (Signet edition, pp. 210-211)
"This place" of course refers to the Ministry of Love. But such places may actually exist today in CIA prisons. For the CIA, which could have taken Orwell's "perfect" totalitarianism as its model, as it certainly did the Soviet and Chinese forms, has been developing methods of torture to serve the same purpose-- the transformation of the subject's personality. A case in point is ECT. In his essay, "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology", Rejali mentions the CIA's interest in ECT, but fails to draw the obvious conclusion. ECT has no conceivable use to the interrogator who is seeking real intelligence, because it is notorious for inducing amnesia. And indeed, it was valued by the CIA for precisely this reason. With the assistance of unscrupulous psychiatrists, the agency developed methods not for interrogation but for the eradication of a person's true personality and its replacement by a personality of the torturer's choosing. These combined ECT with drug-induced hypnosis. Colin Ross, M.D., who has exposed the unethical deeds of those of his colleagues who participated in the program, quotes a CIA source as saying concerning ECT: "Quite often amnesia occurs for events just prior to the convulsion, during the convulsion and during the post seizure state. It is possible that hypnosis or hypnotic activity induced during the post-seizure state might be lost in amnesia. This would be very valuable." (Ross, The CIA Doctors, p. 48)
The notion that the CIA was developing these techniques in order to create "super-spies" can be easily dismissed, for what self-respecting spy would submit to a brutal regime of "depatterning" to an infantile state in which they were "incontinent of urine and feces, unable to feed themselves, and unable to state their name, age, location, or the current date" (Ross, p. 124)? Of course no one would. Such methods were obviously designed to be used upon people against their will, and it is possible that they are being so used right now. To be sure, although many terrorist suspects have reported being subjected to some of the methods experimented with by the Agency-- such as extreme sensory and sleep deprivation-- none have (to my knowledge) said anything about hypnosis or ECT. But of course they wouldn't, for the amnesia which so often accompanies ECT would conceal-- even from themselves-- the fact that they had been subject to these procedures. However, the testimony of one of the "Guantánamo Six", Mohammed Al Qahtani, who has reported being given frequent intravenous injections during interrogation may point to the use of narco-hypnosis (see factsheet on Al Qahtani on the Center for Constitutional Rights website). Why does the CIA use such methods? Of course concealment is part of the answer: if a terrorist suspect is to confess before a military commission to having been involved in the events of 9/11, it must not be known that his "confession" is a false one, stemming from a memory which was deliberately implanted in him by his torturers. But the other reason is the same as that of the Spanish Inquisition: our government does not want people to die until they have been "re-fashioned" into the form it wants.
I would therefore maintain that a government which 1. tortures routinely; 2. tortures for reasons other than the acquisition of intelligence; and 3. does not conceal the fact that it is torturing, is no longer a democracy-- even if it has been in the past-- but is instead in the fast lane on the road to totalitarianism. Such a regime may use methods which are apparently more stealthy than traditionally authoritarian regimes. But its main purpose is not stealth-- it is to avoid killing the victim before he confesses. For the most stealthy methods-- that is to say, those which leave no marks-- also have the advantage of being non-lethal.
No doubt the waterboarded man to whom Jim Lehrer referred did indeed talk. I would too-- as would most people. No doubt he said what he thought his interrogators wanted to hear. Most likely it was a false confession. And most likely that was precisely what they were trying to get from him.
Monday, June 9, 2008
THE STAR WARS AND PRISON STRIPES: Why Display of the Flag is no longer a Manifestation of Patriotism
I would like to preface this latest blog with a word of praise for former CBS News Anchorman Dan Rather. I just read an excellent address he gave to the National News Conference for Media Reform (see "Dan Rather Slams Corporate News at National Conference for Media Reform, http://www.truthout.org/article/dan-rather-slams-corporate-news-conference...) In it, he said that asking tough questions of the administration and reporting them has become more difficult since 9/11. Much tougher even than during the era of Vietnam, when he was covering Presidents like Johnson and Nixon. He is right-- this is what I meant when I said that the nation is far more united and hence far less free today than it was in the nineteen-sixities and seventies-- and it once again makes us wonder how so much information concerning U.S.-sponsored torture could be nonetheless reaching the public, for it certainly could not be because the press has become more conscientious in fulfilling its duty of watchdog. It can only be because our government wants us to know that it tortures, so as to strike terror into the hearts of its opposition, a thesis that conflicts completely with Darius Rejali's notion that torture is an inevitable concomitant of democracy.
But to return to Rather, he attributes the change to the fact that in his early days, although the administrations he covered tried to put the heat on the news organizations for which he worked, that never stopped the press from asking tough questions and reporting news unfavorable to the administration because "back then, my bosses took the heat, so I didn't have to. They did this so the story could get told, and so the public could be informed. But it is rare now to find a major news organization owned by an individual, someone who can say, in effect, 'the buck stops here'." One thinks of William Randolph Hearst, who was certainly not averse to making money, but who made it, in his early days in my own San Francisco, by muckracking journalism and exposure of the undue influence of business giants such as Southern Pacific. What Rather is talking about is what Burnham called the transition from capitalist to managerial society-- from the individual owner, who might well latch on to some public grievance and make it a cause celebre, to the corporate managers-- or CEOs who have no independent ideas but have attained their position solely through their ability to increase corporation profits. Being essentially similar to the government bureacrats their reporters are covering, they find it easy to cooperate with them and stifle those journalists who challenge the powers that be.
That said, let us move on to the major topic of this blog-- so appropriate as Flag Day approaches. Why is it that, when I walk down the street of my suburban neighborhood-- which I'm sure is no different from any suburban neighborhood in America today-- I feel as if I am walking down the streets of Nuremberg during a Nazi Party Rally? Because the American flag has ceased to be a symbol of patriotism. Those people who display it at all times-- and not just on patriotic holidays-- are not expressing their love for their country, but rather their support for our government's criminal policies. I remember going into a library soon after 9/11. I wanted to speak to the librarian, but when I saw a flag taped on the window of her office, I turned around and walked out. I wish I had stayed and given her hell. Because what she was doing was uncalled for and in fact illegal. It was the expression of a political opinion. The flags-- both U.S. and California-- flying outside the library were perfectly acceptable: they only meant, "this is a government institution". But not the flag on her door. Nine-eleven was a crime, but the interpretation that the Bush Administration put upon it-- that it was an "attack upon America"-- was by no means inevitable.
Many countries have suffered from terrorism. The British Isles have for many years been suffering from the attacks of the Irish Republican Army-- and this has not lead to war or a frenzy of pseudo-patriotism. Terrorism is a crime against humanity, not against a particular country, and must be fought by all countries alike, under the aegis of the United Nations. Of course I do not believe that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out by Islamic extremists-- I believe that they were the work of our own government. But say that I'm wrong. Even if they were carried out by Islamic extremists, the logical reaction could very well have been to treat these people as criminals on a grand scale, and not representatives of any power which could possibly "declare war on America". The reaction of Congress in passing the Patriot Act (much less the highly dangerous Military Commissions Act) was not logical and inevitable, because there was no reason whatsoever to curtail the rights of American citizens just because this country had been so unfortunate as to suffer a terrorist attack. The first heads to roll should have been those who are charged with protecting the American public and who failed so conspicuously to carry out their duty-- the heads of the CIA, FAA, and those military leaders whose duty it is to provide early warning of impending attacks. The president himself should have been subject to impeachment for having allowed such a thing to take place on American soil. Yet exactly the opposite happened.
Those who display flags, and signs saying "God Bless America", are by so doing signaling that they accept the Big Lie, which does not concern the question of who was really responsible for 9/11 but rather the interpretation of that event as an "attack upon America". For it is from widespread acceptance of that interpretation, not from the attacks themselves, which all the threats to liberty which we see today spring. At the very outset, the majority of the American people, including the members of Congress, knuckled under to an interpretation of the attacks which is essentially fascist. They viewed them as some equivalent of Pearl Harbor, requiring unquestioning and enforced unity of response among Americans, and turned not upon their government, as they should have, for failing to protect the victims, but upon whole peoples (Muslims of course) and those of their fellow citizens who did not happen to share the "party line". What has happened in America since 9/11 is in fact a silent Gleichschaltung, a synchronization of all elements of political life to serve fascist purposes. In Nazi Germany, that Gleichschaltung was enforced by Hitler-- here in America, to its great shame, it has been voluntary. Those who display flags are not expressing their love of America but quite the opposite, a specific political opinion which is in fact opposed to everything that America should stand for. They are fascists, and should be regarded as enemies who are at least as dangerous as any "free-lance" terrorist (I used the term "free-lance" to distinguish terrorism carried out by small groups like Al Qaeda from the more serious and ongoing threat posed by government-sponsored terrorism).
I have often implied that America needs a revolution: but given the capitulation of so many Americans to the Bush Administration's lies, that is not possible. What we need today is a second American Civil War. The people who signal their support for the Big Lie by displaying flags have a different definition of America than we do, or the Founders did. It is a fascist definition, which unscrupulously utilizes tragedies like 9/11 as the Nazis did the Reichstag Fire, to garner support for increasing governmental control over the lives of its citizens, undending warfare, murder and torture. They are the true enemies of America. In the film Judgement at Nuremberg, Judge Howe says as a Preface to his condemnation of four Nazi judges to life imprisonment, "A nation is not a rock. It is what it stands for. It is what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult." Those who, like Dan Rather and former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who (even if belatedly!) challenge governmental lies are the real patriots. For it is a critical stance toward government, not unquestioning obedience to it, which is the "American Way".
When I walk down our streets, I wonder what has happened to the America I thought I knew when I was growing up, an America which I believed would never accept fascism even under duress. So many Americans are now embracing fascism voluntarily that I have felt estranged from my own country. But in truth, it is they who are estranged from this country, who are the traitors. They are the equivalent of the secessionist Southern planters, who thought that slavery was compatible with the American Way. Well it is not, nor is fascism, and we must let them know that by displaying the American flag as a symbol of their anti-libertarian beliefs, they have denigrated it. Glorifying unending warfare and the abuse of detainees, they have turned it into the "Star Wars and Prison Stripes". And that is far worse than burning it.
But to return to Rather, he attributes the change to the fact that in his early days, although the administrations he covered tried to put the heat on the news organizations for which he worked, that never stopped the press from asking tough questions and reporting news unfavorable to the administration because "back then, my bosses took the heat, so I didn't have to. They did this so the story could get told, and so the public could be informed. But it is rare now to find a major news organization owned by an individual, someone who can say, in effect, 'the buck stops here'." One thinks of William Randolph Hearst, who was certainly not averse to making money, but who made it, in his early days in my own San Francisco, by muckracking journalism and exposure of the undue influence of business giants such as Southern Pacific. What Rather is talking about is what Burnham called the transition from capitalist to managerial society-- from the individual owner, who might well latch on to some public grievance and make it a cause celebre, to the corporate managers-- or CEOs who have no independent ideas but have attained their position solely through their ability to increase corporation profits. Being essentially similar to the government bureacrats their reporters are covering, they find it easy to cooperate with them and stifle those journalists who challenge the powers that be.
That said, let us move on to the major topic of this blog-- so appropriate as Flag Day approaches. Why is it that, when I walk down the street of my suburban neighborhood-- which I'm sure is no different from any suburban neighborhood in America today-- I feel as if I am walking down the streets of Nuremberg during a Nazi Party Rally? Because the American flag has ceased to be a symbol of patriotism. Those people who display it at all times-- and not just on patriotic holidays-- are not expressing their love for their country, but rather their support for our government's criminal policies. I remember going into a library soon after 9/11. I wanted to speak to the librarian, but when I saw a flag taped on the window of her office, I turned around and walked out. I wish I had stayed and given her hell. Because what she was doing was uncalled for and in fact illegal. It was the expression of a political opinion. The flags-- both U.S. and California-- flying outside the library were perfectly acceptable: they only meant, "this is a government institution". But not the flag on her door. Nine-eleven was a crime, but the interpretation that the Bush Administration put upon it-- that it was an "attack upon America"-- was by no means inevitable.
Many countries have suffered from terrorism. The British Isles have for many years been suffering from the attacks of the Irish Republican Army-- and this has not lead to war or a frenzy of pseudo-patriotism. Terrorism is a crime against humanity, not against a particular country, and must be fought by all countries alike, under the aegis of the United Nations. Of course I do not believe that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out by Islamic extremists-- I believe that they were the work of our own government. But say that I'm wrong. Even if they were carried out by Islamic extremists, the logical reaction could very well have been to treat these people as criminals on a grand scale, and not representatives of any power which could possibly "declare war on America". The reaction of Congress in passing the Patriot Act (much less the highly dangerous Military Commissions Act) was not logical and inevitable, because there was no reason whatsoever to curtail the rights of American citizens just because this country had been so unfortunate as to suffer a terrorist attack. The first heads to roll should have been those who are charged with protecting the American public and who failed so conspicuously to carry out their duty-- the heads of the CIA, FAA, and those military leaders whose duty it is to provide early warning of impending attacks. The president himself should have been subject to impeachment for having allowed such a thing to take place on American soil. Yet exactly the opposite happened.
Those who display flags, and signs saying "God Bless America", are by so doing signaling that they accept the Big Lie, which does not concern the question of who was really responsible for 9/11 but rather the interpretation of that event as an "attack upon America". For it is from widespread acceptance of that interpretation, not from the attacks themselves, which all the threats to liberty which we see today spring. At the very outset, the majority of the American people, including the members of Congress, knuckled under to an interpretation of the attacks which is essentially fascist. They viewed them as some equivalent of Pearl Harbor, requiring unquestioning and enforced unity of response among Americans, and turned not upon their government, as they should have, for failing to protect the victims, but upon whole peoples (Muslims of course) and those of their fellow citizens who did not happen to share the "party line". What has happened in America since 9/11 is in fact a silent Gleichschaltung, a synchronization of all elements of political life to serve fascist purposes. In Nazi Germany, that Gleichschaltung was enforced by Hitler-- here in America, to its great shame, it has been voluntary. Those who display flags are not expressing their love of America but quite the opposite, a specific political opinion which is in fact opposed to everything that America should stand for. They are fascists, and should be regarded as enemies who are at least as dangerous as any "free-lance" terrorist (I used the term "free-lance" to distinguish terrorism carried out by small groups like Al Qaeda from the more serious and ongoing threat posed by government-sponsored terrorism).
I have often implied that America needs a revolution: but given the capitulation of so many Americans to the Bush Administration's lies, that is not possible. What we need today is a second American Civil War. The people who signal their support for the Big Lie by displaying flags have a different definition of America than we do, or the Founders did. It is a fascist definition, which unscrupulously utilizes tragedies like 9/11 as the Nazis did the Reichstag Fire, to garner support for increasing governmental control over the lives of its citizens, undending warfare, murder and torture. They are the true enemies of America. In the film Judgement at Nuremberg, Judge Howe says as a Preface to his condemnation of four Nazi judges to life imprisonment, "A nation is not a rock. It is what it stands for. It is what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult." Those who, like Dan Rather and former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who (even if belatedly!) challenge governmental lies are the real patriots. For it is a critical stance toward government, not unquestioning obedience to it, which is the "American Way".
When I walk down our streets, I wonder what has happened to the America I thought I knew when I was growing up, an America which I believed would never accept fascism even under duress. So many Americans are now embracing fascism voluntarily that I have felt estranged from my own country. But in truth, it is they who are estranged from this country, who are the traitors. They are the equivalent of the secessionist Southern planters, who thought that slavery was compatible with the American Way. Well it is not, nor is fascism, and we must let them know that by displaying the American flag as a symbol of their anti-libertarian beliefs, they have denigrated it. Glorifying unending warfare and the abuse of detainees, they have turned it into the "Star Wars and Prison Stripes". And that is far worse than burning it.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
YOUR ENEMY IS YOUR GOVERNMENT-- AND YOUR NEIGHBORS
I recently read an interesting article, by Sheldon S. Wolin, entitled, "A New Kind of Fascism is Replacing our Democracy". It was written in 2003, but its message is ever more relevant today. It points out the contradiction in the terms such as "superpower democracy" and "imperial democracy", saying that one can no more assume that a superpower welcomes legal limits than believe that an empire finds democratic participation congenial." It acknowledges the obviously unconstitutional and illegal actions of the Bush Administration, and says that it is one step toward what it calls "inverted totalitarianism". Wolin calls it that because, as he says, whereas the Nazis "focused upon mobilizing and unifying the society, maintaining a continuous state of war preparations and demanding enthusiastic participation from the populace," "inverted totalitarianism" "exploits apathy and divisiveness." Like James Burnham, whose book inspired Orwell's 1984 (see my May blog, "The Bell Telephone Hour"), Wolin notes that the evolving totalitarianism "merges governmental and corporte power and exploits the scientific advances of technological innovation." His essay concludes logically, as just about every concerned citizen must today, that it is no longer possible to reform this government through the channels available in a democracy, and that "Perhaps the just-passed anniversary of the Declaration of Independence might remind us that 'whenever any form of government becomes destructive...' it must be challenged." Having faced the same dilemma myself, I can glimpse the inner conflict which Wolin must have experienced when he used that tame and ambiguous word "challenged". Because of course what Jefferson was invoking in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Indepedence was the people's right to revolt.
I believe that Wolin is partially correct. There can be no doubt that our government is moving toward totalitarianism. But I prefer to call the new type of government which is coming into being simply "American Totalitarianism" or "Americanism" because it actually has more in common with other forms of totalitarianism than he realizes. Where it differs is in its prospects of for success and the complicity of its citizenry. To illustate its characteristics, let us look at the other forms of totalitarianism. First totalitarianism of the left, which aims to conquer not through direct military action but through subversion, exploiting the grievances of oppressed peoples and inspiring them to revolt. Communism failed because it ignored basic human instincts like tribalism and acquisitiveness, attempting to set up a utopian society which would be free of greed and prejudice between different peoples. European and Asian Fascism, by contrast, acknowledged and indeed played upon human tribalistic instincts, appealing to nationalism and ethnic hatreds, and permitting some measure of private enterprise, even if subordinated to government control (fascist governments differed in the emphasis they placed upon "race"-- for instance both the Italians and Japanese fascists rejected anti-Semitism-- but they all preached an extreme form of nationalism). These types of totalitarian governments had advantages over left-wing totalitarianism, but they had the disadvantage of alienating people of other nationalities (or those who, in the case of Nazism, did not live up to the "Aryan ideal") and involving the citizen population in direct military action, which, if the war is not going well, can lead to war-weariness and hence revolt.
American totalitarianism is clearly a form of fascism-- that is to say, totalitarianism which spreads its power by means of direct military conquest. But it has many advantages over both Communism and the other forms of fascism. First of all, it does not dispense with the human tribalistic instinct. Wolin is dead wrong when he says that the totalitarianism of today "exploits political apathy and encourages divisiveness." When I was growing up in the nineteen-sixties, there was far more divisiveness and, perhaps not coincidentally, far more freedom. America is on a "permanent war footing", in essence a prolonged "ten-minute hate"-- and has been since the National Security State came into being in 1947. But never has it been so united and so fearful of "thought crime" as it has in the wake of 9/11. Those of us who oppose its policies are indeed faced with the possibility that they may be-- as I have been-- the target of vandalism and other forms of public abuse if they voice their opposition openly. Chris Dodd, the only candidate for president who ran on a platform of restoring the Constitution, did miserably and quickly withdrew from the race, throwing his support to Obama, who has downplayed the horrendous transformation now taking place in our structure of government. Having united the public in hatred of a deliberately-created "terrorist threat", our government has been engaged in endless warfare. But having learned from the debacle of Vietnam, it no longer employs draftees, but rather reservists and, increasingly, mercenaries, hence reducing the danger to itself from public war-weariness. And unlike Nazism, Americanism does not discriminate against people on the basis of race or even religion-- quite obviously the Islamophobia indulged in by some extremists in our society does not apply to, say, the Saudi Royal family. It is remarkable how many women and people of ethnic groups which were previously discriminated against-- Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzalez, and John Yoo-- have contributed to American fascism. Anybody of any background can be an American-- or an imitation American if he is the citizen of an American client state-- so long as he supports the goals of American imperialism.
Nor does Americanism ignore the profit motive. Being American means being prosperous. After all, the business of America has always been business. American fascism permits totalitarianism and the profit motive to co-exist in the following way: if people do not challenge the government, they can go about their business and make money. If they question the government, then they are in trouble economically, politically and personally. Finally, Americanism does indeed encourage the use of high technology, not only to make people more comfortable, but also to kill and torture those who challenge it, and to destroy the environment. This makes Americanism potentially the most successful form of totalitarianism which has ever existed. It is so successful that I suspect that many Americans, reading the revelations of torture, genocide and environmental destruction which constantly confront us on the net and elsewhere, are saying, "Why not? What's wrong with a government which permits us to be comfortable both physically and in our self-delusion? And if some people oppose this form of government why should they not be tortured and killed? Who cares about the environment anyway?" At the outset of World War II, James Burnham wrote, "Everyone has such powerful feelings...against totalitarianism that scientific understanding is gravely hindered. It is legitimate to believe that there is often an element of hypocrisy or delusion in these feelings. Frequently, in the United States, it is not totalitarianism, but Russian or German, in general 'foreign totalitarianism' that is being objected to; a 100% American totalitarianism would not be objectionable. And it is not at all clear, from historical exprience, how much the masses are devoted to democracy as compared with other values such as jobs or food or reasonable security." (The Managerial Revolution, p. 153). He was all too prescient.
But of course, this specifically American form of totalitarianism is completely opposed to the form of government the Founding Fathers had in mind, which rests upon "Republican virtue"-- that is to say, a fierce love of liberty. Contrary to what Darius Rejali thinks, it is not democracy, if by that term we mean a government of law which preserves individual liberty, including the liberty of minorities and dissidents. What is happening now is exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville feared when he wrote Democracy in America: as the American people lose their love of liberty, the rule of the masses has become quite compatible with despotism. That is to say, the majority of the American people have willingly accepted a form of government which not only inflicts slavery and horrendous suffering upon foriegners, but which has the potential to destroy, and indeed is now in the process of destoying, freedom right here in America. For the fact is, every abuse against which I have spoken out in these pages is known, or can be knowable, by every American. Any American who cares can know that our government is routinely torturing people who may well be innocent even when they have no 'actionable intelligence' to offer, holding 'kangaroo courts' to try the terrorists it has itself created to take the rap for its own crime of 9/11; that it is planning a permanent occupation of Iraq as viscious as the Nazi occupation of Russia and a genocidal war against Iran; that it is targeting American Muslims in the same way the Nazis targeted the Jews, and that it is destroying the environment. I used to say that the one major flaw of our Constitution is that it does not permit people the right to revolt which Jefferson invoked in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, but there is no indication that the majority of Americans would revolt against this unconstitutional government if it did. The German people have often been criticized for their "willful ignorance" in the face of the Holocaust. But Germany does not have a long traditon of freedom, and as soon as the Nazis gained power, they cut off all access to truth. By contrast, American fascism has come into being in a country with a long tradition of liberty, where a good measure of freedom of the press is still in existence. And yet the American people as a whole are passive in the face of this, the most terrifying threat Mankind has ever faced.
That places Americans in a position that is unique in world history. I have often argued against blaming ordinary civilians for the crimes of their government. Why kill German, Japanese or Russian civilians because their governments are aggressive? I have even, in contrast to most of my left/liberal colleagues, supported a policy of assassination of dangerous foriegn leaders as a way of avoiding a war which would take the lives not only of thousands of soldiers on both sides but tens of thousands of civilians as well. But Americans are different. Having grown up in a free society, they have had the opportunity to say "no" to their government's abuses and have turned it down. Having had the opportunity to know the truth, they have chosen to believe the government's lies, simply because it makes their lives more comfortable. Americans are therefore the only people in the history of Mankind who can be said to be accomplices in the crimes of their government, because they have traditionally been the most free. With regard to slavery, a conscience-stricken Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever, that considering nature, numbers, and natural means alone, an exchange of circumstances [between blacks and whites] is possible, that indeed, it may become probable through Divine intervention! God hath no attribute which can take side with us in this contest." The treatment of so-called "detainees" in the so-called "war on terror" is the moral equivalent of slavery, and our government's endless warfare is the equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust. Jefferson's condemnation of his fellow slaveholders applies with a hundred times greater force to the majority of Americans today.
For now the trappings of democracy remain-- if they did not, I would not be writing this. But when they are gone-- when I and thousands of other conscientious Americans are dead or in concentration camps-- then any catastrophe, natural or man-made, which takes the lives of those who remain will be an expression of God's judgement. For by then there will be no 'innocent civilians' left in America--there will only be a criminal government and millions of accomplices.
I believe that Wolin is partially correct. There can be no doubt that our government is moving toward totalitarianism. But I prefer to call the new type of government which is coming into being simply "American Totalitarianism" or "Americanism" because it actually has more in common with other forms of totalitarianism than he realizes. Where it differs is in its prospects of for success and the complicity of its citizenry. To illustate its characteristics, let us look at the other forms of totalitarianism. First totalitarianism of the left, which aims to conquer not through direct military action but through subversion, exploiting the grievances of oppressed peoples and inspiring them to revolt. Communism failed because it ignored basic human instincts like tribalism and acquisitiveness, attempting to set up a utopian society which would be free of greed and prejudice between different peoples. European and Asian Fascism, by contrast, acknowledged and indeed played upon human tribalistic instincts, appealing to nationalism and ethnic hatreds, and permitting some measure of private enterprise, even if subordinated to government control (fascist governments differed in the emphasis they placed upon "race"-- for instance both the Italians and Japanese fascists rejected anti-Semitism-- but they all preached an extreme form of nationalism). These types of totalitarian governments had advantages over left-wing totalitarianism, but they had the disadvantage of alienating people of other nationalities (or those who, in the case of Nazism, did not live up to the "Aryan ideal") and involving the citizen population in direct military action, which, if the war is not going well, can lead to war-weariness and hence revolt.
American totalitarianism is clearly a form of fascism-- that is to say, totalitarianism which spreads its power by means of direct military conquest. But it has many advantages over both Communism and the other forms of fascism. First of all, it does not dispense with the human tribalistic instinct. Wolin is dead wrong when he says that the totalitarianism of today "exploits political apathy and encourages divisiveness." When I was growing up in the nineteen-sixties, there was far more divisiveness and, perhaps not coincidentally, far more freedom. America is on a "permanent war footing", in essence a prolonged "ten-minute hate"-- and has been since the National Security State came into being in 1947. But never has it been so united and so fearful of "thought crime" as it has in the wake of 9/11. Those of us who oppose its policies are indeed faced with the possibility that they may be-- as I have been-- the target of vandalism and other forms of public abuse if they voice their opposition openly. Chris Dodd, the only candidate for president who ran on a platform of restoring the Constitution, did miserably and quickly withdrew from the race, throwing his support to Obama, who has downplayed the horrendous transformation now taking place in our structure of government. Having united the public in hatred of a deliberately-created "terrorist threat", our government has been engaged in endless warfare. But having learned from the debacle of Vietnam, it no longer employs draftees, but rather reservists and, increasingly, mercenaries, hence reducing the danger to itself from public war-weariness. And unlike Nazism, Americanism does not discriminate against people on the basis of race or even religion-- quite obviously the Islamophobia indulged in by some extremists in our society does not apply to, say, the Saudi Royal family. It is remarkable how many women and people of ethnic groups which were previously discriminated against-- Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzalez, and John Yoo-- have contributed to American fascism. Anybody of any background can be an American-- or an imitation American if he is the citizen of an American client state-- so long as he supports the goals of American imperialism.
Nor does Americanism ignore the profit motive. Being American means being prosperous. After all, the business of America has always been business. American fascism permits totalitarianism and the profit motive to co-exist in the following way: if people do not challenge the government, they can go about their business and make money. If they question the government, then they are in trouble economically, politically and personally. Finally, Americanism does indeed encourage the use of high technology, not only to make people more comfortable, but also to kill and torture those who challenge it, and to destroy the environment. This makes Americanism potentially the most successful form of totalitarianism which has ever existed. It is so successful that I suspect that many Americans, reading the revelations of torture, genocide and environmental destruction which constantly confront us on the net and elsewhere, are saying, "Why not? What's wrong with a government which permits us to be comfortable both physically and in our self-delusion? And if some people oppose this form of government why should they not be tortured and killed? Who cares about the environment anyway?" At the outset of World War II, James Burnham wrote, "Everyone has such powerful feelings...against totalitarianism that scientific understanding is gravely hindered. It is legitimate to believe that there is often an element of hypocrisy or delusion in these feelings. Frequently, in the United States, it is not totalitarianism, but Russian or German, in general 'foreign totalitarianism' that is being objected to; a 100% American totalitarianism would not be objectionable. And it is not at all clear, from historical exprience, how much the masses are devoted to democracy as compared with other values such as jobs or food or reasonable security." (The Managerial Revolution, p. 153). He was all too prescient.
But of course, this specifically American form of totalitarianism is completely opposed to the form of government the Founding Fathers had in mind, which rests upon "Republican virtue"-- that is to say, a fierce love of liberty. Contrary to what Darius Rejali thinks, it is not democracy, if by that term we mean a government of law which preserves individual liberty, including the liberty of minorities and dissidents. What is happening now is exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville feared when he wrote Democracy in America: as the American people lose their love of liberty, the rule of the masses has become quite compatible with despotism. That is to say, the majority of the American people have willingly accepted a form of government which not only inflicts slavery and horrendous suffering upon foriegners, but which has the potential to destroy, and indeed is now in the process of destoying, freedom right here in America. For the fact is, every abuse against which I have spoken out in these pages is known, or can be knowable, by every American. Any American who cares can know that our government is routinely torturing people who may well be innocent even when they have no 'actionable intelligence' to offer, holding 'kangaroo courts' to try the terrorists it has itself created to take the rap for its own crime of 9/11; that it is planning a permanent occupation of Iraq as viscious as the Nazi occupation of Russia and a genocidal war against Iran; that it is targeting American Muslims in the same way the Nazis targeted the Jews, and that it is destroying the environment. I used to say that the one major flaw of our Constitution is that it does not permit people the right to revolt which Jefferson invoked in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, but there is no indication that the majority of Americans would revolt against this unconstitutional government if it did. The German people have often been criticized for their "willful ignorance" in the face of the Holocaust. But Germany does not have a long traditon of freedom, and as soon as the Nazis gained power, they cut off all access to truth. By contrast, American fascism has come into being in a country with a long tradition of liberty, where a good measure of freedom of the press is still in existence. And yet the American people as a whole are passive in the face of this, the most terrifying threat Mankind has ever faced.
That places Americans in a position that is unique in world history. I have often argued against blaming ordinary civilians for the crimes of their government. Why kill German, Japanese or Russian civilians because their governments are aggressive? I have even, in contrast to most of my left/liberal colleagues, supported a policy of assassination of dangerous foriegn leaders as a way of avoiding a war which would take the lives not only of thousands of soldiers on both sides but tens of thousands of civilians as well. But Americans are different. Having grown up in a free society, they have had the opportunity to say "no" to their government's abuses and have turned it down. Having had the opportunity to know the truth, they have chosen to believe the government's lies, simply because it makes their lives more comfortable. Americans are therefore the only people in the history of Mankind who can be said to be accomplices in the crimes of their government, because they have traditionally been the most free. With regard to slavery, a conscience-stricken Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever, that considering nature, numbers, and natural means alone, an exchange of circumstances [between blacks and whites] is possible, that indeed, it may become probable through Divine intervention! God hath no attribute which can take side with us in this contest." The treatment of so-called "detainees" in the so-called "war on terror" is the moral equivalent of slavery, and our government's endless warfare is the equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust. Jefferson's condemnation of his fellow slaveholders applies with a hundred times greater force to the majority of Americans today.
For now the trappings of democracy remain-- if they did not, I would not be writing this. But when they are gone-- when I and thousands of other conscientious Americans are dead or in concentration camps-- then any catastrophe, natural or man-made, which takes the lives of those who remain will be an expression of God's judgement. For by then there will be no 'innocent civilians' left in America--there will only be a criminal government and millions of accomplices.
Monday, June 2, 2008
REJALI'S BIG LIE: THE STUPID, CARING TORTURER
This morning, when I was searching for Darius Rejali's e-mail, because I thought it only fair to send him a copy of my latest blog, I came across something which infuriated me, although I have now, to my equal fury, lost it. It was an article by Rejali, which ends with the comment that torturers "care, they really care." Presumably he meant they care what we think of them. And by implication, because Rejali insists in the face of all the evidence that our government is torturing in order to obtain information, that they care about saving human lives. It called to mind the following imaginary dialogue between Rejali and his hypothetical torturer. I visualized some dumb thug, bending over a poor wretch, with the erudite Rejali, armed with his books and charts, tapping him on the shoulder:
Rejali: "What are you doing, sir?"
Torturer: "I'm waterboarding this terrorist. I'm still mad as hell about 9/11, and I've got to find out when the next terrorist attack will be, because I don't want my children-- I don't want no more innocent Americans to be killed by these terrorist scum. By the way, [standing up] you're not supposed to know about this-- it's top secret."
Rejali: "I know it's top secret, but I heard about it on the evening news. And what I came to tell you is that what you are doing will not get you the information you want. [pulling out a chart] Here, look at this. The bar chart shows the incidence of the kind of torture you are practicing in democracies. And if you will read my latest work [handing him a book,] you will see that torture never is useful for the elicting of good intelligence."
Torturer: [looking at the chart and book] "Uh, thanks, Professor-- I didn't know. But I guess you know better..."
Rejali: "Yes, and furthermore, I know that if you keep doing what you are doing, the people of our great democracy, who are not supposed to know that you're doing it, won't like you."
Torturer: "Won't like me? Oh. Gee I don't want to be disliked. Guess I should stop..."
How nice it would be if this fantasy were true! But of course, as I have asserted over and over again in previous blogs, there is abundant evidence that our government does not torture in order to elicit "actionable intelligence" but rather false confessions and terror. The real torturer is in fact very slick and shrewd. He knows exactly what he is doing, and that it works very well indeed for his purpose. So all of Rejali's statistics and charts are irrelevant to him. And there is another undeniable fact which should have made Rejali wonder.
When I sent a copy of an article I had written on torture to Noam Chomsky, he wished me success, saying, "I have a feeling that the doors are opening on this topic." He might have said "the market", but then of course, Chomsky doesn't use words like that. But the fact is, torture has become a marketable commodity-- so long as one does not challenge official "truths" and sticks to the comfortable old arguments and the comfortable old illusions which go along with them. Mine didn't, and correspondingly, I have not been able to find a publisher. By contrast, the public's sudden fascination with torture is expanding Rejali's career. And why is that? Just because the majority of people have a morbid fascination with the topic? No doubt they do, but that has always been the case. What has changed things? Rejali has said that democracies torture. In that he is right. Human nature being what it is, they do-- sporadically and very secretively. He has said furthermore that the kind of torture practiced by democracies is stealthy, designed to disguise the fact that torture is taking place. In that he is right as well. So I would like to ask him, why is it that our government is no longer making any secret of the fact that it tortures?
To be sure, it has officially denied that it does. But the evidence for its torturing is so overwhelming that no American can be ignorant concerning it. It confronts us at least once a week, and frequently more often than that, on the evening news, and newspaper headlines. Yet this is a democracy, and hence it is supposed to be keeping its torturing a secret. Have journalists become more adept at ferreting out the government's secrets? Actually the evidence suggests that the press, like our Congress, courts and just about every other institution in American life, become far more timid about challenging our government since 9/11. And reporters usually don't last long in their profession if they leak things the government does not want leaked. Some revelations seem almost to have been deliberately planted. Take for instance the meetings that took place between Dick Cheney and then-DCIA Porter Goss with John McCain over his Detainee Treatment Act which has been described as "banning torture" but was in fact designed to faciltate torture. Those meetings could have been held secretly, and yet the press was told about them. Why? Has it occurred to Rejali that our government may now be making a transition from democracy to totalitarianism? That the policies which have caused so much misery abroad, in places like Vietnam and Rejali's own Iran, have, to use Douglas Valentine's words, "come home to roost"?
In fact, the revelations which have caused Rejali's career to boom are part of an organized campaign of terror. In stark contrast to earlier times, when, folowing Rejali's rule, our government kept quiet about its torturing, it now wants us to know about it. Why? Because it knows that although it can sell the lie of a worldwide terrorist conspiracy which is threatening our lives to the majority of Americans, there will always be a significant minority who will see through this lie. Those who cannot be won over through deceit must be brought into line through terror. And make no mistake about it, our government, which has become every bit as ruthless and vicious as the Shah's, has every intention of carrying out the implied threat that we are so often confronted with. It expects us to cower in terror at the thought. What it has not counted upon is that some of us still possess enough of what our Founders would have called "Republican virtue"-- that is to say, a fierce love of liberty-- to be outraged at what is happening, and that rage can overcome their fear. Indeed, it must. For if we fall for the comforting half-truths offered by Rejali, and envision the torturers as stupid or, to use a word often employed by Amnesty International, "men who feel impotent", they will certainly win. They do not feel impotent, because they are not-- they are vastly powerful but their power rests upon deceit. Only in refusing to buy their lies and speaking the truth can we defeat them. And in this regard, Rejali's contribution is a bit more modest than his reputation would suggest.
Rejali: "What are you doing, sir?"
Torturer: "I'm waterboarding this terrorist. I'm still mad as hell about 9/11, and I've got to find out when the next terrorist attack will be, because I don't want my children-- I don't want no more innocent Americans to be killed by these terrorist scum. By the way, [standing up] you're not supposed to know about this-- it's top secret."
Rejali: "I know it's top secret, but I heard about it on the evening news. And what I came to tell you is that what you are doing will not get you the information you want. [pulling out a chart] Here, look at this. The bar chart shows the incidence of the kind of torture you are practicing in democracies. And if you will read my latest work [handing him a book,] you will see that torture never is useful for the elicting of good intelligence."
Torturer: [looking at the chart and book] "Uh, thanks, Professor-- I didn't know. But I guess you know better..."
Rejali: "Yes, and furthermore, I know that if you keep doing what you are doing, the people of our great democracy, who are not supposed to know that you're doing it, won't like you."
Torturer: "Won't like me? Oh. Gee I don't want to be disliked. Guess I should stop..."
How nice it would be if this fantasy were true! But of course, as I have asserted over and over again in previous blogs, there is abundant evidence that our government does not torture in order to elicit "actionable intelligence" but rather false confessions and terror. The real torturer is in fact very slick and shrewd. He knows exactly what he is doing, and that it works very well indeed for his purpose. So all of Rejali's statistics and charts are irrelevant to him. And there is another undeniable fact which should have made Rejali wonder.
When I sent a copy of an article I had written on torture to Noam Chomsky, he wished me success, saying, "I have a feeling that the doors are opening on this topic." He might have said "the market", but then of course, Chomsky doesn't use words like that. But the fact is, torture has become a marketable commodity-- so long as one does not challenge official "truths" and sticks to the comfortable old arguments and the comfortable old illusions which go along with them. Mine didn't, and correspondingly, I have not been able to find a publisher. By contrast, the public's sudden fascination with torture is expanding Rejali's career. And why is that? Just because the majority of people have a morbid fascination with the topic? No doubt they do, but that has always been the case. What has changed things? Rejali has said that democracies torture. In that he is right. Human nature being what it is, they do-- sporadically and very secretively. He has said furthermore that the kind of torture practiced by democracies is stealthy, designed to disguise the fact that torture is taking place. In that he is right as well. So I would like to ask him, why is it that our government is no longer making any secret of the fact that it tortures?
To be sure, it has officially denied that it does. But the evidence for its torturing is so overwhelming that no American can be ignorant concerning it. It confronts us at least once a week, and frequently more often than that, on the evening news, and newspaper headlines. Yet this is a democracy, and hence it is supposed to be keeping its torturing a secret. Have journalists become more adept at ferreting out the government's secrets? Actually the evidence suggests that the press, like our Congress, courts and just about every other institution in American life, become far more timid about challenging our government since 9/11. And reporters usually don't last long in their profession if they leak things the government does not want leaked. Some revelations seem almost to have been deliberately planted. Take for instance the meetings that took place between Dick Cheney and then-DCIA Porter Goss with John McCain over his Detainee Treatment Act which has been described as "banning torture" but was in fact designed to faciltate torture. Those meetings could have been held secretly, and yet the press was told about them. Why? Has it occurred to Rejali that our government may now be making a transition from democracy to totalitarianism? That the policies which have caused so much misery abroad, in places like Vietnam and Rejali's own Iran, have, to use Douglas Valentine's words, "come home to roost"?
In fact, the revelations which have caused Rejali's career to boom are part of an organized campaign of terror. In stark contrast to earlier times, when, folowing Rejali's rule, our government kept quiet about its torturing, it now wants us to know about it. Why? Because it knows that although it can sell the lie of a worldwide terrorist conspiracy which is threatening our lives to the majority of Americans, there will always be a significant minority who will see through this lie. Those who cannot be won over through deceit must be brought into line through terror. And make no mistake about it, our government, which has become every bit as ruthless and vicious as the Shah's, has every intention of carrying out the implied threat that we are so often confronted with. It expects us to cower in terror at the thought. What it has not counted upon is that some of us still possess enough of what our Founders would have called "Republican virtue"-- that is to say, a fierce love of liberty-- to be outraged at what is happening, and that rage can overcome their fear. Indeed, it must. For if we fall for the comforting half-truths offered by Rejali, and envision the torturers as stupid or, to use a word often employed by Amnesty International, "men who feel impotent", they will certainly win. They do not feel impotent, because they are not-- they are vastly powerful but their power rests upon deceit. Only in refusing to buy their lies and speaking the truth can we defeat them. And in this regard, Rejali's contribution is a bit more modest than his reputation would suggest.
AN OPEN LETTER TO DARIUS REJALI
Professor Rejali:
I first became interested in your work when I read your article "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology", which is discussed in my last blog. I even considered buying your book, Torture and Democracy. But I have read enough now to see that your theories, which caused me some concern from the start, are counter-productive and indeed even dangerous. No doubt you are sincerely devoted to stopping torture as it is practiced today, but in fact nothing is more likely to give torturers encouragement than the conclusions which you are championing. I am referring specifically to a passage from your published comments in a panel discussion sponsored by the Carnegie Council, and held in the New York Public Library on June 1, 2005. On that occasion you said:
"Does it work? Well, let me be clear. There are three ways you can use torture: to cause fear, to elicit a false confession, to get true information. Can organizations use torture to intimidate prisoners? Yes. Can organizations use torture to produce false confessions? Yes, absolutely, though it's hard. But these cases of torture working are not the important ones. The real question is whether organizations can apply torture professionally to produce true information better than other forms of intelligence-gathering." (http://www.eceia.org/resources/transcripts/5207.html/pf_printable?
In this you are dead wrong. For there is overwhelming evidence that our government uses torture not to obtain information which could save lives, but for the first two purposes, for which you admit that it works. In dismissing those first two cases as unimportant, you are giving the torturers the victory at the very outset. I suspect that your unwillingness to confront the real aim of torture by by United States stems from a tendency, surprising in someone who grew up under the Shah, to confuse democracy with prosperity and consumerism, and fail to see that a government which uses torture on a routine basis, no matter how stealthfully, cannot long remain a democracy: through its own actions it is laying the foundations for totalitarianism.
You must be aware that the Iraq War was initiated partly because of the "confession" of Ibn Al-Sheikh Al-Libi, that Iraq was giving Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction, which he later recanted and which has been proven to be untrue: in fact Iraq had no WMDs. Do you think that this was an accident? Can you not see that that confession was deliberately elicited in order to get the U.S. into a war which people would otherwise not have supported? You have been studying torture, especially as practiced by democracies, all your life. So you cannot have failed to notice that since the nineteen-fifties, the CIA has been conducting programs, such as MK-ULTRA, ARTICHOKE AND BLUEBIRD, aimed at radically changing the subject's personality. These methods utilize a combination of mental and physical tortures, such as electroconvulsive treatment, severe sensory deprivation, and hallucinogenic drugs, along with hypnosis, to "depattern" individuals to an infantile state from which they can be re-programmed to be whatever the government wants them to be. The facts are laid out in Alfred W. McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror(see especially pp. 29-59). Such methods produce amnesia, delusions, hallucinations and psychosis, which obviously have no use in the elicting of true information. Why then has it been developing them? Dr. Colin Ross, M.D., has offered an answer in The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists : they are being used to produce new personalities, to create what used to be called "Manchurian Candidates", and must now (since the Cold War is over) be termed "phony terrorists".
But our government, concerned as it is with the protection of American lives, would never do such a thing, right? You above all should know how false that assumption is. Stealthy methods of torture may have been developed to fool the public in democracies, but they have invariably have been used to create dictatorships. Even at the height of the Cold War, there were in fact far more more CIA-created and U.S.-supported dictatorships in the world than Communist ones. If the Communists seemed to control a comparable number of people, it was because they had control of the two great Eurasian giants, the Soviet Union and China. But in terms of the number of states which were dictatorships, right-wing ones far outnumbered Communist ones. Everywhere the CIA applied its methods, the result was dictatorship. And one of these places was your own native Iran. Another was Vietnam, where thousands of American and millions of Vietnamese lives were lost in order to maintain the power of the vicious and dicatorial regime of South Vietnam. The CIA called it "PHOENIX". To the Vietnamese, it was torture and murder on a mass scale, most often of innocent civilians unconnected with the Viet Cong. Douglas Valentine has detailed this in his book, the Phoenix Program. And with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the terror has come home. With the the U.S. Constitution gutted by that act and others supposedly designed to protect us from "terrorists", our government now has the capability to do more harm to American citizens than any foreign terrorist could ever do.
In your essay, "Electricity...", you say that "torture is part and parcel of the spread of democratization. In an age where... democratization is touted as the province of all that is 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 re-invent themselves in the face of democratization and international human rights scrutiny and as well-to-do consumers increasingly fear for their security." This assertion ignores two facts. First, although democratic governments may indeed embrace "stealthy" methods to fool a democratic public, the goal and actual result of their efforts is to produce and support dictatorship. If "wealthy consumers" fear more for their security than for their liberty, it is because they have lost the love of liberty which is the only secure basis upon which democracy can rest. Materialism, consumerism, and all that are associated with them are not concomitants of democracy, they are its antithesis. And therein lies the danger of your thesis: it encourages complacency. When people for whom "democracy" means primarily "prosperity" hear it, and read articles such as the one in Newsweek which implies that the CIA is now torturing thousands of detainees who no longer have any intelligence value (if indeed they ever did-- see the October, 8, 2007 issue, page 66), they are bound to say, "Why not? If it is necessary to maintain our way of life, let it continue." Not, be it noted, "our safety", for as you have pointed out, torture has little value for the accumulation of the intelligence necessary for that.
Your thesis can only strengthen the fatal link between public complacency and our government's grab for totalitarian power, because it accepts as true the prevailing lie that the real terrorists are somewhere "out there", when in fact they are right here in our own government. And frankly, I do not understand how a scholar who grew up in Iran under the Shah, and has devoted his life to the study of torture, can have reached such conclusions. Arguing-- as all too many human rights groups do-- over whether or not torture is effective in elicting true intelligence is arguing over hypotheticals. If we want to deal with the real problem of torture today, we have to look at how it furthers the aim of those whose interest is not in saving human lives but in the acquisiton of power. You have already admitted that torture works very well for their purposes, which are to inspire terror and elicit false confessions. So how on earth do you propose to stop it?
I first became interested in your work when I read your article "Electricity: The Global History of a Torture Technology", which is discussed in my last blog. I even considered buying your book, Torture and Democracy. But I have read enough now to see that your theories, which caused me some concern from the start, are counter-productive and indeed even dangerous. No doubt you are sincerely devoted to stopping torture as it is practiced today, but in fact nothing is more likely to give torturers encouragement than the conclusions which you are championing. I am referring specifically to a passage from your published comments in a panel discussion sponsored by the Carnegie Council, and held in the New York Public Library on June 1, 2005. On that occasion you said:
"Does it work? Well, let me be clear. There are three ways you can use torture: to cause fear, to elicit a false confession, to get true information. Can organizations use torture to intimidate prisoners? Yes. Can organizations use torture to produce false confessions? Yes, absolutely, though it's hard. But these cases of torture working are not the important ones. The real question is whether organizations can apply torture professionally to produce true information better than other forms of intelligence-gathering." (http://www.eceia.org/resources/transcripts/5207.html/pf_printable?
In this you are dead wrong. For there is overwhelming evidence that our government uses torture not to obtain information which could save lives, but for the first two purposes, for which you admit that it works. In dismissing those first two cases as unimportant, you are giving the torturers the victory at the very outset. I suspect that your unwillingness to confront the real aim of torture by by United States stems from a tendency, surprising in someone who grew up under the Shah, to confuse democracy with prosperity and consumerism, and fail to see that a government which uses torture on a routine basis, no matter how stealthfully, cannot long remain a democracy: through its own actions it is laying the foundations for totalitarianism.
You must be aware that the Iraq War was initiated partly because of the "confession" of Ibn Al-Sheikh Al-Libi, that Iraq was giving Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction, which he later recanted and which has been proven to be untrue: in fact Iraq had no WMDs. Do you think that this was an accident? Can you not see that that confession was deliberately elicited in order to get the U.S. into a war which people would otherwise not have supported? You have been studying torture, especially as practiced by democracies, all your life. So you cannot have failed to notice that since the nineteen-fifties, the CIA has been conducting programs, such as MK-ULTRA, ARTICHOKE AND BLUEBIRD, aimed at radically changing the subject's personality. These methods utilize a combination of mental and physical tortures, such as electroconvulsive treatment, severe sensory deprivation, and hallucinogenic drugs, along with hypnosis, to "depattern" individuals to an infantile state from which they can be re-programmed to be whatever the government wants them to be. The facts are laid out in Alfred W. McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror(see especially pp. 29-59). Such methods produce amnesia, delusions, hallucinations and psychosis, which obviously have no use in the elicting of true information. Why then has it been developing them? Dr. Colin Ross, M.D., has offered an answer in The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists : they are being used to produce new personalities, to create what used to be called "Manchurian Candidates", and must now (since the Cold War is over) be termed "phony terrorists".
But our government, concerned as it is with the protection of American lives, would never do such a thing, right? You above all should know how false that assumption is. Stealthy methods of torture may have been developed to fool the public in democracies, but they have invariably have been used to create dictatorships. Even at the height of the Cold War, there were in fact far more more CIA-created and U.S.-supported dictatorships in the world than Communist ones. If the Communists seemed to control a comparable number of people, it was because they had control of the two great Eurasian giants, the Soviet Union and China. But in terms of the number of states which were dictatorships, right-wing ones far outnumbered Communist ones. Everywhere the CIA applied its methods, the result was dictatorship. And one of these places was your own native Iran. Another was Vietnam, where thousands of American and millions of Vietnamese lives were lost in order to maintain the power of the vicious and dicatorial regime of South Vietnam. The CIA called it "PHOENIX". To the Vietnamese, it was torture and murder on a mass scale, most often of innocent civilians unconnected with the Viet Cong. Douglas Valentine has detailed this in his book, the Phoenix Program. And with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the terror has come home. With the the U.S. Constitution gutted by that act and others supposedly designed to protect us from "terrorists", our government now has the capability to do more harm to American citizens than any foreign terrorist could ever do.
In your essay, "Electricity...", you say that "torture is part and parcel of the spread of democratization. In an age where... democratization is touted as the province of all that is 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 re-invent themselves in the face of democratization and international human rights scrutiny and as well-to-do consumers increasingly fear for their security." This assertion ignores two facts. First, although democratic governments may indeed embrace "stealthy" methods to fool a democratic public, the goal and actual result of their efforts is to produce and support dictatorship. If "wealthy consumers" fear more for their security than for their liberty, it is because they have lost the love of liberty which is the only secure basis upon which democracy can rest. Materialism, consumerism, and all that are associated with them are not concomitants of democracy, they are its antithesis. And therein lies the danger of your thesis: it encourages complacency. When people for whom "democracy" means primarily "prosperity" hear it, and read articles such as the one in Newsweek which implies that the CIA is now torturing thousands of detainees who no longer have any intelligence value (if indeed they ever did-- see the October, 8, 2007 issue, page 66), they are bound to say, "Why not? If it is necessary to maintain our way of life, let it continue." Not, be it noted, "our safety", for as you have pointed out, torture has little value for the accumulation of the intelligence necessary for that.
Your thesis can only strengthen the fatal link between public complacency and our government's grab for totalitarian power, because it accepts as true the prevailing lie that the real terrorists are somewhere "out there", when in fact they are right here in our own government. And frankly, I do not understand how a scholar who grew up in Iran under the Shah, and has devoted his life to the study of torture, can have reached such conclusions. Arguing-- as all too many human rights groups do-- over whether or not torture is effective in elicting true intelligence is arguing over hypotheticals. If we want to deal with the real problem of torture today, we have to look at how it furthers the aim of those whose interest is not in saving human lives but in the acquisiton of power. You have already admitted that torture works very well for their purposes, which are to inspire terror and elicit false confessions. So how on earth do you propose to stop it?
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