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?