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.