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.
Showing posts with label electrical torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label electrical torture. Show all posts
Monday, June 2, 2008
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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