Tortured justifications

By Emil Pulsifer
Guest Blogger

Recently there has been an aggressive media campaign to justify torture as a tool of official U.S. government policy: Attempts have been made not only by Dick Cheney and others implicated in past practices, but also by a variety of media allies who seem determined to soften up public perception in support of future imperatives. Most notably is the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, who recently ran the second of two columns (to date) defending torture.

 

Krauthammer, like other advocates of torture as a tool of official government policy, begs the question: He assumes, in the premises of his arguments, that which he wants to prove: First, that subjects in custody know the location of a ticking bomb or a hostage; Second, that the authorities somehow know that the subjects in custody possess this knowledge (without themselves possessing this knowledge); Third, that standard law-enforcement interrogation techniques have not only failed to produce the information sought, but will continue to do so; and that torture, instead of eliciting a false confession (stopping the torture by telling interrogators what they want to hear), will produce the information which the subject is "known to possess".

The obvious question here is, how do interrogators know what knowledge the subject possesses without themselves possessing that knowledge?

Perhaps, without being able to read minds, they can sense "guilty auras"? In almost all such cases, when authorities say that they "know" in such cases, it merely means that they suspect it, based on the subject's known or apparent involvement with a group; or that someone else has pointed the finger of guilt at another: "I can't tell you what you want to know, but I have it on good authority that he knows."

 In some cases, this finger pointing may even be truthful; in many others, it isn't. The reasons for falsely implicating others in such cases are well known and numerous: Individuals hoping to stop their own torture by "giving information"; to prevent the arrest, or torture of relatives or friends; to avoid prison, shorten their sentence, or ease their conditions; to gain other concessions; to confuse authorities to protect the guilty; to settle a score with personal enemies or with individuals belonging to a hated group or a rival organization.

   

Upon scrutiny, the "knowledge" claimed by authorities as to what a subject knows but won't reveal, often dissolves into hearsay, coerced testimony, assumptions which interpret vague or ambiguous information as though it were specific and definite, or some combination of these. Even in the tiny handful of cases where torture has, seemingly, led to critical discoveries by the authorities, we have only the word of the torturers themselves to vouch for this: and such claims, when examined long after the fact, in the light of informed scrutiny, frequently turn out to be exaggerated or simply false.  Those publicly supporting torture, as public policy, are almost never the ones actually involved in conducting it, and from the torturers to the intelligence analysts and managers, to the administrators authorizing it or defending it after the fact, the line is crooked, broken, and subverted by overriding ideological and practical propaganda needs.

 

Here in Arizona, the 1991 Buddhist Temple Murder Case gave an example of what can happen even without waterboarding, but simply with subjects being pressured by false claims that their fellow suspects had fingered them, and that unless they confessed, they would face the death penalty. The result of these common, law-enforcement interrogation techniques was a set of completely false confessions, by multiple suspects, to the crime of mass murder, in which the suspects implicated one another. 

Only later was it was determined that the confessions were completely false and that a different set of suspects were guilty. Ultimately, the collapse of the case contributed to the ouster of Maricopa County Sheriff Tom Agnos, but only because other elements of the system worked: if the MCSO had been able to act as an autonomous element of the National Security State, hiding behind government secrecy, secret trials, pursuing suspects without constitutional rights, in the absence of defense attorneys able to use the discovery process and without independent judicial oversight, the truth may never have come to light. Instead, we might today be reading justifications by former MCSO administrators and their ideological sympathizers in the media, explaining why aggressive interrogation techniques are sometimes necessary to prevent those guilty of terrible crimes from walking away, free to continue preying on a naive and vulnerable society. 

 

In the case of terrorist suspects subjected to torture, the authorities claimed to be "certain" that the suspect knew of operational links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida -- links critical to demonstrating the Bush administration's casus belli for the invasion of Iraq. And indeed, the suspect confessed these links after being tortured.  The only problem is that there were no such links.  They were fabricated, and the confession was coerced.

Those defending the Doctrine That Dare Not Speak Its Name predictably employ euphemisms such as "enhanced interrogation techniques." Cheney continues to insist that the United States never tortured anyone. Therefore, it's enlightening to examine the origins of torture practices adopted in the name of "defending freedom."

In fact, many of the methods come from history's most monstrous regimes. The security apparatus of Stalinist Russia employed them against communist rivals and military officers to gain false confessions for the infamous show trials. Imperial Japan used waterboarding ("the water cure) to torture Allied POWs during World War II. Japanese officers were convicted of war crimes for using these "enhanced" techniques. The SERE program -- which was reverse-engineered by the Bush administration to use on terror suspects -- has its origins in teaching American military members how to resist the torture that was inflicted by the communists during the Korean War.

 

If this sounds familiar, it is because all of these methods -- beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation (a particularly devilish form of torture), "stress positions", and the arrest or threatened arrest of relatives on charges of terrorism or abetting it -- have been documented by mainstream American media sources; and this doesn't even address the  additional practices of torture surrogates used by the U.S. government in cases of "rendition" of suspects to foreign governments. 

 

Those advocating torture as policy who use hypothetical examples in which the government says that it "knows" this or that, would do well to remember the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen whom the United States government deported to Syria knowing that he would be tortured. He was, in a tiny, unlit, "grave-like" cell, for nearly a year, while being held incommunicado. The U.S. House of Representatives eventually apologized to Arar. Representative Jerrold Nadler, who saw all of the classified information on the case, said to Arar in a public hearing: "I am not at liberty to reveal all the classified information, but I am at liberty to say … there is nothing there that justifies the campaign of vilification against your name … or justifies denying you entry into this country or characterizing you as a terrorist in any way."

  

Krauthammer is right about one thing: Attitudes have shifted among members of government about torture, whether or not that shift applies specifically in the case of Pelosi. (And isn't it ironic that, instead of discussing what the policy architects, intelligence agency bureaucrats, and front-line practitioners of torture knew, we're arguing about what Nancy Pelosi knew!)

 

There was a similar shift in the case of Congress as a whole, which first supported the Bush administration's war in Iraq on the basis of fabricated claims, then later rejected those claims. It seems that both in government and in the press, there is no institutional memory. No matter how many times the government lies, about this, that, and the other thing, over months, years, and decades, civic leaders behave more like Charlie Brown in his perennial attempts to kick the football held by Lucy. No matter how many times she pulls that football away at the last minute, and he falls flat on his back, he somehow manages to convince himself, the following year, that this time she is finally telling the truth.

 

The government said that Abu Zubaydah, its poster-boy for waterboarding, had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.  It now transpires that he was waterboarded 83 times, and that all of the genuine information he provided may have been given before being tortured.

How far back do you need to go?  Agent Orange doesn't make people sick, and U.S. servicemen who claim otherwise are either whiny neurotics or else fabricators looking to make a fast buck. Remember? How about Richard Nixon's famous claim that "There will be no whitewash in the White House." Every few years, we find out that the storyline we'd been fed was fake, but that now we should believe whatever we're being told. Now, because the nature of power and authority has magically changed, you want to grant the government unlimited powers to coerce confessions and give a one-sided version of what suspects "know" or "knew" -- according to the schemers and liars and after-the-fact-fabricators-in-the-service-of-politics-and-policy?  It's as if you wanted to continue believing in Santa Claus. 

When are you going to grow up and admit that government, from the local police to the feds, routinely lies? That's why they're made to prove a case in court using legal, constitutional methods. Because if they aren't, why bother with the rule of law at all? Why not simply authorize whatever is necessary, because those you are authorizing are all good, truthful, accurately informed, wise men? 

 

What if there are, once in a blue moon, cases where torture is morally and intellectually justified? Don't you see that this can only be justified on the basis of the specific details of specific cases, and then only by those who are genuinely qualified to determine this? How do you write such a justification into general law or executive orders?

You can't.

You have to be general in authorizing general actions on the basis of generalized descriptions. How do you determine, ahead of time and outside of a specific, definite situation, who is "genuinely qualified"? You have to make sure that those authorized to torture have definite, personal knowledge, not based on error or fabrication or misrepresentation or misinterpretation (whether ill-intentioned or well-intentioned).  How will you do that in laws or orders which, ipso facto, govern general circumstances and must be assessed by someone else?

 

Emil Pulsifer lives in Phoenix.