Today, the Senate Armed Services Committee performed an interrogation. First there were two panels of witnesses, including Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the woman whose legal brief ended up being the sole legal advise attached to the list of interrogation techniques written by William J. Haynes II, and signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in late 2002. Including Lt. Col Daniel Baumgartner and Dr. Jerald Ogrisseg, from the SERE program, who testified repeatedly that the program was never intended to train people to interrogate enemy prisoners.
Evidence has mounted that the idea of using SERE this way originated in the Pentagon, not down at Guantanamo at one of Diane Beaver's brainstorming sessions. We didn't hear about the show '24' today, but that was another source for those sessions, as it also informs at least one of the august justices at the Supreme Court, the very one who wrote a dissenting opinion to last week's habeas corpus ruling, Boumediene v. Bush, warning of death at the hands of "radical Islamists" (p. 111).
The Senate Hearings
The testimony changed to interrogation when Jim Haynes was empaneled. People really were expecting to hear this person, whom Philippe Sands believes was at the nexus of the torture team that created the regimes of torture that were used first on Mohammed al Qahtani, a.k.a. detainee 063, later on others at Guantanamo, and spread to Afghanistan and Iraq, surfacing for the American public in the nightmarish photographs from Abu Ghraib (Philippe Sands, The Torture Team).
There were expectations of fireworks on FireDogLake, where they live blogged the event. I cleared my schedule, rearranging to do things from my desk, where I could watch on CSPAN-3 while I worked. After all, the man had agreed to testify, voluntarily. During the earlier sessions a lot of blanks got filled. SERE is not just a testosterone laced nightmare training regimen, like we see in the movies, it includes all forms of interrogation, even those more to the liking of the FBI, and Dr. Ogrisseg testified that, at least in the program he was both a constructor of, and a program evaluator for, backed up by journal articles and logs of findings, they don't do waterboarding. The reason is just as chilling as the technique itself: The point of their program is to build up defenses against interrogation, for the purposes of helping captured troops to defend their dignity, their honor, and their sanity. Waterboarding breaks a person, and even afterward, the person to whom it is done retains an inordinate fear of the waterboarding devices. Consequently, since breaking peoples' personalities is inconsistent with building them up, the technique is not used in his training. Likewise, the sleep deprivation (extreme closed confinement was not discussed by Dr. Ogrisseg) is not extreme, they aren't trying to hurt people, just train them.
Chilling, for what it says about the real techniques, so expertly reverse-engineered, that their real application is too injurious to use for training.
Chilling that with the very real inhumane and torturous treatment that went on in al Qahtani's case, at Guantanamo, that one of the people who helped construct that program, Diane Beaver, should let slip her outrage at Captain Carolyn Wood, who she regards as a really malevolent person who creates real torture: Under her watch at Bagram, people were beaten to death, and then she worked up the techniques used at Abu Ghraib.
Mr. Haynes Knits His Brow in Vain
But the star of the show, the man who was going to tell everyone just how the techniques studied for the SERE program ended up being used for interrogations, his testimony consisted of admitting the obvious whenever a Senator angrily stated that they had the letters from [name your source, chiefly the military JAGs] to prove it, but otherwise repeatedly failed to recall meeting after meeting after memo after trip after phone call, in a manner that would have made former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales very proud. When someone made the mistake of asking him what he did recall, the Washington Post got their take home quote of the day: "What I remember about the summer of 2002 was a government-wide concern about the possibility of another terrorist attack as the anniversary of September 11." To be fair, they, like much of the press, found more that was newsworthy by poring over the documents the committee released than listening to Mr. Haynes' much promised fireworks.
But if you are looking for the mindset that led to the judgements that Senator Lindsey Graham so aptly characterized, "The guidance that was provided during this period of time, I think, will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities," if you really want to know how such a thing happened, then perhaps questioning Mr. Haynes on what everyone pretty much already knows, and knows he won't disclose, isn't the right place to look.
That mindset has been building for a long time. You could hear it when the House Judiciary Committee Republicans questioned David Rivkin, and chuckled over the idea that anyone would believe that rapport building would be effective against the unhuman al Qaeda operatives. You could hear it when Senator Inhofe was doubting whether a man who was a twentieth hijacker would respond without more incentives, citing a list of all the reasons for haste in getting information in December 2002. You could hear it in the comment of Senator Jeff Sessions. Mr. Sessions ridiculed the notion that the techniques to which Mohammed al Qahtani was subjected were in any way harsh. He singled out one for disdain. In a comment reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld's priceless footnote to Jim Haynes list of tactics, Mr. Rumsfeld famously complained that 4 hours of standing was too short, after all he stood for 9 or 10 hours a day at his desk. Today, Jeff Sessions remarked that 30 days of solitary confinement wasn't much, after all, we confine people in federal custody for longer than that.
The Knowing Chuckle Frame
Does anyone notice these little comments, does anyone pay attention to the frame that they build? The ridicule of thirty days is a ridicule of Articles 89 and 90 of the Third Geneva Convention, perhaps Mr. Sessions believes it's, um, quaint. The standing, is double the limit in Article 89, which limits "Fatigue duties" to two hours. If thirty days is light, given U.S. prison conditions, and it is for some U.S. federal penitentiaries, then the criticism is on the penitentiaries, not on the Geneva Conventions. Humanitarian law is based on the essential dignity of man, what Alberto Mora today termed inalienable rights, rights that should accrue to every member of the species. The Supreme Court opinion finds the basis for the rock bottom fundamental nature of habeas corpus in the works of that guy Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, those documents in which the Federalist Society and Samuel J. Alito, Jr. find tea leaves supporting signing statements, unitary executives, and unbridled power.
The building of the frame of scoffing at international agreements on human dignity, the frame in which people need to earn the right to be treated as human beings, the frame in which inalienable rights are confined to the prepared statements of quiet heroes, has been going on for a long time. It is a swirling mess: Ancient enmities from around the globe, generation long disputes over small territories in the Middle East, child soldiers, slaves, and genocide ignored in Africa, hardening over starvation in Somalia, suicide bombing out of a bitter Hindu-Buddhist war in South Asia, all descending on minds and drying them to an unfeeling core that believes that they are the only sensible people left, and so the insanity they create is the only proper response to the great evil always outside the gates. One almost expected Jeff Sessions and Jim Haynes to lean back over their laugh and reach for a brew, and reminisce about the old days, when men were men and torture victims could be starved, put in the hole, and beaten for a lot more than a mere 30 days without doing a wimpy thing like going insane or dying. I'm reading La Question, by Henri Alleg, I'll let you know about the good ol' days when I finish.
If America truly wants to become something it has ceased to be, it will need to heed the statements of genuine humanitarians like Alberto Mora, and remember that it once thought human beings were endowed with inalienable rights, and that We the People do not believe in cruelty, and that we'd rather dissolve the ties which bind men into nations than see people imprisoned without habeas corpus. In this country, such humanitarianism is obligatio erga omnes, lest that 'new nation' perish from the earth.
Notice: There is a new panel on the sidebar, for June 26th. As we discover them, we will add events people have planned to help end torture this month. They can be sent to any of us, if you have them. Feel free to use the graphic if it helps with your efforts. Get some orange ribbons, or find a local lecture. Or set one up: I've been surprised how much people who do the work on this issue appreciate the opportunity to talk to any crowd you can assemble.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Practical Compassion
It's been a busy week again. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture has launched its Torture Awareness Month, and they have churches across the U.S. displaying banners against torture. If you live in any sizable population area, there is a good chance there are churches near you that are participating (we have 4 in the area around where I am). For details, lists of churches and how you can participate, please go to their website.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on interrogation methods, centered on the report from Glenn Fine about the FBI relation to them. In testimony, John Cloonan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed that the FBI had obtained usable intelligence from Ibn al Sheikh al Libi by establishing rapport, before he was subjected to harsh methods by the CIA. In the case of al Libi, the harsh interrogation was done by the Egyptians, and the committee also heard testimony on the legal fig-leaves used to pretend that the U.S. did not know what type of interrogation al Libi would undergo if they handed him over. A synopsis of the hearings in three parts is here, here, and here, at Firedoglake. The prepared statements of all the witnesses are available here. Interestingly, the hearing was interrupted. Apparently Mitch McConnell tried to call numerous votes to keep the hearing from proceeding, a tactic which failed when Harry Reid moved to recess the Senate.
The testimony from Mr. Cloonan is very damning, and is largely corroborated by the report that Mr. Fine and Ms. Caproni were presenting. Ms. Caproni also testified that she was denied access to information about the interrogations -- she is Counsel to the FBI. One wonders whether an investigation into all details of the interrogation policies of the U.S. government is possible, given that the lead investigating branch of the Department of Justice can find itself disallowed from accessing information. It doesn't seem possible that the FBI could not have the proper security clearance to look at government documents.
What Mr. Cloonan paints is a picture in which rapport building has produced intelligence from even so called high-level targets, like al Libi, and probably would have from Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, had it been used, but in which the preferred course was abuse and torture, with the result that the information was never obtained. I have remarked before on this blog that the so-called intelligence that people have claimed to have got from prisoners during the "War on Terror" by torture has amounted to confessions on facts that were obtained through alternate means and forensics. What emerges is a picture in which there are tactics that work that are not used, and tactics that don't work that are used, chiefly because those making the decisions believe something about the various tactics that is 180 degrees opposite to the truth.
What emerges from George Lakoff (Don't Think of an Elephant!), and from Glenn Greenwald (Great American Hypocrites, and his blog on Salon), and others who have tried to analyze the emotional or metaphorical process behind such thinking, is that there is a belief that if one doesn't act tough, one can not defeat these terrorists. Torture is the ultimate in acting tough, rapport building is the ultimate in what George Lakoff calls the nurturant parent model. In order to maintain a belief system that the terrorists are evil without question, that model can not be allowed to succeed, and the model that advocates toughness, harsh tactics, and "a dunk in the water" must be shown to be expedient, even if the results are not forthcoming.
That would certainly explain the metatorture. When thousands of prisoners are kept in temporary pens exposed to the harsh elements in Afghanistan, the reason can not be because they all have useful information, and they are waiting in line in some interrogation backlog. If the motive is punishment, as it was in some instances at Abu Ghraib (according to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez), or the motive is to instill fear, as Gerald Gray claims about the abuse, on what to do with the prisoners can be that imprecise. The immediate objective is the mistreatment itself, all that is needed is to make sure it happens.
Be very careful about what is claimed here: The reason for the abusive treatment is to prove, either to themselves or to the rest of us, several things:
Point 2 is exceedingly complex, and will not be defeated easily. The people who make this argument are attempting multiple things at one time: They are attempting the ultimate in dehumanizations, that the person we are dealing with is so evil they are not human, deserve no rights, must be silenced, must be held secretly, everything other than what are the inalienable rights of a human being. They are attempting to assert that there is a language for talking to such walking demons, and it is the language of pain, humiliation, and psychological destruction. They are attempting to finish that argument off by asserting that they know which are the demons and which are the humans, often without much information (say, for example, only that they have paid a reward for them to the Pakistani ISI). The point man on this dehumanization policy has always been Douglas Feith. He began working on it under Reagan, as has been documented here before, by pushing for the U.S. not to ratify the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which would have detailed the rights and responsibilities of non-state actors in conflicts of various international and non-international character.
He was joined by others, but the final set of work involves no ratification of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which would have dictated that the U.S. comply with the additional protocols because they had been signed, even if we didn't enforce them because they had not been ratified. It involves no ratification of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court. It involves a general reluctance to sign or ratify any treaties out of the U.N. be they on land mines, on cluster bombs, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. A full list of the U.N. treaties and the status of the U.S. is online, there are a lot of gaps.
As the Torture Awareness Month continues, and the International Day Against Torture approaches, it is worth questioning something very basic about American foreign policy. Would someone who wished to repudiate the dehumanizations and abominations of a policy, based on invocation of extreme evil and finding places beyond the law, also be willing to take a fresh look at those gaps? As Scott Shane reports on Jack Cloonan's testimony in the New York Times,
That being the case, how much easier would it have been to seduce away the whole war on terror, had the status of the terrorists been clearly delineated by the 1977 Additional Protocols? Is it really true that ratifying them would be wrong because it would give unwarranted status to terrorists, or is it rather true that in a world in which mistreatment is universally wrong, as the Christians say, even unto the least of my brethren, such terrorists would have been easily found, interrogated, and brought to justice in a court of law? All indications are that compassion even to the worst of the worst isn't just good behavior, it's effective police work and good policy.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on interrogation methods, centered on the report from Glenn Fine about the FBI relation to them. In testimony, John Cloonan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed that the FBI had obtained usable intelligence from Ibn al Sheikh al Libi by establishing rapport, before he was subjected to harsh methods by the CIA. In the case of al Libi, the harsh interrogation was done by the Egyptians, and the committee also heard testimony on the legal fig-leaves used to pretend that the U.S. did not know what type of interrogation al Libi would undergo if they handed him over. A synopsis of the hearings in three parts is here, here, and here, at Firedoglake. The prepared statements of all the witnesses are available here. Interestingly, the hearing was interrupted. Apparently Mitch McConnell tried to call numerous votes to keep the hearing from proceeding, a tactic which failed when Harry Reid moved to recess the Senate.
The testimony from Mr. Cloonan is very damning, and is largely corroborated by the report that Mr. Fine and Ms. Caproni were presenting. Ms. Caproni also testified that she was denied access to information about the interrogations -- she is Counsel to the FBI. One wonders whether an investigation into all details of the interrogation policies of the U.S. government is possible, given that the lead investigating branch of the Department of Justice can find itself disallowed from accessing information. It doesn't seem possible that the FBI could not have the proper security clearance to look at government documents.
What Mr. Cloonan paints is a picture in which rapport building has produced intelligence from even so called high-level targets, like al Libi, and probably would have from Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, had it been used, but in which the preferred course was abuse and torture, with the result that the information was never obtained. I have remarked before on this blog that the so-called intelligence that people have claimed to have got from prisoners during the "War on Terror" by torture has amounted to confessions on facts that were obtained through alternate means and forensics. What emerges is a picture in which there are tactics that work that are not used, and tactics that don't work that are used, chiefly because those making the decisions believe something about the various tactics that is 180 degrees opposite to the truth.
What emerges from George Lakoff (Don't Think of an Elephant!), and from Glenn Greenwald (Great American Hypocrites, and his blog on Salon), and others who have tried to analyze the emotional or metaphorical process behind such thinking, is that there is a belief that if one doesn't act tough, one can not defeat these terrorists. Torture is the ultimate in acting tough, rapport building is the ultimate in what George Lakoff calls the nurturant parent model. In order to maintain a belief system that the terrorists are evil without question, that model can not be allowed to succeed, and the model that advocates toughness, harsh tactics, and "a dunk in the water" must be shown to be expedient, even if the results are not forthcoming.
That would certainly explain the metatorture. When thousands of prisoners are kept in temporary pens exposed to the harsh elements in Afghanistan, the reason can not be because they all have useful information, and they are waiting in line in some interrogation backlog. If the motive is punishment, as it was in some instances at Abu Ghraib (according to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez), or the motive is to instill fear, as Gerald Gray claims about the abuse, on what to do with the prisoners can be that imprecise. The immediate objective is the mistreatment itself, all that is needed is to make sure it happens.
Be very careful about what is claimed here: The reason for the abusive treatment is to prove, either to themselves or to the rest of us, several things:
- The abusive treatment works.
- The people we are dealing with are so evil that it is the only language they understand.
- The United States has a right to do so, either because of sovereignty or justice.
- That those who do not believe in the treatment are dangerous.
Point 2 is exceedingly complex, and will not be defeated easily. The people who make this argument are attempting multiple things at one time: They are attempting the ultimate in dehumanizations, that the person we are dealing with is so evil they are not human, deserve no rights, must be silenced, must be held secretly, everything other than what are the inalienable rights of a human being. They are attempting to assert that there is a language for talking to such walking demons, and it is the language of pain, humiliation, and psychological destruction. They are attempting to finish that argument off by asserting that they know which are the demons and which are the humans, often without much information (say, for example, only that they have paid a reward for them to the Pakistani ISI). The point man on this dehumanization policy has always been Douglas Feith. He began working on it under Reagan, as has been documented here before, by pushing for the U.S. not to ratify the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which would have detailed the rights and responsibilities of non-state actors in conflicts of various international and non-international character.
He was joined by others, but the final set of work involves no ratification of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which would have dictated that the U.S. comply with the additional protocols because they had been signed, even if we didn't enforce them because they had not been ratified. It involves no ratification of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court. It involves a general reluctance to sign or ratify any treaties out of the U.N. be they on land mines, on cluster bombs, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. A full list of the U.N. treaties and the status of the U.S. is online, there are a lot of gaps.
As the Torture Awareness Month continues, and the International Day Against Torture approaches, it is worth questioning something very basic about American foreign policy. Would someone who wished to repudiate the dehumanizations and abominations of a policy, based on invocation of extreme evil and finding places beyond the law, also be willing to take a fresh look at those gaps? As Scott Shane reports on Jack Cloonan's testimony in the New York Times,
“Gaining the cooperation of an Al Qaeda member is a formidable task, but it is not impossible,” Mr. Cloonan said. He said he saw Qaeda operatives who had pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden “cross the threshold and cooperate with the F.B.I. because they were treated humanely, understood what due process was about and were literally seduced by our legal system, as strange as that might sound.”
That being the case, how much easier would it have been to seduce away the whole war on terror, had the status of the terrorists been clearly delineated by the 1977 Additional Protocols? Is it really true that ratifying them would be wrong because it would give unwarranted status to terrorists, or is it rather true that in a world in which mistreatment is universally wrong, as the Christians say, even unto the least of my brethren, such terrorists would have been easily found, interrogated, and brought to justice in a court of law? All indications are that compassion even to the worst of the worst isn't just good behavior, it's effective police work and good policy.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Framing for Containment
At a recent panel discussion at Stanford University, one of the panelists, answering a question about how the struggle was going for finding facts, defending prisoners, and getting rights at Guantanamo, said something at once surprising and depressing. Amant Raut, finishing up his response, suddenly said, "They're framing things before we can, they're inventing vocabulary so fast we can't keep up."
The Language of Frames
I'm not a stranger to the language of framing, of cognitive science with it's processes of recruitment and its interaction with language. But just to be sure, I went and took a look at George Lakoff, and read about why I shouldn't think of an elephant. The essential point is that if a situation is described well by a frame, that is, an empty prototype which is then filled with the specifics to become an interpretation. If the frame is well established, a word or two from the frame become a metaphor, and then becomes the symbol for the subject matter. This is powerful politically, if one side of a debate can adequately frame the issue and construct a powerful metaphor, every time the issue is discussed, the mere use of what has become the standard vocabulary by that point, draws up a frame that is advantageous to the party that framed it. We speak in metaphors most of the time, and we don't examine them usually (George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant, see ch. 1).
So how has torture been framed recently? Say torture in the mainstream media right now, and they will talk about waterboarding within the paragraph. The words illegal enemy combatants, and probably enhanced interrogation methods, and Guantanamo Bay will show up soon after, perhaps the words high value detainee. The frame in public opinion is that some high value detainees were waterboarded soon after September 11, it was a different time, it was legal then because they were illegal enemy combatants, we were worried about another attack, the president approved enhanced interrogation methods, those to whom the methods have been applied are at Guantanamo Bay, they are being brought to trial in front of the Military Commissions. Right?
In this atmosphere, what ensues next is a discussion over whether or not detainees at Gitmo were tortured, and a discussion over whether waterboarding is drowning or simulated drowning, and inevitably a discussion over whether or not torture produces useful intelligence or only what the interrogator wants to hear. Here is the list of words, remember these, these are the frame:
torture = waterboarding
prisoner = detainee
detainee = illegal enemy combatant
imprisonment = Guantanamo
torture victim = high-value detainee
information = prevent another attack
back then = right after September 11
now = trials, laws have changed
court of law = Military commission
Dry Drowning and Torture
In the context of this frame, I got an email of the video of the CNN report on dry drowning from Jim White -- we should look at this, it shows that waterboarding can cause lasting harm, even death. I demurred, there are some things about that video. What happened is that a young boy in South Carolina had a near drowning incident at the pool, after which he walked home. His mother noticed he was acting tired while bathing him, he said he felt so, and he lay down for a nap. He stopped breathing, when he was noticed, and rushed to the hospital, he did not survive. The incident is being called dry drowning because he wasn't in the pool when he stopped breathing. The video is a little odd in places due to strange use of terminology and interpretations, the correspondent keeps saying ingest instead of aspirate, and she has a strange interpretation of the symptoms of hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain).
Actually, most drowning occurs with very little water in the lungs, until either deep unconsciousness or death relaxes the muscles and the water enters. A natural reaction is laryngeospasm, which closes the passage to the lungs keeping the water out, before that. The spasm can fail to release again, or it can occur when there is very little water present, all are called dry drowning. Further, water or salt water aspirated into the lungs can cause damage there, which leads to pulmonary edema and the alveoli ceasing to function, again resulting in asphyxia. The last is closer to what happened in this case.
And Jim White is right, the subject of dry drowning is apropos to the subject of torture and the debate on the government's use thereof. And it is related to waterboarding, and does show how you could die from it.
And according to Professor Lakoff, if that's what we do, we will reinforce the current frame. So we can instead use the sad dry drowning incident to create a different frame, and populate it with different views of torture, and perhaps not do that reinforcing that leads to protecting those in the administration and around it who have done things they should not have.
In one incarnation especially, waterboarding is dry drowning. The version with the saran wrap placed over the victims mouth, especially. When the water is poured on, the inability to breathe through the saran wrap, coupled with the water being poured on the victim, make the victim believe he is drowning, and trigger the reflex - the panic, and the laryngeospasm, which closes off the passage to the lungs. The victims frequently pass out, they are drowning. This is why it works without actually forcing aspiration of water into the lungs, a distinction that the administration has been using to split hairs and say that this is not the water torture of Torquemada, but rather that of Pol Pot. But as the sudden interest in dry drowning leads people to the triggered reaction being the direct antecedent to drowning, it becomes obvious that waterboarding is drowning, nothing simulated about it, as Malcolm Nance has frequently tried to get people to understand.
But what happened to the boy is actually closer to something that happened to someone else. The other kind of dry drowning occurs because the lungs become damaged, causing pulmonary edema (swelling in the lungs in which they fill with fluid), leading to the hypoxia and in this case to death. Do you remember the Ice Man, Manadel al Jamadi, whose body was photographed at Abu Ghraib so famously? He died because he asphyxiated due to being in a position called (in the doctor's report) "Palestinian Hanging". That kind of asphyxiation is often brought on by having previously sustained an injury that either because of shock or lung damage aggravates the effects of being in a position in which it is difficult to breathe. The MPs on the cell block learned that he was dead because they had been asked to tighten up his restraints because he'd gone loose. That would be the "high cuffing", the aforesaid Palestinian Hanging.
The Spanish Inquisition Again
While waterboarding has grabbed all the attention, and is without a doubt cruel treatment amounting to torture, this "high cuffing" or "Palestinian Hanging" has plenty of documentation, and no one has claimed that it has been performed on only 3 "high-valued detainees". There is picture after picture of this position at Abu Ghraib. It is uniformly referred to in administration documents as a stress posture.
It is a modification of an Inquisitional technique called strappado. Strappado, and its more brutal cousin squassation, were the most used of torture techniques by the Spanish Inquisition because they were cheap and easy to do: throw a rope over a rafter, tie the prisoner's wrists behind his/her back, and hoist them into the air by their wrists. It becomes squassation when the prisoner is then dropped by slackening the rope and then caught by tightening it. This causes dislocation of the shoulders, and the Inquisitors found that it generally caused death in about 3 to 4 drops. Strappado, without the drops, causes nerve damage in about 15 minutes. Darius Rejali notes that, "The strappado can easily dislocate the shoulders and maim victims permanently. However, the same approximate condition can be achieved, without overall damage and for a longer period of time, by raising the handcuffed hands behind the back until the prisoner is standing on his toes; his hands are then attached to a hook." (Rejali, Torture and Democracy, p. 296). Or maybe a bed frame, or a bar in a prison window.
Can this form of torture kill, in it's milder form of high cuffing, the stress position? It killed the Ice Man. He died of dry drowning in a way, lung damage causing pulmonary edema plus a difficulty breathing due to his position.
That calls into question the frame above. Obviously torture is not equivalent to waterboarding. Instead, waterboarding is one possible means of torture, out of many that have been used. On this site, we have detailed the privation tortures: extreme solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, being deprived of food, extremes in temperature. There are pictures of many more than 3 cases of strappado, there is documentation of a lot of solitary confinement, and sleep deprivation. Jane Mayer documented sensory deprivation done at black sites. Prisoners have lesions due to frostbite in outdoor pens in Afghanistan. Homicides were documented at Bagram due to damage caused by pounding muscle tissue.
Framing to Reduce the Issue
And what of the other parts of the frame? If torture = waterboarding is not true, are any of the others? A detainee is normally one being detained for a short period of time, prisoner is what people who inhabit prisons are called. The excuse for not using such plain language is to avoid a term that might be confused with prisoner of war, which the people held in U.S. military prisoners are not, supposedly. This is the handiwork originally of Douglas Feith, who as far back as the Reagan administration sought to carve out a special place in the Geneva Conventions where the law did not apply, to put anyone who could be designated as a terrorist, a strange term in its use that implies someone who can be fought with a military, but treated like a criminal, but need not be charged like a prisoner of war, but need not be treated well, like a person from a country that hasn't signed the Geneva Conventions. If there is ambiguity there, it is also Feith's work, the Additional Protocols of 1977 were intended to fix it, and it was because of this man they were not ratified by the U.S.
From there, just a memo or two by John Yoo creates a new status for these people, illegal enemy combatant. Notice that this title requires two legal findings: that they are combatants, and that they are illegal, but they are called that in advance of either finding. These people are not in their greatest numbers, confined at Guantanamo Bay, which houses only 275 inmates. There are well upwards of 34,000 of these prisoners, but if the frame says Guantanamo, then the problem is much smaller. The title high-value detainee also requires determination. It implies that these people are guilty of a crime, which requires a legal determination, and it implies that they have information of value. The assumption of this status in even a single case in which the person is innocent will result in endless, brutal, interrogation. Never mind whether or not torture will produce reliable intelligence, it certainly will not if the person knows nothing, and there is no method we have heard of for determining that in advance.
Information can only prevent an attack if two things are there: it must be new information, and it must enable someone to prevent the attack by taking specific actions (that presumes that an attack was imminent). The record of the FBI statements given to the Department of Justice Inspector General, and interviews by Philippe Sands (The Torture Team, ch. 14) is one of information being given to interrogators on paper, from other forensics and sources, and, at best, they believe they have got intelligence out of a prisoner when the prisoner confirms these data. That isn't new information, it's a confession. The record also shows interrogations spanning weeks and months, before these confessions are reached. Not a record of prevention of imminent attacks at all.
Finally, we have the supposedly changed legal climate. The evil deeds were all performed back then, in the aftermath of September 11, when we were desperate to prevent an attack. The laws have changed. No, what has changed is the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, plus some Supreme Court rulings. The last do not represent a change in the laws. The Court ruled that the treatment, at least as far as access to a properly constituted court and habeas corpus, was not legal. It is a very strange interpretation of a court ruling to assert that this means it was legal until the court pronounced it illegal. And treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture is still being reported. Those prisoners in the Afghani pens? Still going on. Solitary confinement to the point of madness, that one is still going on even at Guantanamo. And the prisoners being arraigned are not appearing in court, they are appearing in front of Military Commissions, procedures so flawed that they have seen numerous defections from the ranks of their prosecutors, numerous suspension of the proceedings, and are now widely rumored to be moving swiftly in response to political pressure in an election year.
In the end, none of that frame is accurate. But focussing on only one part, waterboarding and Guantanamo, the purpose of repeating these two, that the torture we are opposing is waterboarding and the detainees that need to be freed are in Guantanamo, reduces the whole mess to a manageable one for the administration. It can be written by the papers in their sleep at this point. It's containment. And it's anything but the whole truth.
The Language of Frames
I'm not a stranger to the language of framing, of cognitive science with it's processes of recruitment and its interaction with language. But just to be sure, I went and took a look at George Lakoff, and read about why I shouldn't think of an elephant. The essential point is that if a situation is described well by a frame, that is, an empty prototype which is then filled with the specifics to become an interpretation. If the frame is well established, a word or two from the frame become a metaphor, and then becomes the symbol for the subject matter. This is powerful politically, if one side of a debate can adequately frame the issue and construct a powerful metaphor, every time the issue is discussed, the mere use of what has become the standard vocabulary by that point, draws up a frame that is advantageous to the party that framed it. We speak in metaphors most of the time, and we don't examine them usually (George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant, see ch. 1).
So how has torture been framed recently? Say torture in the mainstream media right now, and they will talk about waterboarding within the paragraph. The words illegal enemy combatants, and probably enhanced interrogation methods, and Guantanamo Bay will show up soon after, perhaps the words high value detainee. The frame in public opinion is that some high value detainees were waterboarded soon after September 11, it was a different time, it was legal then because they were illegal enemy combatants, we were worried about another attack, the president approved enhanced interrogation methods, those to whom the methods have been applied are at Guantanamo Bay, they are being brought to trial in front of the Military Commissions. Right?
In this atmosphere, what ensues next is a discussion over whether or not detainees at Gitmo were tortured, and a discussion over whether waterboarding is drowning or simulated drowning, and inevitably a discussion over whether or not torture produces useful intelligence or only what the interrogator wants to hear. Here is the list of words, remember these, these are the frame:
torture = waterboarding
prisoner = detainee
detainee = illegal enemy combatant
imprisonment = Guantanamo
torture victim = high-value detainee
information = prevent another attack
back then = right after September 11
now = trials, laws have changed
court of law = Military commission
Dry Drowning and Torture
In the context of this frame, I got an email of the video of the CNN report on dry drowning from Jim White -- we should look at this, it shows that waterboarding can cause lasting harm, even death. I demurred, there are some things about that video. What happened is that a young boy in South Carolina had a near drowning incident at the pool, after which he walked home. His mother noticed he was acting tired while bathing him, he said he felt so, and he lay down for a nap. He stopped breathing, when he was noticed, and rushed to the hospital, he did not survive. The incident is being called dry drowning because he wasn't in the pool when he stopped breathing. The video is a little odd in places due to strange use of terminology and interpretations, the correspondent keeps saying ingest instead of aspirate, and she has a strange interpretation of the symptoms of hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain).
Actually, most drowning occurs with very little water in the lungs, until either deep unconsciousness or death relaxes the muscles and the water enters. A natural reaction is laryngeospasm, which closes the passage to the lungs keeping the water out, before that. The spasm can fail to release again, or it can occur when there is very little water present, all are called dry drowning. Further, water or salt water aspirated into the lungs can cause damage there, which leads to pulmonary edema and the alveoli ceasing to function, again resulting in asphyxia. The last is closer to what happened in this case.
And Jim White is right, the subject of dry drowning is apropos to the subject of torture and the debate on the government's use thereof. And it is related to waterboarding, and does show how you could die from it.
And according to Professor Lakoff, if that's what we do, we will reinforce the current frame. So we can instead use the sad dry drowning incident to create a different frame, and populate it with different views of torture, and perhaps not do that reinforcing that leads to protecting those in the administration and around it who have done things they should not have.
In one incarnation especially, waterboarding is dry drowning. The version with the saran wrap placed over the victims mouth, especially. When the water is poured on, the inability to breathe through the saran wrap, coupled with the water being poured on the victim, make the victim believe he is drowning, and trigger the reflex - the panic, and the laryngeospasm, which closes off the passage to the lungs. The victims frequently pass out, they are drowning. This is why it works without actually forcing aspiration of water into the lungs, a distinction that the administration has been using to split hairs and say that this is not the water torture of Torquemada, but rather that of Pol Pot. But as the sudden interest in dry drowning leads people to the triggered reaction being the direct antecedent to drowning, it becomes obvious that waterboarding is drowning, nothing simulated about it, as Malcolm Nance has frequently tried to get people to understand.
But what happened to the boy is actually closer to something that happened to someone else. The other kind of dry drowning occurs because the lungs become damaged, causing pulmonary edema (swelling in the lungs in which they fill with fluid), leading to the hypoxia and in this case to death. Do you remember the Ice Man, Manadel al Jamadi, whose body was photographed at Abu Ghraib so famously? He died because he asphyxiated due to being in a position called (in the doctor's report) "Palestinian Hanging". That kind of asphyxiation is often brought on by having previously sustained an injury that either because of shock or lung damage aggravates the effects of being in a position in which it is difficult to breathe. The MPs on the cell block learned that he was dead because they had been asked to tighten up his restraints because he'd gone loose. That would be the "high cuffing", the aforesaid Palestinian Hanging.
The Spanish Inquisition Again
While waterboarding has grabbed all the attention, and is without a doubt cruel treatment amounting to torture, this "high cuffing" or "Palestinian Hanging" has plenty of documentation, and no one has claimed that it has been performed on only 3 "high-valued detainees". There is picture after picture of this position at Abu Ghraib. It is uniformly referred to in administration documents as a stress posture.
It is a modification of an Inquisitional technique called strappado. Strappado, and its more brutal cousin squassation, were the most used of torture techniques by the Spanish Inquisition because they were cheap and easy to do: throw a rope over a rafter, tie the prisoner's wrists behind his/her back, and hoist them into the air by their wrists. It becomes squassation when the prisoner is then dropped by slackening the rope and then caught by tightening it. This causes dislocation of the shoulders, and the Inquisitors found that it generally caused death in about 3 to 4 drops. Strappado, without the drops, causes nerve damage in about 15 minutes. Darius Rejali notes that, "The strappado can easily dislocate the shoulders and maim victims permanently. However, the same approximate condition can be achieved, without overall damage and for a longer period of time, by raising the handcuffed hands behind the back until the prisoner is standing on his toes; his hands are then attached to a hook." (Rejali, Torture and Democracy, p. 296). Or maybe a bed frame, or a bar in a prison window.
Can this form of torture kill, in it's milder form of high cuffing, the stress position? It killed the Ice Man. He died of dry drowning in a way, lung damage causing pulmonary edema plus a difficulty breathing due to his position.
That calls into question the frame above. Obviously torture is not equivalent to waterboarding. Instead, waterboarding is one possible means of torture, out of many that have been used. On this site, we have detailed the privation tortures: extreme solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, being deprived of food, extremes in temperature. There are pictures of many more than 3 cases of strappado, there is documentation of a lot of solitary confinement, and sleep deprivation. Jane Mayer documented sensory deprivation done at black sites. Prisoners have lesions due to frostbite in outdoor pens in Afghanistan. Homicides were documented at Bagram due to damage caused by pounding muscle tissue.
Framing to Reduce the Issue
And what of the other parts of the frame? If torture = waterboarding is not true, are any of the others? A detainee is normally one being detained for a short period of time, prisoner is what people who inhabit prisons are called. The excuse for not using such plain language is to avoid a term that might be confused with prisoner of war, which the people held in U.S. military prisoners are not, supposedly. This is the handiwork originally of Douglas Feith, who as far back as the Reagan administration sought to carve out a special place in the Geneva Conventions where the law did not apply, to put anyone who could be designated as a terrorist, a strange term in its use that implies someone who can be fought with a military, but treated like a criminal, but need not be charged like a prisoner of war, but need not be treated well, like a person from a country that hasn't signed the Geneva Conventions. If there is ambiguity there, it is also Feith's work, the Additional Protocols of 1977 were intended to fix it, and it was because of this man they were not ratified by the U.S.
From there, just a memo or two by John Yoo creates a new status for these people, illegal enemy combatant. Notice that this title requires two legal findings: that they are combatants, and that they are illegal, but they are called that in advance of either finding. These people are not in their greatest numbers, confined at Guantanamo Bay, which houses only 275 inmates. There are well upwards of 34,000 of these prisoners, but if the frame says Guantanamo, then the problem is much smaller. The title high-value detainee also requires determination. It implies that these people are guilty of a crime, which requires a legal determination, and it implies that they have information of value. The assumption of this status in even a single case in which the person is innocent will result in endless, brutal, interrogation. Never mind whether or not torture will produce reliable intelligence, it certainly will not if the person knows nothing, and there is no method we have heard of for determining that in advance.
Information can only prevent an attack if two things are there: it must be new information, and it must enable someone to prevent the attack by taking specific actions (that presumes that an attack was imminent). The record of the FBI statements given to the Department of Justice Inspector General, and interviews by Philippe Sands (The Torture Team, ch. 14) is one of information being given to interrogators on paper, from other forensics and sources, and, at best, they believe they have got intelligence out of a prisoner when the prisoner confirms these data. That isn't new information, it's a confession. The record also shows interrogations spanning weeks and months, before these confessions are reached. Not a record of prevention of imminent attacks at all.
Finally, we have the supposedly changed legal climate. The evil deeds were all performed back then, in the aftermath of September 11, when we were desperate to prevent an attack. The laws have changed. No, what has changed is the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, plus some Supreme Court rulings. The last do not represent a change in the laws. The Court ruled that the treatment, at least as far as access to a properly constituted court and habeas corpus, was not legal. It is a very strange interpretation of a court ruling to assert that this means it was legal until the court pronounced it illegal. And treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture is still being reported. Those prisoners in the Afghani pens? Still going on. Solitary confinement to the point of madness, that one is still going on even at Guantanamo. And the prisoners being arraigned are not appearing in court, they are appearing in front of Military Commissions, procedures so flawed that they have seen numerous defections from the ranks of their prosecutors, numerous suspension of the proceedings, and are now widely rumored to be moving swiftly in response to political pressure in an election year.
In the end, none of that frame is accurate. But focussing on only one part, waterboarding and Guantanamo, the purpose of repeating these two, that the torture we are opposing is waterboarding and the detainees that need to be freed are in Guantanamo, reduces the whole mess to a manageable one for the administration. It can be written by the papers in their sleep at this point. It's containment. And it's anything but the whole truth.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Not When We Do It
Oh, here we go again. On Monday, Glenn Greenwald wrote about the new appointee to John McCain's campaign team, Michael Goldfarb. Among his other opinions, which were more the subject of that analysis, Mr. Greenwald cited a post that Mr. Goldfarb did on the Weekly Standard blog site, called, Trivializing Torture. Quoting at length,
I see. Real torture. Apparently, Messrs. Goldfarb and Crittenden are experts on what constitutes real torture. Darius Rejali also worries about broadening the definition of torture. There are two ways he discusses that broaden it beyond its legal definition. One trivializes by asserting that many other indignities are torture. Oddly enough, for Mr. Goldfarb's argument, the other is by broadening it to include conduct of "insurgencies and rebel groups", by which Mr. Rejali means what are commonly referred to as non-state actors (Torture and Democracy, p.38) It's strange isn't it? These people deny prisoners status on a regular basis because they are not the military parts of a recognized state, and do not comply with the state requirements for a military. The same people completely gloss over the same distinction made about torture, when it suits them.
Personally, I'm all for granting the broadening of the legal definition to non-state actors. The behavior is abhorrent, it should be prosecuted and punished. But let's not have any illusions that the law does not put a higher burden on states, and therefore on our actions. Our founding documents put such a burden on us as well.
The Istanbul Protocol
As for what is, and what is not, real torture, the list these two authors subscribe to is quite interesting. They reject "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." They assert "[d]isorientation, isolation, beatings, starvation, summary executions." I will give them the benefit of the doubt that the last one was written in a burst of passion. Summary executions are summary executions, not torture. They have their own criminal category, both under U.S. and international law. And why is this list better? They are of the "bone-breaking, organ-smashing, electrocuting, bloody-drawing variety." This is an odd assertion of reality here. Unless torture looks like what you see in TV shows and movies, it isn't real. If it looks like what is described in, for example, The Istanbul Protocol, it trivializes torture.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the Istanbul Protocol isn't an international treaty that the people from the Weekly Standard can lobby against signing or ratifying. It's a medical protocol for examining victims of torture. It goes into necessary detail. It does not assert that there must be bone breaking, nor organ smashing, nor electrocution, nor drawing blood. It does detail examining for these things. It dwells a lot on neurological damage. That's when the beating has been specially designed to avoid the kinds of evidence Messrs. Goldfarb and Crittenden demand. Like Falanga, the beating of the feet (p. 37), which has been alleged to be practiced on people in Iraqi police custody.
It also dwells on sexual degradation, on stress positions, on skin damage, on PTSD and depression, on the effects of sensory deprivation or solitary confinement, and near asphyxiation, as may be due to submerging the head in water, or preventing air from entering the nose or mouth, e.g. with a plastic bag, ...(there is a list on p.28, asphyxiation is discussed on p.39), you get the picture. It's interesting that these two experts do believe disorientation, isolation, beatings and starvation to be tactics of their real torture. There are people in U.S. custody that have been in isolation for years. There are disorienting tactics that include sensory deprivation for extended periods of time. There have been beatings: common peroneal strikes, I believe they were called in Afghanistan, some of which did such damage to organs that the victims died. Does that qualify as organ-smashing?
When a prisoner is subjected to "frigid temperatures" to the point of hypothermia, for instance Mohammed al Qahtani, who had to be hospitalized for bradycardia and low core temperature after such exposure, or people kept in outdoor pens in Afghanistan, some of whom have had water poured on them, resulting in frostbite injuries to their integumentary organ (I'm sure the two experts are aware of this organ, here's a hint, it's the largest organ in the human body), when hypothermia causes decreased level of consciousness, when it threatens to kill the prisoner due to the possibility of ventricular fibrillation, I would guess that the only reason these people do not believe that is torture is because no bones are broken or blood is spilt.
Note: For those interested in a more readable source on the types of tortures and their medical consequences, there are two excellent documents on the Physicians for Human Rights site. Go to here, and scroll down, the links are on the right.
The Real Definition of Real Torture
Simulated drowning, what is widely referred to as waterboarding, isn't torture, it doesn't break bones or spill blood, apparently. But if our enemies do it, then disorientation, isolation, beatings and starvation are torture, and we have never done anything that approaches what they do. We have a prisoner in captivity, Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri, who is losing his sanity from isolation. That was in the list of tortures when the enemy does them that Jules Crittenden gave. We already had a few that did so, Philippe Sands details Mohammed al Qahtani (The Torture Team), we've FBI documentation on prisoners tearing their own hair out as a result of positioning and isolation. We've regularly used sleep and sensory deprivation on prisoners, not to mention that the frigid temperatures that Messrs. Goldfarb and Crittenden are so derisive of prevent sleep when they aren't causing hypothermia and frostbite. We've subjected prisoners to high temperatures and to extreme positioning, one man, the so-called Ice Man of Abu Ghraib died as a result of being stepped on and then positioned in a Palestinian Hanging (hung from his wrists from behind and above).
Positioning that allows no or almost no motion for long periods of time can cause rhabdomyolysis, when core temperatures above 106 degrees Fahrenheit cause the body's chemicals to denature. Either one causes poisons to be dumped into the blood stream, poisons which cause the kidneys to self-destruct. Would that count as organ smashing? How about being caged in the desert then?
These two experts belittle the statement of the Navy lawyer, John Hutson, about the treatment of our troops. It is obvious from the list, equating the disorientation, isolation, beatings and starvation that our enemies in the modern era have done with their preferred definition of bone breaking, organ smashing, and blood letting, that if these techniques are performed on our troops, they are torture. It is similarly obvious from the ridicule of head slapping, simulated drowning, or frigid temperatures, that if the same tactics are performed by our troops, or our CIA, or maybe directed from the White House or the OLC or the Pentagon, that it is simply not in the same ballpark with torture.
Which brings us to the operative version of torture that the Weekly Standard appears to employ: It's torture if done by evil people we designate, and it's not torture if done by the United States government. When the army of the righteous smashes organs, it's reasonable defense against an existential threat, when the axis of evil does it, it's torture. It is reinforced by a definition of torture based on Hollywood, or perhaps on Jack Bauer. Those are reality, what is done in U.S. military prisons is not. That bears repeating once more: What you see in the movies is more real than what is really done. Since we don't do what they do in the movies, We Don't Torture.
To me, that may not be trivial, but it's the most childish definition of torture I've yet seen.
A correction to previous posts:
I had used the figure 27,000 for the number of people in U.S. custody abroad, taken from the estimated 13,000 in Afghanistan and adding an estimated 14,000 in Iraq, although there are people elsewhere making up at least 500-1000. The Pentagon released figures about Iraq indicating that there are 21,000 prisoners there that they wish to disclose. So I will correct my total estimate to around 35,000 for now. But I would caution that if the rate of disappearance of prisoners in Iraq is anywhere near that in Afghanistan or elsewhere, then this number needs to be 40,000 or more. Apparently the war on terror is won just like all the other war ons. By imprisoning as many people as possible.
And for what? The Times indicts the Bush administration for exposing terrorists captured abroad to "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." Boo hoo. And why does the Times consider this such a dangerous policy? The reporters end the story with this quote, from former Navy lawyer John Hutson, which they must believe to be compelling:
“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.
As Jules Crittenden notes in response:
[The] article neglects to mention we are fighting an enemy that considers powerdrills into kneecaps and videotaped beheading of captives business as usual. That in fact, we have yet to face an enemy in the modern era that observes anything approaching the standards we do. Germany, Japan, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq. Disorientation, isolation, beatings, starvation, summary executions, torture … of the bone-breaking, organ-smashing, electrocuting, bloody-drawing variety.
That is, real torture. And it trivializes the seriousness of it to apply the word to "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." It also trivializes the seriousness of real war crimes for someone to throw around the charge so promiscuously.
I see. Real torture. Apparently, Messrs. Goldfarb and Crittenden are experts on what constitutes real torture. Darius Rejali also worries about broadening the definition of torture. There are two ways he discusses that broaden it beyond its legal definition. One trivializes by asserting that many other indignities are torture. Oddly enough, for Mr. Goldfarb's argument, the other is by broadening it to include conduct of "insurgencies and rebel groups", by which Mr. Rejali means what are commonly referred to as non-state actors (Torture and Democracy, p.38) It's strange isn't it? These people deny prisoners status on a regular basis because they are not the military parts of a recognized state, and do not comply with the state requirements for a military. The same people completely gloss over the same distinction made about torture, when it suits them.
Personally, I'm all for granting the broadening of the legal definition to non-state actors. The behavior is abhorrent, it should be prosecuted and punished. But let's not have any illusions that the law does not put a higher burden on states, and therefore on our actions. Our founding documents put such a burden on us as well.
The Istanbul Protocol
As for what is, and what is not, real torture, the list these two authors subscribe to is quite interesting. They reject "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." They assert "[d]isorientation, isolation, beatings, starvation, summary executions." I will give them the benefit of the doubt that the last one was written in a burst of passion. Summary executions are summary executions, not torture. They have their own criminal category, both under U.S. and international law. And why is this list better? They are of the "bone-breaking, organ-smashing, electrocuting, bloody-drawing variety." This is an odd assertion of reality here. Unless torture looks like what you see in TV shows and movies, it isn't real. If it looks like what is described in, for example, The Istanbul Protocol, it trivializes torture.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the Istanbul Protocol isn't an international treaty that the people from the Weekly Standard can lobby against signing or ratifying. It's a medical protocol for examining victims of torture. It goes into necessary detail. It does not assert that there must be bone breaking, nor organ smashing, nor electrocution, nor drawing blood. It does detail examining for these things. It dwells a lot on neurological damage. That's when the beating has been specially designed to avoid the kinds of evidence Messrs. Goldfarb and Crittenden demand. Like Falanga, the beating of the feet (p. 37), which has been alleged to be practiced on people in Iraqi police custody.
It also dwells on sexual degradation, on stress positions, on skin damage, on PTSD and depression, on the effects of sensory deprivation or solitary confinement, and near asphyxiation, as may be due to submerging the head in water, or preventing air from entering the nose or mouth, e.g. with a plastic bag, ...(there is a list on p.28, asphyxiation is discussed on p.39), you get the picture. It's interesting that these two experts do believe disorientation, isolation, beatings and starvation to be tactics of their real torture. There are people in U.S. custody that have been in isolation for years. There are disorienting tactics that include sensory deprivation for extended periods of time. There have been beatings: common peroneal strikes, I believe they were called in Afghanistan, some of which did such damage to organs that the victims died. Does that qualify as organ-smashing?
When a prisoner is subjected to "frigid temperatures" to the point of hypothermia, for instance Mohammed al Qahtani, who had to be hospitalized for bradycardia and low core temperature after such exposure, or people kept in outdoor pens in Afghanistan, some of whom have had water poured on them, resulting in frostbite injuries to their integumentary organ (I'm sure the two experts are aware of this organ, here's a hint, it's the largest organ in the human body), when hypothermia causes decreased level of consciousness, when it threatens to kill the prisoner due to the possibility of ventricular fibrillation, I would guess that the only reason these people do not believe that is torture is because no bones are broken or blood is spilt.
Note: For those interested in a more readable source on the types of tortures and their medical consequences, there are two excellent documents on the Physicians for Human Rights site. Go to here, and scroll down, the links are on the right.
The Real Definition of Real Torture
Simulated drowning, what is widely referred to as waterboarding, isn't torture, it doesn't break bones or spill blood, apparently. But if our enemies do it, then disorientation, isolation, beatings and starvation are torture, and we have never done anything that approaches what they do. We have a prisoner in captivity, Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri, who is losing his sanity from isolation. That was in the list of tortures when the enemy does them that Jules Crittenden gave. We already had a few that did so, Philippe Sands details Mohammed al Qahtani (The Torture Team), we've FBI documentation on prisoners tearing their own hair out as a result of positioning and isolation. We've regularly used sleep and sensory deprivation on prisoners, not to mention that the frigid temperatures that Messrs. Goldfarb and Crittenden are so derisive of prevent sleep when they aren't causing hypothermia and frostbite. We've subjected prisoners to high temperatures and to extreme positioning, one man, the so-called Ice Man of Abu Ghraib died as a result of being stepped on and then positioned in a Palestinian Hanging (hung from his wrists from behind and above).
Positioning that allows no or almost no motion for long periods of time can cause rhabdomyolysis, when core temperatures above 106 degrees Fahrenheit cause the body's chemicals to denature. Either one causes poisons to be dumped into the blood stream, poisons which cause the kidneys to self-destruct. Would that count as organ smashing? How about being caged in the desert then?
These two experts belittle the statement of the Navy lawyer, John Hutson, about the treatment of our troops. It is obvious from the list, equating the disorientation, isolation, beatings and starvation that our enemies in the modern era have done with their preferred definition of bone breaking, organ smashing, and blood letting, that if these techniques are performed on our troops, they are torture. It is similarly obvious from the ridicule of head slapping, simulated drowning, or frigid temperatures, that if the same tactics are performed by our troops, or our CIA, or maybe directed from the White House or the OLC or the Pentagon, that it is simply not in the same ballpark with torture.
Which brings us to the operative version of torture that the Weekly Standard appears to employ: It's torture if done by evil people we designate, and it's not torture if done by the United States government. When the army of the righteous smashes organs, it's reasonable defense against an existential threat, when the axis of evil does it, it's torture. It is reinforced by a definition of torture based on Hollywood, or perhaps on Jack Bauer. Those are reality, what is done in U.S. military prisons is not. That bears repeating once more: What you see in the movies is more real than what is really done. Since we don't do what they do in the movies, We Don't Torture.
To me, that may not be trivial, but it's the most childish definition of torture I've yet seen.
A correction to previous posts:
I had used the figure 27,000 for the number of people in U.S. custody abroad, taken from the estimated 13,000 in Afghanistan and adding an estimated 14,000 in Iraq, although there are people elsewhere making up at least 500-1000. The Pentagon released figures about Iraq indicating that there are 21,000 prisoners there that they wish to disclose. So I will correct my total estimate to around 35,000 for now. But I would caution that if the rate of disappearance of prisoners in Iraq is anywhere near that in Afghanistan or elsewhere, then this number needs to be 40,000 or more. Apparently the war on terror is won just like all the other war ons. By imprisoning as many people as possible.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Waiting Won't Do
This post is about advocacy. Because regardless of whether or not we plumb the depths of why the American public does not rally to end the torture and abuse committed against prisoners in their name, in our name, unless they do, this country will continue to do what it should not, and apparently in increasing, not decreasing amounts, with increasing, and not decreasing secrecy, in increasing, and not decreasing torture "cleanliness".
I am not an advocate by nature. My posts are an attempt to research and divulge facts that I find it hard to collect together, thinking maybe that by putting them together I make it easier for those who read them to try to get a picture of what has been going on. I am not a lawyer, I don't go argue cases for these people, I have never met them. Even so, I don't find the laws involved, the international treaties that everybody knows about, to be so abstruse that one needs any special training to understand their point. I don't know whether the prisoners are good or bad people, I don't seem to care. Do I care that they may have meant harm to me? It shouldn't matter when the concern is how we treat people, and something so basic as human dignity. I believe we are losing the battle against those who want to create a permanent, off the shelf, covert entity that operates beyond the law, beyond the branches of American government. People have said that a balanced attitude is to believe that they want nothing but the most patriotic of things for America, they just have gone about it in the wrong way. I find that hard to believe. Almost from the start, the efforts have been to change what was right and wrong, to change how the very most basic functions of government work, and finally, with the subject at hand, change the most basic ways in which we tell right from wrong.
If one focuses on what is easy to grasp, one gets a certain vocabulary, a mental space, populated with frames of violent torture, with concepts like alien illegal combatant detainee. The place is Guantanamo, the time frame is 2002 to 2004, the words are things like waterboarding, enhanced interrogation. There may or may not be something wrong with this mental space. It blends easily with others that allow, if not numbness, then containment. No one would be suggesting that we could put off investigating and prosecuting the wrongs committed in the name of this country if that weren't possible. We can wait to prosecute because we are believing that we are investigating a committed crime, then there is ample time to wait for the correct moment, the proper advantage, the right number of people on our side in Congress, the right president, the right moment, the right combination of factors that will maximize our advantage and allow us to win. Or to declare that we will change the way the country works, move forward instead of dwelling on the past. We have important things to do. We contain things in space and time because it makes them bearable. Politicians contain them in space and time because they fit better under the rug.
Do you remember the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? When you confine something in space, make the photograph sharp, make it so you can see every detail, then it expands in time. When you confine it in time, be sure of when it happened, how fast it is evolving, when it started, then it blurs indefinitely in space, and the picture isn't sharp. There is a limit to how much something with rest mass, defined by Einstein's famous formula, may be confined. You can take that principle to the bank, it's used in your cell phone, its used in the computer that you access the internet and read blogs on. It's very, very real.
In the case of torture by Americans or for Americans, perhaps there is an uncertainty principle at work as well. You can confine it, and the problem seems manageable. On this date, they began the torture of Abu Zubaydah, on the other, they started the sensory deprivation of Mohammed al Qahtani, this is when John Yoo wrote his memo, that is who was present in the Situation Room at the White House, we use saran wrap to do our waterboarding, it comes from Pol Pot not Torquemada, there are 14 prisoners that arrived from the Black Sites to Guantanamo, the Geneva Conventions says that an accused civilian may not be deported from the country of occupation. December 2001, January 2002, April 2004, October 2006 confine it in time. Confine it in place. The less energy it has, the tighter it may be confined, after all, a body of evidence with no momentum creates no change when it impacts your mind.
None of that is true if confinement doesn't exist. The only question that determines whether or not the whole question of American torture is something that can conveniently wait till the next president, the next session of Congress, Deng Xiaoping's four M's (ming tien, ming yueh, ming nien, ming bei, as the joke goes, tomorrow, next month, next year, next life), or whatever is this one. Is it confined? And that means, just like the uncertainty principle, do we see it clearly and where is it going?
First, do we see it clearly?
That was not from Guantanamo. It was from Ohio state prison (quoted in Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, pp. 249-250). Waterboarding is easy to understand as torture. The prisoner gasps for life, the implements look medieval, the scene in the movie Rendition is gut wrenching to watch. Privation is silent, it doesn't look gut wrenching at any given time, no sirens or red flags go up to mark the disintegration of a personality due to sleep or sensory deprivation and solitary confinement, no marks or bruises mark the organ damage from hypo- or hyperthermia. By the time someone gets to interrogation, just shouting at them may be all that's needed to inflict this sort of torture, maybe all that causes the mind to shred is a touch that makes them to unclean to pray, their only hope of being saved from the torment they are in removed in front of any camera that will fail to show the sharp edges of what has happened. In 2006, Barbara Olshansky writes,
Where? She further reports a whole constellation of sites in Afghanistan. Bagram Air Base and Kandahar are familiar from the papers. Other facilities are not. Reports have been in our papers of prisoners in Afghanistan that were killed using "peroneal strikes". Comfortable, when there is violence, because we understand. That is torture, that is what we mean by it. Even Darius Rejali has trouble talking about torture that has no physical component, no beatings, no use of force. So we shudder, as we should, over descriptions like, "He was purportedly stripped, chained to the floor, assaulted, and left overnight without covering. He died from exposure." (Democracy Detained, p. 225).
Well then, if it wasn't contained in place, was it contained in time? Surely we now have those laws in place. We have people who sit in front of our congress and testify that the law has changed, or the situation has changed, or something has changed (Condoleezza Rice has used those words at least within the last two weeks if not the last few days). We have the Detainee Treatment Act, we have explicit bans against torture, we have Supreme Court decisions. We have revelations coming faster and more furious, we have testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee, we have publication of hundreds of pages of reports about the FBI complaints, we have this under control? We are still talking about something in the past, something that will withstand the slow march of justice, the slow but inexorable wheels of congressional debate and testimony and an election that will bring to power a new government, elected by a people who want change, who want to move forward and not dwell on the divisiveness of the past, a new government, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle...
No. When a cancerous tumor is excised, there is remission and the patient believes they have turned the corner, it has been contained, the threat has passed, and the moments that seemed special when they were all one had left are now to become the normal moments of boredom and liveliness of a life with future. To find out at that point that the cancer has metastasized is devastating. Amnesty International is reporting, in Afghanistan, under the title, Abuse by International Forces, the subsection, Torture and other ill treatment,
So while we are blithely believing that hearings that might just produce David Addington (if he deigns to honor a subpoena from his perch in the fourth branch of government) are real progress, while we feel good about demanding from each of the remaining presidential candidates that they promise to close Guantanamo, while we feel righteous about asking Michael Mukasey to denounce waterboarding, or John McCain to vote on torture legislation, the number of new prisoners is as many as it took years to build up at Guantanamo Bay, the torture is still close confinement and passive subjection to harsh changes in heat and cold, there are still plenty of new prisoners that are prevented from sleeping night after night.
In short, we aren't winning yet.
June 26th is the International Day Against Torture. Before that day, can we do anything that will make the country arouse from its slumber on this one? By then can each candidate be forced to answer the question of whether or not they know what the other branch of government is doing in Afghanistan? By then can enough people write their congressional delegation to tell them that solitary confinement to the point of madness is torture too, even if no water lands on a prisoner's face? By June 26th we must raise a voice in this country. We must make it impossible to confine our country's misdeeds to a small enough place and time that it will fit between the shuffle of more comfortable legislation. We must make it uncomfortable for every politician from every part of the spectrum to appear in public without these questions answered. There are a few towns in America in which it is illegal for these torturers to set foot. They should be persona non grata in every major metropolis, and every mayor should know that as far away as Washington is, there is moral rot in most prisons in the land and that is unacceptable too. It should not be comfortable to put the immigrants slated for deportation out of mind while they endure different standards of care that kill or abuse them in transport or detention. All that makes it too easy to endure what is happening in our military prisons abroad.
Please. We need to start changing this country now, not wait for November.
Before June 26th, every American should be confronted with a new reality: They don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us for our prisons. We should too, not a few of them hold Americans at home, in conditions that make the tortures we commit abroad more palatable because we've grown used to widespread abuse. Prisons and torture are our cancer, and we are not in remission. We cannot wait for some bringer of change, some mandate from heaven. Not while we continue this mandate from hell.
I am not an advocate by nature. My posts are an attempt to research and divulge facts that I find it hard to collect together, thinking maybe that by putting them together I make it easier for those who read them to try to get a picture of what has been going on. I am not a lawyer, I don't go argue cases for these people, I have never met them. Even so, I don't find the laws involved, the international treaties that everybody knows about, to be so abstruse that one needs any special training to understand their point. I don't know whether the prisoners are good or bad people, I don't seem to care. Do I care that they may have meant harm to me? It shouldn't matter when the concern is how we treat people, and something so basic as human dignity. I believe we are losing the battle against those who want to create a permanent, off the shelf, covert entity that operates beyond the law, beyond the branches of American government. People have said that a balanced attitude is to believe that they want nothing but the most patriotic of things for America, they just have gone about it in the wrong way. I find that hard to believe. Almost from the start, the efforts have been to change what was right and wrong, to change how the very most basic functions of government work, and finally, with the subject at hand, change the most basic ways in which we tell right from wrong.
If one focuses on what is easy to grasp, one gets a certain vocabulary, a mental space, populated with frames of violent torture, with concepts like alien illegal combatant detainee. The place is Guantanamo, the time frame is 2002 to 2004, the words are things like waterboarding, enhanced interrogation. There may or may not be something wrong with this mental space. It blends easily with others that allow, if not numbness, then containment. No one would be suggesting that we could put off investigating and prosecuting the wrongs committed in the name of this country if that weren't possible. We can wait to prosecute because we are believing that we are investigating a committed crime, then there is ample time to wait for the correct moment, the proper advantage, the right number of people on our side in Congress, the right president, the right moment, the right combination of factors that will maximize our advantage and allow us to win. Or to declare that we will change the way the country works, move forward instead of dwelling on the past. We have important things to do. We contain things in space and time because it makes them bearable. Politicians contain them in space and time because they fit better under the rug.
Do you remember the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? When you confine something in space, make the photograph sharp, make it so you can see every detail, then it expands in time. When you confine it in time, be sure of when it happened, how fast it is evolving, when it started, then it blurs indefinitely in space, and the picture isn't sharp. There is a limit to how much something with rest mass, defined by Einstein's famous formula, may be confined. You can take that principle to the bank, it's used in your cell phone, its used in the computer that you access the internet and read blogs on. It's very, very real.
In the case of torture by Americans or for Americans, perhaps there is an uncertainty principle at work as well. You can confine it, and the problem seems manageable. On this date, they began the torture of Abu Zubaydah, on the other, they started the sensory deprivation of Mohammed al Qahtani, this is when John Yoo wrote his memo, that is who was present in the Situation Room at the White House, we use saran wrap to do our waterboarding, it comes from Pol Pot not Torquemada, there are 14 prisoners that arrived from the Black Sites to Guantanamo, the Geneva Conventions says that an accused civilian may not be deported from the country of occupation. December 2001, January 2002, April 2004, October 2006 confine it in time. Confine it in place. The less energy it has, the tighter it may be confined, after all, a body of evidence with no momentum creates no change when it impacts your mind.
None of that is true if confinement doesn't exist. The only question that determines whether or not the whole question of American torture is something that can conveniently wait till the next president, the next session of Congress, Deng Xiaoping's four M's (ming tien, ming yueh, ming nien, ming bei, as the joke goes, tomorrow, next month, next year, next life), or whatever is this one. Is it confined? And that means, just like the uncertainty principle, do we see it clearly and where is it going?
First, do we see it clearly?
I was released from "solitary confinement" after being held therein for 37 months. A silent system was imposed on me and to even "whisper" to the man in the next cell resulted in being beaten by guards, sprayed with chemical mace, black-jacked, stomped, and thrown into a 'strip-cell' naked to sleep on a concrete floor without bedding, covering, wash basin, or even a toilet. The floor served as toilet and bed, and even there the "silent system" was enforced. To let a "moan" escape your lips because of the pain and discomfort resulted in another beating. I spent not days, but months there during my 37 months in solitary.
That was not from Guantanamo. It was from Ohio state prison (quoted in Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, pp. 249-250). Waterboarding is easy to understand as torture. The prisoner gasps for life, the implements look medieval, the scene in the movie Rendition is gut wrenching to watch. Privation is silent, it doesn't look gut wrenching at any given time, no sirens or red flags go up to mark the disintegration of a personality due to sleep or sensory deprivation and solitary confinement, no marks or bruises mark the organ damage from hypo- or hyperthermia. By the time someone gets to interrogation, just shouting at them may be all that's needed to inflict this sort of torture, maybe all that causes the mind to shred is a touch that makes them to unclean to pray, their only hope of being saved from the torment they are in removed in front of any camera that will fail to show the sharp edges of what has happened. In 2006, Barbara Olshansky writes,
While the full population of the CIA's web of secret detention facilities has not yet been definitely ascertained, media reports, along with reports of several leading human rights groups, indicate that the government may be holding in excess of fourteen thousand people at more than three dozen detention centers around the world, at least half of which operate in secret (Democracy Detained, p. 219).
Where? She further reports a whole constellation of sites in Afghanistan. Bagram Air Base and Kandahar are familiar from the papers. Other facilities are not. Reports have been in our papers of prisoners in Afghanistan that were killed using "peroneal strikes". Comfortable, when there is violence, because we understand. That is torture, that is what we mean by it. Even Darius Rejali has trouble talking about torture that has no physical component, no beatings, no use of force. So we shudder, as we should, over descriptions like, "He was purportedly stripped, chained to the floor, assaulted, and left overnight without covering. He died from exposure." (Democracy Detained, p. 225).
Well then, if it wasn't contained in place, was it contained in time? Surely we now have those laws in place. We have people who sit in front of our congress and testify that the law has changed, or the situation has changed, or something has changed (Condoleezza Rice has used those words at least within the last two weeks if not the last few days). We have the Detainee Treatment Act, we have explicit bans against torture, we have Supreme Court decisions. We have revelations coming faster and more furious, we have testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee, we have publication of hundreds of pages of reports about the FBI complaints, we have this under control? We are still talking about something in the past, something that will withstand the slow march of justice, the slow but inexorable wheels of congressional debate and testimony and an election that will bring to power a new government, elected by a people who want change, who want to move forward and not dwell on the divisiveness of the past, a new government, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle...
No. When a cancerous tumor is excised, there is remission and the patient believes they have turned the corner, it has been contained, the threat has passed, and the moments that seemed special when they were all one had left are now to become the normal moments of boredom and liveliness of a life with future. To find out at that point that the cancer has metastasized is devastating. Amnesty International is reporting, in Afghanistan, under the title, Abuse by International Forces, the subsection, Torture and other ill treatment,
ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] forces continued to transfer detainees to the NDS [Afghani National Directorate of Security], despite allegations of torture and other ill-treatment by the NDS. Attempts by international forces to monitor transferred detainees were inconsistently applied.
In addition, forces involved in the US-led OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] continued to transfer people to the NDS and to US-run detention facilities, including at Bagram airbase near Kabul. US authorities transferred more than 100 detainees from Bagram and Guantánamo to the newly refurbished D-Block of the high security Pol-e Charkhi prison outside Kabul. It was not clear who had oversight of the D-Block. About 600 detainees were believed to remain in Bagram at the end of the year (Amnesty International Report 2008, Afghanistan).
So while we are blithely believing that hearings that might just produce David Addington (if he deigns to honor a subpoena from his perch in the fourth branch of government) are real progress, while we feel good about demanding from each of the remaining presidential candidates that they promise to close Guantanamo, while we feel righteous about asking Michael Mukasey to denounce waterboarding, or John McCain to vote on torture legislation, the number of new prisoners is as many as it took years to build up at Guantanamo Bay, the torture is still close confinement and passive subjection to harsh changes in heat and cold, there are still plenty of new prisoners that are prevented from sleeping night after night.
In short, we aren't winning yet.
June 26th is the International Day Against Torture. Before that day, can we do anything that will make the country arouse from its slumber on this one? By then can each candidate be forced to answer the question of whether or not they know what the other branch of government is doing in Afghanistan? By then can enough people write their congressional delegation to tell them that solitary confinement to the point of madness is torture too, even if no water lands on a prisoner's face? By June 26th we must raise a voice in this country. We must make it impossible to confine our country's misdeeds to a small enough place and time that it will fit between the shuffle of more comfortable legislation. We must make it uncomfortable for every politician from every part of the spectrum to appear in public without these questions answered. There are a few towns in America in which it is illegal for these torturers to set foot. They should be persona non grata in every major metropolis, and every mayor should know that as far away as Washington is, there is moral rot in most prisons in the land and that is unacceptable too. It should not be comfortable to put the immigrants slated for deportation out of mind while they endure different standards of care that kill or abuse them in transport or detention. All that makes it too easy to endure what is happening in our military prisons abroad.
Please. We need to start changing this country now, not wait for November.
Before June 26th, every American should be confronted with a new reality: They don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us for our prisons. We should too, not a few of them hold Americans at home, in conditions that make the tortures we commit abroad more palatable because we've grown used to widespread abuse. Prisons and torture are our cancer, and we are not in remission. We cannot wait for some bringer of change, some mandate from heaven. Not while we continue this mandate from hell.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Discrimination of Any Kind
In the classic presentation of the ticking bomb theory, there is a bomb somewhere ready to destroy a large American city, and there is a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. The prisoner needs to be tortured because the crime of torturing the prisoner is outweighed by the need to save lives. In the classic rebuttal to the ticking bomb theory, one usually hears two things: That the ticking bomb scenario never happens, and that torture produces unreliable information because the prisoner will tell you what it is he thinks you want him to say, to get the torture to stop.
At least I think that's how it goes. In my mind, the torture is wrong always, so the decision is clear. There are many variations of the ticking bomb scenario, proponents like to stress that first one makes the question so stark that the answer is not in question, then one argues that the case has been made and it's a matter of judgment as to where the line is. Sometimes one needs to remember that there are plenty of unwritten assumptions involved, even in the unlikely case, that are not articulated.
The Unwritten Assumptions
The biggest among these is the assumption that there is no other way to get the prisoner to divulge the information. The next is that the information must stay secure, from the existence of the prisoner, to the tactic used, to the information divulged, since once the prisoner parts with the information, we must know that no one can change the circumstances. The next is that we know exactly how to get them to talk, and how to interpret the information, and how to link the information to the defusing process quickly enough to avert disaster. There are a quick set of names for these three unwritten assumptions: The first is called dehumanization. The prisoner is so evil that we can assume there is no non-violent way of getting the information. The second is called anonymity. The need for secrecy begets a need to do things that you don't want to know. The third is called control. The extraction of information is being done professionally, the ability to manipulate the prisoner is total. Oddly, these unwritten assumptions are exactly the conditions predicting the Stanford Prison Experiment. So the message to anyone advocating the ticking bomb theory is: Bet you can't do it just once. It is guaranteed to go out of control.
But the first assumption, like I said, is the biggest. There is no other way to get the information. This is frequently not an appeal to fact, it is an appeal to commonly held belief, or to gut instinct, or to any and all of the more vile emotions that underlie true dehumanization: racism, prejudice, xenophobia. There is a reason why the U.N. Convention Against Torture, Article 1, has more forms of torture than are commonly supposed (I was truly surprised with Philippe Sands for citing only the first two, interrogation and confession, The Torture Team, p. 169). Article 1 also includes punishment, intimidation, and coercion, and it includes the curious phrase,"or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind".
How strange. But if you look at the history of the U.S. recent descent into torture, this phrase says everything about that unwritten assumption, everything about why torture is really done. It isn't the ticking bomb scenario that gives rise to the assumption that torture has become necessary, it's this unwritten assumption: The prisoner is so evil that this must be done. Torture is the only language this prisoner understands. This was a requirement among the Greeks and the Romans (Rejali, Torture and Democracy p.36, or see also Harrison at A1-A3).
The assumption is pervasive. During the testimony on May 6th before the House Judiciary Committee, at one point after the statements were read and the questioning had begun, it was generally agreed between David Rivkin and the members of the Judiciary Committee, who also attempted to get agreement from others after Marjorie Cohn said that she would write a statute that would require that a prisoner from whom one wanted information would specify treating the prisoner with kindness and respect and build a rapport (see the webcast, at about 1:17).
The Forensic Evidence
But FBI documentation, available at various points during the history of the U.S. and its current problems with prisoner abuse, seems to say otherwise. The FBI has a different opinion of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, in which the CIA, possibly with help from the National Security Council Principals, subjected this "high value detainee" to multiple "enhanced interrogation" methods up to and including waterboarding. They believed (p.ix) that they had begun to establish a rapport with the prisoner, when he was taken away for harsher questioning. The FBI also objected to the treatment of Mohammed al Qahtani, the prisoner whose interrogation Philippe Sands documents in The Torture Team. Aside from feeling that the interrogations would spoil the ability to try al Qahtani in court, they worried that it would taint the agents who interrogated him, if they did so after he had been badly treated. Evident in their testimony is the fact that they thought their techniques would work, but would take time (p. 84). As Mr. Sands so aptly points out, time should not have been the issue, as they had had him in captivity for the better part of a year (The Torture Team, p. 224).
It really wasn't that. The military and CIA interrogators did not believe the FBI techniques would work at all. The FBI special agent in charge during the first stages of the al Qahtani interrogation was interviewed (p. 90),
The real problem was that there was a perception, and still is, in the minds of the administration lawyers and spokespeople, in the minds of policy makers at the Pentagon, in the minds of the interrogators, and many others, that these are a fundamentally different kind of prisoner, that they will not succumb to rapport building techniques, that they are somehow different, somehow inhuman.
This is most certainly not an empirical observation coming from past history. The whole reason that the FBI had been asked to participate in the initial interrogations of people like Abu Zubaydah, and al Qahtani, and many others, was because of their interrogation expertise, and the fact that they had had good results interrogating al Qaeda prisoners in the past. Remember that famous August 6, PDB, the one called Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US? It contains the following paragraph:
The Case of the Real Ticking Bomb Warning
That PDB, the closest thing in the whole nearly eight years of the Bush administration to a ticking time bomb warning, got its evidence by FBI Behavioral Analysis Units, rapport building, and non-torture interrogation of an al Qaeda suspect, one who, like al Qahtani, had been spotted trying to enter the U.S. by an alert border agent -- evidently the border agents catch even al Qaeda suspects with standard methods with some regularity, too.
The effort to dehumanize, the need to present those who are now called variously islamofascists, jihadi terrorists, or Muslim extremists, by the administration, as something other than human beings has a history dating to the 1980's and Douglas Feith's successful lobbying in the Reagan Administration to not ratify the 1977 Geneva Conventions First Additional Protocol, with other roots in the New Sovereigntist movement that disliked the perceived encroachment of international human rights treaties and protocols into U.S. sovereignity.
But the text of the U.N. Convention Against Torture Article 1 says, essentially, that all the reasons for torture that were conceived of by limiting access to legal opinions, by discussing techniques without expertise, and by forming interrogation policies by ideology instead of science, are reasons that have been seen before. Just like the excuses of, "I didn't see it," when the ICRC presented the administration with complaints about Guantanamo and Bagram, which the ICRC had seen before and therefore had a policy to disseminate their documents to the entire chain of command.
And so, that last reason for harsh treatment has meaning, in retrospect, when it turns out that the prisoner would have given up the information about the ticking bomb without harsh treatment: or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind. It covers the other reasons for torture perfectly. It's as clear in this case as the clause in Article 2: No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
At least I think that's how it goes. In my mind, the torture is wrong always, so the decision is clear. There are many variations of the ticking bomb scenario, proponents like to stress that first one makes the question so stark that the answer is not in question, then one argues that the case has been made and it's a matter of judgment as to where the line is. Sometimes one needs to remember that there are plenty of unwritten assumptions involved, even in the unlikely case, that are not articulated.
The Unwritten Assumptions
The biggest among these is the assumption that there is no other way to get the prisoner to divulge the information. The next is that the information must stay secure, from the existence of the prisoner, to the tactic used, to the information divulged, since once the prisoner parts with the information, we must know that no one can change the circumstances. The next is that we know exactly how to get them to talk, and how to interpret the information, and how to link the information to the defusing process quickly enough to avert disaster. There are a quick set of names for these three unwritten assumptions: The first is called dehumanization. The prisoner is so evil that we can assume there is no non-violent way of getting the information. The second is called anonymity. The need for secrecy begets a need to do things that you don't want to know. The third is called control. The extraction of information is being done professionally, the ability to manipulate the prisoner is total. Oddly, these unwritten assumptions are exactly the conditions predicting the Stanford Prison Experiment. So the message to anyone advocating the ticking bomb theory is: Bet you can't do it just once. It is guaranteed to go out of control.
But the first assumption, like I said, is the biggest. There is no other way to get the information. This is frequently not an appeal to fact, it is an appeal to commonly held belief, or to gut instinct, or to any and all of the more vile emotions that underlie true dehumanization: racism, prejudice, xenophobia. There is a reason why the U.N. Convention Against Torture, Article 1, has more forms of torture than are commonly supposed (I was truly surprised with Philippe Sands for citing only the first two, interrogation and confession, The Torture Team, p. 169). Article 1 also includes punishment, intimidation, and coercion, and it includes the curious phrase,"or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind".
How strange. But if you look at the history of the U.S. recent descent into torture, this phrase says everything about that unwritten assumption, everything about why torture is really done. It isn't the ticking bomb scenario that gives rise to the assumption that torture has become necessary, it's this unwritten assumption: The prisoner is so evil that this must be done. Torture is the only language this prisoner understands. This was a requirement among the Greeks and the Romans (Rejali, Torture and Democracy p.36, or see also Harrison at A1-A3).
The assumption is pervasive. During the testimony on May 6th before the House Judiciary Committee, at one point after the statements were read and the questioning had begun, it was generally agreed between David Rivkin and the members of the Judiciary Committee, who also attempted to get agreement from others after Marjorie Cohn said that she would write a statute that would require that a prisoner from whom one wanted information would specify treating the prisoner with kindness and respect and build a rapport (see the webcast, at about 1:17).
The Forensic Evidence
But FBI documentation, available at various points during the history of the U.S. and its current problems with prisoner abuse, seems to say otherwise. The FBI has a different opinion of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, in which the CIA, possibly with help from the National Security Council Principals, subjected this "high value detainee" to multiple "enhanced interrogation" methods up to and including waterboarding. They believed (p.ix) that they had begun to establish a rapport with the prisoner, when he was taken away for harsher questioning. The FBI also objected to the treatment of Mohammed al Qahtani, the prisoner whose interrogation Philippe Sands documents in The Torture Team. Aside from feeling that the interrogations would spoil the ability to try al Qahtani in court, they worried that it would taint the agents who interrogated him, if they did so after he had been badly treated. Evident in their testimony is the fact that they thought their techniques would work, but would take time (p. 84). As Mr. Sands so aptly points out, time should not have been the issue, as they had had him in captivity for the better part of a year (The Torture Team, p. 224).
It really wasn't that. The military and CIA interrogators did not believe the FBI techniques would work at all. The FBI special agent in charge during the first stages of the al Qahtani interrogation was interviewed (p. 90),
Demeter told the OIG that he argued with Miller that by using proven law enforcement interview tactics such as rationalizing the conduct along with the subject, joining the subject in projecting blame for the conduct on others, or minimizing the severity of the conduct with the subject, the barriers to confession are reduced and cooperation becomes more likely. Demeter told the OIG that these tactics may sound "touchy-feely" or "counterintuitive," but they had been very successful with hard core criminals in the past.
The real problem was that there was a perception, and still is, in the minds of the administration lawyers and spokespeople, in the minds of policy makers at the Pentagon, in the minds of the interrogators, and many others, that these are a fundamentally different kind of prisoner, that they will not succumb to rapport building techniques, that they are somehow different, somehow inhuman.
This is most certainly not an empirical observation coming from past history. The whole reason that the FBI had been asked to participate in the initial interrogations of people like Abu Zubaydah, and al Qahtani, and many others, was because of their interrogation expertise, and the fact that they had had good results interrogating al Qaeda prisoners in the past. Remember that famous August 6, PDB, the one called Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US? It contains the following paragraph:
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped him facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubayday was planning his own US attack.
Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.
The Case of the Real Ticking Bomb Warning
That PDB, the closest thing in the whole nearly eight years of the Bush administration to a ticking time bomb warning, got its evidence by FBI Behavioral Analysis Units, rapport building, and non-torture interrogation of an al Qaeda suspect, one who, like al Qahtani, had been spotted trying to enter the U.S. by an alert border agent -- evidently the border agents catch even al Qaeda suspects with standard methods with some regularity, too.
The effort to dehumanize, the need to present those who are now called variously islamofascists, jihadi terrorists, or Muslim extremists, by the administration, as something other than human beings has a history dating to the 1980's and Douglas Feith's successful lobbying in the Reagan Administration to not ratify the 1977 Geneva Conventions First Additional Protocol, with other roots in the New Sovereigntist movement that disliked the perceived encroachment of international human rights treaties and protocols into U.S. sovereignity.
But the text of the U.N. Convention Against Torture Article 1 says, essentially, that all the reasons for torture that were conceived of by limiting access to legal opinions, by discussing techniques without expertise, and by forming interrogation policies by ideology instead of science, are reasons that have been seen before. Just like the excuses of, "I didn't see it," when the ICRC presented the administration with complaints about Guantanamo and Bagram, which the ICRC had seen before and therefore had a policy to disseminate their documents to the entire chain of command.
And so, that last reason for harsh treatment has meaning, in retrospect, when it turns out that the prisoner would have given up the information about the ticking bomb without harsh treatment: or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind. It covers the other reasons for torture perfectly. It's as clear in this case as the clause in Article 2: No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Death and Memorial Day
Some things are inherently hard to talk about. Others are banned from conversation, an implication that no matter what is said, it will cause pain or hurt to someone. It's hard to talk about death, and gets harder as the number of deaths go up. But at this point in my ruminations about the public attitude about torture, it all comes down to a change in how we perceive death. And so death must be talked about, no matter how hard. Memorial Day in the United States is a day when it is appropriate to talk about death, about some deaths, but it makes this talk no easier.
Over at Firedoglake, loosheadprop has made this job just a little easier, in her discussion of jus cogens, she notes, of her law professors at Yale,
I wish it were so. I wish that human thought was well-ordered, an inevitable march of evolution. But the Dark Age for torture that was ended by John Donne by the Enlightenment, followed on Pope Nicolas I's unequivocal ban on torture in 866 (see here, at B1) as unacceptable under both divine and human law, because it produced confession that was not voluntary. A few hundred years later, facing the usual "existential threat", the Dark Ages reversed compelling law, as the U.S. seems to have done recently. I am coming to the conclusion that the problem is death, and that what is keeping many of Americans from understanding the concepts in looseheadprop's piece, is the notion that nothing is as important as death.
Here Comes the Hard Part
We have become a culture that enshrines some deaths as beyond speech. I wish this weren't the problem, but I think it is. Because we cannot talk about certain deaths in the past, we are unable to put death into its proper place in our thoughts -- because we have these outstanding atrocities that allow the loss of life to seem always evil, and that allow the preservation of life to trump all other concerns. Death becomes primordial, schemes to defeat it become obligatory, questions are not allowed to be asked.
So let's talk about September 11 and Pearl Harbor. Even before the September 11 attacks, the term "Pearl Harbor like event" to denote a cataclysm that would change the way Americans think of their society, and facilitate change that some thought necessary, was in documents produced by the Project for a New American Century (in Rebuilding America's Defenses:Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, 2000, the group apparently has taken their website down). The comparable part of the two events was the death toll in American lives. 2350 Americans died at Pearl Harbor, 2973 died as a result of the September 11th attacks. And to many, if not most, that was all that mattered when concerned with the subsequent response. And so there is a perception of an existential threat.
They were not equal as existential threats, though. Japan was an aggressive nation-state, with a large war machine, conducting an essentially repeatable attack. Except for the element of surprise, they could have subsequently done the same attack, executed the same set of maneuvers against, for example, a large American city. They had already invaded China and parts of Indochina, and would soon occupy Burma, challenging the British Empire. They could, and did, sustain full scaled war with the United States and plenty of other countries for several years afterward, continuously, at great cost of human lives in all the places those wars were fought.
Al Qaeda in no way posed or poses such a threat, nor have they sustained such a war. The plan executed on September 11, was many years in the making, if you count the mistakes, the other attempts. It is fundamental to much of the conduct of the United States subsequent to September 11 that we are facing an existential threat, like we faced after Pearl Harbor. It is therefore fundamental that our institutions and our public maintain their focus on what has become an obsession in America, the death toll. That is all that makes the events comparable.
That wasn't a nice thing to say, but there are things that are even less nice. Comparisons to the Holocaust, and to many grievous events in recent history are not, in many fundamental ways, permissible in America, or in Europe, or many other places. When Philippe Sands talks of comparisons between the Justice Cases at Nuremburg and the abuses after September 11 by the United States, he disclaims them:
More Hard Thoughts
Equally off limits is the preservation of life at great cost, though. This preservation goes on in hospitals all the time, and has only recently had much challenge. It is assumed in the notion of implied consent: A patient that is not conscious, or is not alert and oriented, is assumed to consent to the treatments needed to keep the patient alive. It is believed that any sane individual that is alert and oriented, under the circumstances, would give such consent, so it is implied. This goes further in applications of the Hippocratic Oath, actually the dictum of Galens to "above all, do no harm." It is interpreted much like implied consent.
A patient is kept alive at all costs. Frequently, the reason for keeping the patient alive is couched in an optimistic belief that a cure might be imminent, and the patient might recover, but this is obviously not the reality in some instances. I can recall a patient kept alive through two weeks of acute vasculitis, intense pain of the sort that was offered as possibly cruel and unusual in the recent debates about lethal injections, on the basis of the imminent cure argument. The patient clearly wanted to die, the doctors at the time dismissed that desire, and in fact would have been prohibited from facilitating it. There would never have been a way for a cure to have occurred and become practicable in such a time frame, the argument reflected an extreme fear of death in our society, and little else.
And what of beliefs? A sizable number of Americans alive right now wait anxiously for the Second Coming, believing that it will occur within their own lives if the conditions are right, and they will bodily enter the Kingdom of Heaven. There will be no death if that occurs, and it would appear that the importance of such an event as a source of comfort in people's lives would not be insignificantly tied to having cheated death: "Oh death where is thy sting, oh grave where is thy victory?"
It goes further: In The Torture Team, Sands records (p. 86) General Hill of the Southern Command as offering in response to questioning the tactics that had been approved by Donald Rumsfeld for interrogation, "They behead us." Execution in this manner is not humane by modern standards, and in fact is a deliberate insult: Those beheaded were killed that way because it is halal, the way of preparing the meat of animals, and so equates those killed with animals. But it is execution. Likewise, when the bodies of contractors were pulled from the vehicles in which they died and hung on a bridge, as grisly and offensive as it was, it was maltreatment of the dead. It offended because of the dignity of the dead, because of the attitude which did not pay enough respect for death and for the dead. But if death is not part of the prescription, as with most of the prisoners in U.S. custody, who have been subject to abuse or torture, then it doesn't rise to the level of this atrocity, this very wrong treatment of death.
Death is our "ultimate sacrifice." It is cited by some as the only part of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" that matters, without life, the others are "meaningless". Our special place for it, if you will, in recent times, transcends everything, and the lack of it is justification. No one has died in terror attacks on American soil since September 11? Whatever the tactic, no matter how brutal, it is successful, don't criticize. It is okay to relegate the Iraq war to the back pages because of the invisibility of death. Not just the lack of images of coffins coming home, or the brutal scenes we saw in the photography of the Vietnam war. For we have been at this war for longer than World War II, and it has consumed only four thousand some lives.
Only? How can anyone say that? It's not right to mention it that way. But hasn't that been the attitude, both in reporting and in the prosecution of this war? It isn't Vietnam, just look at the difference in deaths. Never mind the real reason: the number of casualties saved compared to those lost has changed from 2.5:1 in Vietnam to 16:1 in Iraq. Those who would have been dead get hemicraneotomies and ICP probes, radical new surguries to the spine and the like. Were the toll to be according to the ratio readjusted to the Vietnam era, the toll would be 20,000 dead by now. It is probably this, and not the lack of a draft, that dictates the reaction of the American public, but to say so seems profoundly impolite and inappropriate. It implies that Americans rate the awfulness of tragedy based on a body count, based on death alone.
John Yoo famously equated "severe pain" rising to the level of torture to pain equivalent to "death or organ failure." Pain to the torture victim isn't significant in this view unless it approaches -- death. Death is the prevented effect in the ticking bomb theory. Death has been cheated by 4 draft deferments and 4 coronary bypasses by the man who keeps coming up as central to the shift in American policy away from international law and towards techniques that include torture. It's all about death, about avoiding death at all costs, about the ultimate sacrifice.
And so, to come back again to the theory of evolution and jus cogens in international law: It is the fear of death that causes the "surrender all of their rights in exchange for security." Enlightenment comes, in the sense of jus cogens, in understanding the existence of a fate worse than death. Otherwise there can be no "Give me liberty or give me death!" because it makes no sense, it would be insanity to choose something other than defeating death, even for an instant.
It is Memorial Day in America. In remembering those who have fought and died for this country, in hoping for that permanent peace, it is worth remembering that there are things that are worth such sacrifice, and there are things that are worse than death itself. If we cannot remember that the sacrifice of soldiers by its very nature implies that fear of death should not cause us to dismantle the evolution towards human rights, and away from torture, slavery, and genocide, if we cannot believe that there are certain human rights that exist regardless of what a person has done or what they believe, then we have forgotten a perspective so fundamental, and acquired at such cost, that we cannot be considered to have evolved at all.
Over at Firedoglake, loosheadprop has made this job just a little easier, in her discussion of jus cogens, she notes, of her law professors at Yale,
They followed an evolution of human rights law from periods when citizens would surrender all of their rights in exchange for security (Dark Ages anyone?) through the Enlightenment's ideas about natural law, with detours through Communism's "collectivism" and down to the authors' modern vision of a "policy based" approach to human rights.
I wish it were so. I wish that human thought was well-ordered, an inevitable march of evolution. But the Dark Age for torture that was ended by John Donne by the Enlightenment, followed on Pope Nicolas I's unequivocal ban on torture in 866 (see here, at B1) as unacceptable under both divine and human law, because it produced confession that was not voluntary. A few hundred years later, facing the usual "existential threat", the Dark Ages reversed compelling law, as the U.S. seems to have done recently. I am coming to the conclusion that the problem is death, and that what is keeping many of Americans from understanding the concepts in looseheadprop's piece, is the notion that nothing is as important as death.
Here Comes the Hard Part
We have become a culture that enshrines some deaths as beyond speech. I wish this weren't the problem, but I think it is. Because we cannot talk about certain deaths in the past, we are unable to put death into its proper place in our thoughts -- because we have these outstanding atrocities that allow the loss of life to seem always evil, and that allow the preservation of life to trump all other concerns. Death becomes primordial, schemes to defeat it become obligatory, questions are not allowed to be asked.
So let's talk about September 11 and Pearl Harbor. Even before the September 11 attacks, the term "Pearl Harbor like event" to denote a cataclysm that would change the way Americans think of their society, and facilitate change that some thought necessary, was in documents produced by the Project for a New American Century (in Rebuilding America's Defenses:Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, 2000, the group apparently has taken their website down). The comparable part of the two events was the death toll in American lives. 2350 Americans died at Pearl Harbor, 2973 died as a result of the September 11th attacks. And to many, if not most, that was all that mattered when concerned with the subsequent response. And so there is a perception of an existential threat.
They were not equal as existential threats, though. Japan was an aggressive nation-state, with a large war machine, conducting an essentially repeatable attack. Except for the element of surprise, they could have subsequently done the same attack, executed the same set of maneuvers against, for example, a large American city. They had already invaded China and parts of Indochina, and would soon occupy Burma, challenging the British Empire. They could, and did, sustain full scaled war with the United States and plenty of other countries for several years afterward, continuously, at great cost of human lives in all the places those wars were fought.
Al Qaeda in no way posed or poses such a threat, nor have they sustained such a war. The plan executed on September 11, was many years in the making, if you count the mistakes, the other attempts. It is fundamental to much of the conduct of the United States subsequent to September 11 that we are facing an existential threat, like we faced after Pearl Harbor. It is therefore fundamental that our institutions and our public maintain their focus on what has become an obsession in America, the death toll. That is all that makes the events comparable.
That wasn't a nice thing to say, but there are things that are even less nice. Comparisons to the Holocaust, and to many grievous events in recent history are not, in many fundamental ways, permissible in America, or in Europe, or many other places. When Philippe Sands talks of comparisons between the Justice Cases at Nuremburg and the abuses after September 11 by the United States, he disclaims them:
The scale of the atrocity described in the Justice Cases was staggering and cannot be compared with what apparently happened at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib. I felt uncomfortable even making that kind of comparison, but what struck me as a point of connection was the underlying cause...The scale of the atrocity is, in modern times, defined by numbers: the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis is a genocide, but the scale of death is the reason it is never compared, or compared only reluctantly. But Philippe Sands is right, the point is the underlying connection. The point is difficult to make because death stands in its way, and blurs the vision of many in the discussion.
More Hard Thoughts
Equally off limits is the preservation of life at great cost, though. This preservation goes on in hospitals all the time, and has only recently had much challenge. It is assumed in the notion of implied consent: A patient that is not conscious, or is not alert and oriented, is assumed to consent to the treatments needed to keep the patient alive. It is believed that any sane individual that is alert and oriented, under the circumstances, would give such consent, so it is implied. This goes further in applications of the Hippocratic Oath, actually the dictum of Galens to "above all, do no harm." It is interpreted much like implied consent.
A patient is kept alive at all costs. Frequently, the reason for keeping the patient alive is couched in an optimistic belief that a cure might be imminent, and the patient might recover, but this is obviously not the reality in some instances. I can recall a patient kept alive through two weeks of acute vasculitis, intense pain of the sort that was offered as possibly cruel and unusual in the recent debates about lethal injections, on the basis of the imminent cure argument. The patient clearly wanted to die, the doctors at the time dismissed that desire, and in fact would have been prohibited from facilitating it. There would never have been a way for a cure to have occurred and become practicable in such a time frame, the argument reflected an extreme fear of death in our society, and little else.
And what of beliefs? A sizable number of Americans alive right now wait anxiously for the Second Coming, believing that it will occur within their own lives if the conditions are right, and they will bodily enter the Kingdom of Heaven. There will be no death if that occurs, and it would appear that the importance of such an event as a source of comfort in people's lives would not be insignificantly tied to having cheated death: "Oh death where is thy sting, oh grave where is thy victory?"
It goes further: In The Torture Team, Sands records (p. 86) General Hill of the Southern Command as offering in response to questioning the tactics that had been approved by Donald Rumsfeld for interrogation, "They behead us." Execution in this manner is not humane by modern standards, and in fact is a deliberate insult: Those beheaded were killed that way because it is halal, the way of preparing the meat of animals, and so equates those killed with animals. But it is execution. Likewise, when the bodies of contractors were pulled from the vehicles in which they died and hung on a bridge, as grisly and offensive as it was, it was maltreatment of the dead. It offended because of the dignity of the dead, because of the attitude which did not pay enough respect for death and for the dead. But if death is not part of the prescription, as with most of the prisoners in U.S. custody, who have been subject to abuse or torture, then it doesn't rise to the level of this atrocity, this very wrong treatment of death.
Death is our "ultimate sacrifice." It is cited by some as the only part of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" that matters, without life, the others are "meaningless". Our special place for it, if you will, in recent times, transcends everything, and the lack of it is justification. No one has died in terror attacks on American soil since September 11? Whatever the tactic, no matter how brutal, it is successful, don't criticize. It is okay to relegate the Iraq war to the back pages because of the invisibility of death. Not just the lack of images of coffins coming home, or the brutal scenes we saw in the photography of the Vietnam war. For we have been at this war for longer than World War II, and it has consumed only four thousand some lives.
Only? How can anyone say that? It's not right to mention it that way. But hasn't that been the attitude, both in reporting and in the prosecution of this war? It isn't Vietnam, just look at the difference in deaths. Never mind the real reason: the number of casualties saved compared to those lost has changed from 2.5:1 in Vietnam to 16:1 in Iraq. Those who would have been dead get hemicraneotomies and ICP probes, radical new surguries to the spine and the like. Were the toll to be according to the ratio readjusted to the Vietnam era, the toll would be 20,000 dead by now. It is probably this, and not the lack of a draft, that dictates the reaction of the American public, but to say so seems profoundly impolite and inappropriate. It implies that Americans rate the awfulness of tragedy based on a body count, based on death alone.
John Yoo famously equated "severe pain" rising to the level of torture to pain equivalent to "death or organ failure." Pain to the torture victim isn't significant in this view unless it approaches -- death. Death is the prevented effect in the ticking bomb theory. Death has been cheated by 4 draft deferments and 4 coronary bypasses by the man who keeps coming up as central to the shift in American policy away from international law and towards techniques that include torture. It's all about death, about avoiding death at all costs, about the ultimate sacrifice.
And so, to come back again to the theory of evolution and jus cogens in international law: It is the fear of death that causes the "surrender all of their rights in exchange for security." Enlightenment comes, in the sense of jus cogens, in understanding the existence of a fate worse than death. Otherwise there can be no "Give me liberty or give me death!" because it makes no sense, it would be insanity to choose something other than defeating death, even for an instant.
It is Memorial Day in America. In remembering those who have fought and died for this country, in hoping for that permanent peace, it is worth remembering that there are things that are worth such sacrifice, and there are things that are worse than death itself. If we cannot remember that the sacrifice of soldiers by its very nature implies that fear of death should not cause us to dismantle the evolution towards human rights, and away from torture, slavery, and genocide, if we cannot believe that there are certain human rights that exist regardless of what a person has done or what they believe, then we have forgotten a perspective so fundamental, and acquired at such cost, that we cannot be considered to have evolved at all.
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