A Call for Congress to Take Action on Torture
October 28th, 2009
Whereas over seven years have passed since President George W. Bush fraudulently induced the U.S. congress, the American people, and the world into the illegal war in Iraq,
Whereas it is nearly five years since Specialist Darby revealed the photos of Abu Ghraib that showed us torture being committed by our government in our name,
Whereas further evidence of torture remains secret and has been hidden from the public, courts, and Congress to insulate the perpetrators from appropriate criminal liability,
Neither the MPs at Abu Ghraib nor the guards at Guantanamo Bay started the US down a path of being a nation that tortures all by their lonesome. They didn't even order it. And why should it be so surprising that there would be little squeamishness about torturing foreigners when our domestic culture has been encouraging in-house torture for a very long time?
The torture of US citizens is common in prisons. This includes dehumanizing solitary confinement and the threat of rape torture. Prisoner advocates have been pointing out for a very long time that prison rape is a casual punchline praised for universally accepted, though never proven, deterrence benefits. US prisoners of war considered solitary confinement among the most terrible tortures and nearly everyone considers rape to be torture, but we allow these things to be done in our country every day.
Though winking at torture never stopped with convicted inmates. Police brutality against minorities and uppity demonstrators has been a long-accepted staple of US national culture - almost as if getting to bully and beat people was a perk of being a law enforcement professional, because it's just so darn fun. Even if most members of the police force conduct themselves laudably and would never want to torment anyone, cases of sadistic behavior by law enforcement rarely raises the mainstream outrage meter, or any attention at all.
Now that Tasers have been approved for law enforcement use, police torture of even upstanding white people who've never protested anything in their lives has become commonplace. Which is great in a way, because then we're more sure to get news coverage of it. Still, it's disconcerting to realize how easy it was to sell everyone on the idea that the police should be able to torture whoever they feel like torturing whenever they want to.
Admittedly, Tasers don't usually cause major organ damage or death, so that's all right then. Except that technology advances are likely to begin making it so easy and efficient for the police to torture even large groups all at once that we might want to think harder about where this is going. Especially when the attitude of some people towards their fellow citizens has gotten so pitiless that moronic advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi of Los Angeles decided that terrorizing and threatening people would make for a good ad campaign, as did Toyota and a bunch of people who referred their 'friends' for this treatment.
A long delayed report, a fine piece of investigative journalism and a recent scientific study have combined to seriously erode the credibility of arguments popularized by "24." Its influence will long outlast the series, though.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
I'm a big fan of out-of-the-box, attention-grabbing ads. These ones are running in the Farragut North metro stop here in DC (one of the busiest downtown stops and frequented a lot by DC organizational/lobbyist types) and I thought I would share.
"Close Guantanamo. End Torture. Investigate All Abuses."
"...it (torture) serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us."-Sen. John McCain talking about torture, FOX News, March 20, 2009
Osama bin Laden wearing an "I <3 Guantanamo" t-shirt
These are a sampling I took while waiting for a train. They're being run by Avaaz.org, which is doing a campaign to pressure Obama on the issue. More about it here.
There have been many reports in recent years that the U.S. government used psychiatrists and/or psychologists to assist in designing torture techniques to be used against Muslims in the middle east in connection with the U.S. War Against Afghanistan and Iraq. And maybe additional wars to come.
The reports are that the U.S. military trains its own people to survive torture and, in connection with that training, devised certain methods of torture that they believed no human being could withstand. Or at least at the conclusion of the use of these types of torture, the human psyche would be destroyed even if the body continued to function.
The desired outcome from the torture was to create in the prisoners a state of "Learned Helplessness." This is a term that comes from experiments done on dogs by an American psychiatrist who was invited by the CIA to lecture the U.S. military on his experiments, and his conclusions. Those lectures were, in turn, used by the CIA and the U.S. military in developing these torture techniques designed to destroy the human psyche.
The experiments done on animals, specifically dogs, showed the following: one group of dogs were put into a cage and given certain options for their behavior. They could, for example, try to escape, they could push a lever. But no matter what they did, no matter how hard they tried, they continued to be subjected to electrical shocks. They learned that they had no ability to stop the abuse. No matter what they did, the torture continued. When those dogs were allowed out of the cages, they simply laid down and submitted, no longer tried to avoid further abuse and torture. They had learned that they were helpless to have any control over their own lives.
This is the desired goal of the U.S. widespread torture programs in the middle east, as well as those which have been conducted in Central and South America by people trained by the U.S. at the School of Americas.
The original experiments were used as part of an investigation into depression and other forms of mental disease in which people feel helpless to do anything to improve their lives. No matter how bad the conditions, they are psychologically trained to believe that they must submit, they are helpless to change or to stop the abuse. This is probably a good explanation of the battered spouse, but also of large numbers of people in our society who are in unhappy relationships, or who are abused and mistreated in their work, but feel unable to try to make any changes. Often, changing jobs isn't a real solution if a country allows workers to be mistreated and underpaid, denied benefits or rights. So a state of learned helplessness exists in the American workforce. For good reason. They've been mistreated and abused, fired if they stand up for themselves, and have learned that they are helpless to stop the abuse.
Is it possible our entire society has been conditioned into a state of learned helplessness. No matter what people do, the government continues to simply take bribes from the corporations, lie to the people, conduct foreign wars of choice, steal our money, send our jobs overseas, give tax breaks to the rich and deny healthcare to the rest of us. This despite the historic number of people who got out and campaigned last year. All the people who believed in change are right now being taught the underpinnings of the state of learned helplessness.
Think about it: the Democrats control the House, have a 60-seat control of the Senate, and control the white house, and despite that they refuse to end the wars, they refuse to provide a real healthcare program for people, they refuse to create job programs, they refuse to hold the Bush administration responsible for its numerous violations of our constitution and other laws, they refuse to hold Wall Street responsible for its criminal theft from the public. They have, quite simply, done nothing for progressive or even for liberals since taking office, except to routinely bash us by calling us names. "The left won't like it," but they need to live with it. And we, as it turns out, are just now learning that we are completely helpless to do anything to affect what our government is doing.
Below is link to an article on the psychiatrist who developed the theory, and how it is the CIA and U.S. military used his theory to develop a program of torture designed not to get information, but instead to destroy human beings, to drive them crazy, to take away their will to live.
Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that torture is often used after a coup to create a state of submission in the civilian population. Torture a few thousand, make it public, make it particularly brutal, get the information out to the rest of the public, and most people are likely to stop resisting, just do what they are told and try to survive.
We've heard a lot about the "ticking time bomb," by which people argue that we need to torture to find out whether someone has a nuclear weapon ready to go off in our country. But no one has ever provided any factual support to show that's why we began a program of systematic torture throughout Afghanistan and Iraq. Isn't it more likely that the torture program was designed from the outset to destroy human beings and create a state of submission among the other civilians, so the U.S. could keep its permanent military bases in the region, steal all the oil, bomb and attack the neighbors conveniently, with the majority of the population too terrified to do anything to stand up against them.
It's not every day that retired generals denounce a Vice President. But two distinguished military leaders felt compelled to speak out against Mr. Cheney's support of torture, in an op-ed in today's Miami Herald.
I got pulled over for speeding in Texas yesterday and the officer looked like the kind of guy who dreamed about using his taser. So when he asked for my license and registration, I slowly got them out and handed them over.
Have you heard of Ishmael? He is the bogeyman of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.
In his column today, Cohen says that Ishmael, a fictionalized "terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything you want" who the U.S. will capture one day, won't talk because the Obama administration has outlawed the use of waterboarding and other abusive "enhanced" interrogation techniques.
In the wake of the latest blow to those who favor America's torture policy, their rhetorical ground for approving it has shrunk to a downright claustrophobic space. As it turns out, this development is not confining but downright liberating.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
It seems almost trivial to accuse someone who launched an illegal war that has killed over a million people of torture. But if we are going to prosecute the lowest ranked torturers, it makes sense to look up the chain of command.
There is no doubt that George W. Bush conspired to commit torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and murder. How do I know? He said so.
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union, Bush said: "All told more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States."
Three weeks ago at a Baptism party in Virginia, Prince William County police tasered the grandfather of the boy being Baptized. Here is a local news report on the incident:
The grandfather was tased multiple times for the crime of being drunk on private property while trying to show his I.D. Tasering has become routine. Cop thinks you're being mouthy: you're tased. If the charges are later dropped, which they often are, the tasing was your punishment for the crime of not being deferential enough. An internal investigation concluded procedures were followed.
A New York mom was tasered in front of her kids because she questioned why she was being ticketed for driving with a cell phone when she didn't have one. She filed suit this week. Take a look at the video:
In this case our "heroic and manly" officer, embarrassed at his own mistake, tries to save face by tasering the mom in front of her crying kids. All charges against her have been dismissed and police are conducting an internal investigation to see if they can find a way to justify what happened.
In Michigan, two teenage boys died this spring in separate incidents. These and many other cases are detailed inside.
Michael Vick, the football player who's all over the news, should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.
It's Not So Much That We're Sadists, More That We Trust The Wrong People
The following graphic from The Economist caught my attention:
Showing that only a handful of countries have more people willing to endorse torture--we're neck-and-neck with Egypt, while Nigeria, India, Turkey and South Korea are the only countries with substantially more pro-torture sentiment the US.
And so I went back to the report it's based on, World Public Opinion on Torture (pdf), from worldpublicopinion.com. It has a more nuanced, though less graphic chart showing that most support for torture is limited to terrorists in the "ticking time-bomb" scenario--an exceeding rare situation. It presents a less harrowing picture of the US, but still a troubling one. Chart on the flip, with more info.
Nationally Renowned Scholars, Writers, Artists, and Advocates Urge Attorney General Holder to Uphold the Rule of Law and Appoint Prosecutor to Investigate Allegations of Torture and Other Serious Crimes
SALT LAKE CITY - Several prominent Americans, including authors, artists, legal experts, and renowned voices of conscience, today transmitted a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and other violations of human rights and civil liberties committed by former government officials and others. The signatories to the letter are:
If Attorney General Eric Holder creates a special prosecutor for torture but forbids him or her to prosecute the lawyers who facilitated torture or the top officials who ordered it, proposing to go after only torturers who exceeded the limitations outlined in the lawyers' memos, what are the risks?
It's an article of faith on the right--not just the fanboys, but the ones who actually ran the Bush "War on Terror"--that way to fight to terrorism is to be learned from the TV show 24, as Dahlia Lithwick writes at Newsweek. Only problem is, experts are virtually unanimous: they're utterly wrong. Torture doesn't work to extract information quickly. In fact, it doesn't work to extract reliable information at all. Dahlia gets into all that in her Newsweek piece, as well as the rather pointed observation that Bauer knows what he's doing is illegal, and expects to pay a price for it:
that is the real source of his heroism-to the extent one finds torture heroic. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system, and accepts the consequences of the system's judgment.
All in all, she does a very good job of hitting the high notes in the crazy world of taking "24" as blue-print for fighting terror.
But there is another TV show that actually does provide some valuable insight into combating terrorism, the CBS show about FBI profilers, Criminal Minds. The premise of profiling is quite simple: to catch a criminal, you have to know how to think like a criminal. And not just any criminal, but the particular criminal that committed the particular crime you're trying to solve. Profilers are most famous for their work with serial killers, but profiling can be applied to a much wider range of crimes, including those that are political. A key insight is that no matter how "crazy" the criminal's thinking may seem, it all makes sense to them, and if you can understand what that sense is, then you are well more than halfway there to solving the crime.
There's a deep irony here: On the one hand, conservatives are utterly horrified at the very thought of trying to understand the terrorists who attacked us. So horrified, they can't even focus on what it means. At one point, Karl Rove mocked liberals, saying, "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," On the other hand, conservatives are actually very close to the terrorists how they think--brothers under the skin, one might say: tribalist, ethnocentric, religious, fundamentalist, self-righteous, prone to violence and scornful of compromise or even dialogue. They are peas in a pod. No wonder conservatives don't want to understand the terrorists--they'd have to admit they're one and the same!
Awhile back, Digby wrote she feels the torture debate slipping away. I'd like to try and put this in context. This was always going to be tough. It is a fight worth fighting, but nowhere in the world has the still potent previous ruling order ever rolled over and taken their lumps for the crimes they committed while in power without a massive fight. While we may make references to Nuremburg, the most important difference there was that the Nuremburg trials were an act of imposing international law on Germany and Japan after conquering them. This is an attempt to have domestic law enforcement mechanisms go after the leaders of the previous government for their official policy. In the US, I don't believe such a thing has been done. Worldwide, it isn't so common either.
Watergate is not an apt comparison either. Nixon's motivies were clearly about personal advancement. He wasn't ordering buildings firebombed and journalists murdered to "protect" America, he was cheating in the competitive game of politics. Further, he acted guilty and had been stupid enough to tape himself. The war crimes of the Bush Administration exist in a different realm, because they mostly lack a personal benefit motive on the part of the players involved. They are still all over television brazenly defending what they did and attacking Obama for not continuing all of it. It is still possible for them to claim all this was done to defend the nation, for the greater good and so on. Nixon's claims of this sort were not credible. For whatever reason, time and again personal failings bring down the scandal avalanche in a way that other illegality does not. No doubt part of this is the pernicious US domestic news media, but not all of it. People just seem to viscerally loathe bright line personal corruption in a way that makes, say, $90,000 in a freezer a much bigger deal than 90,000 (or 900,000) dead innocent Iraqi civilians. It's a serious challenge for the long term viability of democracy.
We've heard of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, and maybe even Jay Bybee. Some of us recall John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, and even David Addington. William Haynes, Stephen Bradbury, and Douglas Feith occasionally make the news. If I had any say about it all 40 of these facilitators of torture would be universally known -- plus the eight more that readers of this article will call to my attention and angrily accuse me of trying to cover for by only being aware of 40. I would also make universally known the fact that two of the worst now work for President Barack Obama.
(Remarks at Torture Accountability Action Day rally in Washington, D.C., June 25, 2009 -- video of this and other speeches at AfterDowningStreet.org)
Have you ever held a little baby in your arms? Raise your hand if you have. A toddler is as delicate and precious as a baby, but able to move around and get hurt. Bigger kids can move faster and farther. Our instincts should be to protect them.
I was reading yesterday about a boy who was probably 12 years old when our nation imprisoned him in 2002. We held him in Afghanistan, but I don't mean "held" in the sense in which one lovingly holds a baby. We put a hood on him, stripped him, shackled him and shoved him down stairs. We brought him to Guantanamo, kicked him, beat him, broke his nose, pepper sprayed him, and deprived him of sleep for many days. In 2003 he tried to kill himself by slamming his head against a wall.
Thursday, June 25, 2009, has been designated Torture Accountability Action Day by a large coalition of human rights groups planning rallies and marches in major U.S. cities, including a rally in Washington, D.C.'s John Marshall Park at 11 a.m. followed by a noon march to the Justice Department where some participants will risk arrest in nonviolent protest if a special prosecutor for torture is not appointed.
http://accountability4torture.com
Events are planned in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco, CA; Pasadena, CA; Thousand Oaks, CA; Boston, MA; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Las Vegas, NV; Honolulu, HI; Tampa, FL; Philadelphia, PA; and Anchorage, AK, with details available online:
http://tortureaccountability.w...
It's an article of faith on the right--not just the fanboys, but the ones who actually ran the Bush "War on Terror"--that way to fight to terrorism is to be learned from the TV show 24, as Dahlia Lithwick 
On the other hand, conservatives are actually very close to the terrorists how they think--brothers under the skin, one might say: tribalist, ethnocentric, religious, fundamentalist, self-righteous, prone to violence and scornful of compromise or even dialogue. They are peas in a pod. No wonder conservatives don't want to understand the terrorists--they'd have to admit they're one and the same!
