Torture: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

We are told that torture is essential to defend our “security.” Here are a few examples of how torture has contributed to the “security” of society over the years:
.
From “The History of the Franks,” by Gregory of Tours:
.
In 584 AD a nobleman named Mummolus annoyed Queen Fredegund. Gregory continues with the story:
.
(The Queen) had a number of Parisian housewives rounded up, and they were tortured with the instruments and the cat, and so compelled to act as informers. They confessed that they were witches and gave evidence that they had been responsible for many deaths. They then added something which I find quite incredible: “We sacrificed you son (a young boy who had just died of dysentery) O Queen, to save the life of Mummolus…
.
Chilperic (the king) immediately sent his men to seize the person of Mummolus. He was interrogated, loaded with chains and put to the torture. Then his hands were tied behind his back, he was suspended from a rafter and he was questioned about these sorceries…Mummolus was extended on the rack and then flogged with treble thongs until his torturers were quite exhausted. After this splinters were driven beneath the nails of his fingers and toes. So things continued…
.
From “Red Victory” by W. Bruce Lincoln:
.
Methods of the Cheka, the first of the infamous Communist security organizations, during the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution:
.
“Rapes of female prisoner by Cheka guards and interrogators were so commonplace that they occasioned comment from superiors only if performed in some particularly brutal or perverted fashion…
.
“…each Cheka headquarters evidently developed certain specialities. The Cheka in Voronezh rolled its prisoners around inside a barrel into which nails had been driven, while the Cheka in Kharkov used scalping as a preferred form of torture. In Armavir, the Cheka used a “death wreath” that applied increasing pressure to a prisoners skull; at Tsaritsyn, they separated prisoners joints by sawing through their bones; and, in Omsk, they poured molten sealing wax on prisoners’ faces, arms, and necks. In Kiev, Chekists installed rats in pieces of pipe that had been closed at one end, placed the open end against prisoners’ stomachs, and then heated the pipes until the rats, maddened by the heat, tried to escape by gnawing their way into the prisoners’ intestines.”
.
From a U.S. military autopsy report:
.
“Final Autopsy Report: DOD 003164, (Detainee) Died as a result of asphyxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) due to strangulation as evidenced by the recently fractured hyoid bone in the neck and soft tissue hemorrhage extending downward to the level of the right thyroid cartilage. Autopsy revealed bone fracture, rib fractures, contusions in mid abdomen, back and buttocks extending to the left flank, abrasions, lateral buttocks. Contusions, back of legs and knees; abrasions on knees, left fingers and encircling to left wrist. Lacerations and superficial cuts, right 4th and 5th fingers. Also, blunt force injuries, predominately recent contusions (bruises) on the torso and lower extremities. Abrasions on left wrist are consistent with use of restraints. No evidence of defense injuries or natural disease. Manner of death is homicide. Whitehorse Detainment Facility, Nasiriyah, Iraq.”
.
Such acts really do merit moral condemnation, but we’ve become jaded to moral condemnation. We’ve been afflicted by the professionally pious with their ostentatious displays of superior virtue and their holier than thou preening for so long that we dismiss moral revulsion as a pose, because that’s what it usually is. For the professionally pious, the pose is everything, and the reality nothing. When the reality really is an outrage to human decency, we tend not to notice, dismissing any reservations about, for example, torture, as just another pose, just another facet of someone’s political narrative.
.
Well, a healthy conscience, a rational sense of right and wrong, really isn’t necessary to understand why it’s necessary to resist the legitimization of torture. It’s can really be boiled down to a matter of self-preservation. Read through the above incidents, and multiply them hundreds of thousands of times. That’s been the reality of human history. Can anyone really still be so naïve as to believe that what goes around will never come around, that they will never be the victim of what they gladly condone when applied to others. As state power continues to expand exponentially, not only in the US, but in virtually every other country on the globe, who can still be blind enough not to see that, if they legitimize torture, they will eventually become its victim, or, if not them, their children? Has “security” become the sine qua non of modern society, trumping habeas corpus, the right to a trial by jury, the right to confront ones accusers, and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without hindrance except by due process of law? If so, then I submit that security is not to be found by the legitimization of torture, but by its final, unequivocal condemnation as a legal instrument of state power.
.
If security has really become the ultimate social value, then perhaps, when it comes to torture, it would be wise to forget the poll parsing that one finds here, there, and everywhere on the web these days, and coolly consider the odds of ourselves becoming victims. Do you really want security above all else? Then work to put the state out of the torture business once and for all. You’ll be a more secure.
.
Update: Sorry about the formatting issue. I’m working on it.
.

Torture: The Liberals, the Conservatives, and the Rabbit People

I, personally, am opposed to torture.  I also consider the notion that water boarding, sleep deprivation, and similar “enhanced interrogation techniques” are not torture absurd.  Whatever one cares to consider it when inflicted in a carefully controlled training situation, water boarding is most definitely torture when inflicted on an enemy not once, but 80, 90 or 100 times, by tormenters who are confident they will not be held to account for their deeds.  Resistance to torture doesn’t have to be a moral decision, just a practical one.  Nations that torture weaken themselves by playing into the hands of their enemies, handing them an effective propaganda tool.  Anyone who was following the European media at the time the Abu Ghraib story broke knows how effective and damaging such propaganda can be.  For democracies, at least, condoning torture carries a high political cost.  The damage it does to the national security of a democracy by allowing its enemies to seize the moral high ground and by eliminating its own moral authority in the world greatly outweighs any plausible advantage that could be gained by it.

Individuals who support torture live in an imaginary world in which the victims are always their enemies, persons certainly guilty of terrorism or worse, regardless of whether they have had a trial or whether there is any plausible evidence against them.  The principles embodied in the American Bill of Rights don’t matter, as long as their precious security is at stake.  In the end, though, that security is a chimera.  Those who believe that torture will only be applied to the “others,” never to themselves, live in a dream world.  In the first place, nations that torture provide their enemies with justification for torture, putting their citizens, and especially their soldiers, at risk.  In a world that condones torture, the idea that the old rule, “What goes around, comes around,” doesn’t apply is not only stupid, it is suicidal.  In a world that condones torture, every individual is a risk.

History has demonstrated that the state is the most effective terrorist, just as it is the most effective killer. It was to protect us from the state as torturer and killer that or forefathers established prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, the assumption of innocence until proven guilty, protections against arbitrary imprisonment, and all the rest of the freedoms we treasure for ourselves, and should treasure for others.  The conservatives in the USA who cheer so loudly for “enhanced interrogation” are wringing their hands at the same time about the expansion of government power and what they perceive as the approach to socialism.  If the state is really in danger of becoming so evil, is it wise to cheer so loudly for torture?  What if the state really does become evil?  What if it occurs to the leaders of that evil state to engage in the wholesale torture of those who, after all, were torture’s most zealous defenders?  What?  You think “It can’t happen here?”  Was the history of the 20th century nothing but a bad dream?  No, it wasn’t a dream.  It was a reality that could happen here quite as well as it happened elsewhere.  In such a world, our genuine security depends on standing by the principles we never should have abandoned in the first place, including rejection of torture.  

Sometimes I can’t even believe we are having this debate. A bunch of religious fanatics gets lucky and kills 3000+ people, and we are suddenly in a “war,” and have to throw all our liberties out the window.  Going on a decade later, we are still at “war,” and anything goes, as long as we can bamboozle ourselves into believing that our precious “security” requires it.  It reminds one of the constantly warring states in Orwell’s “1984.”  I suspect Orwell would have detected a very familiar ring in the arguments being fobbed off on us today to justify this constant state of “war.”  We have over 25,000 firearm deaths every single year in the US, and over 40,000 traffic fatalities. Is anyone suggesting we throw out the Bill of Rights and introduce a police state because of that? Hundreds of thousands have died defending the liberties we are now supposed to casually discard because we are all so terribly threatened by the evil terrorists. What fine Americans we are, what brave defenders of the faith our fathers fought and died for!  One successful attack, and all we can think of is crawling under a rock and bleating about our illusory “security.” One successful attack that in no way threatens our existence as a nation and, suddenly, we are drawing dire parallels with the need to suspend habeus corpus during the Civil War. What wimps we have become, what rabbits!

The right in the US really seems to have taken leave of its collective senses on this issue.  They really seem to believe that the torturers will never turn on them, that they will somehow, against all odds, be immune to the disease they are so blithely promoting.  The idea that the people who are given the authority to apply torture will always be philosopher kings, or, for that matter, are even likely to be capable of distinguishing those in the act of carrying out a nuclear attack from innocent civilians rounded up based on no or faint evidence is nonsense. History has proved it nonsense time after time. Those who condone torture have forgotten or never learned the lessons of history.  Our founding fathers were well aware of those lessons.  They didn’t suffer from our modern delusions about the benevolence and justice of the state as torturer.  That’s why they took the stand they did.  If we abandon their stand in pursuit of a hollow security we might as well give up the fight. We will have become the mirror images of the people we are fighting.

When one looks at the ideological divide in the US today on the matter of torture, one can only shake ones head.  The right openly condones it.  They give Nathan Hale speeches defending it, as if it were some kind of a holy cause.  For them, no one can be truly “patriotic” who opposes it.  For the left, it is just an ideological bludgeon that they find a convenient tool for attacking their enemies.  One hears no reasoned arguments against torture.  Instead, in place of reason one finds nothing but the usual pious posing from the “moral high ground.”    In other words, they oppose torture more or less for the same reasons the Bolsheviks opposed it before 1917; because it is a useful political tool. 

What did she know and when did she know it? The torture Nancy Pelosi “didn’t know about,” as described in the Washington Post, November 23, 2005

The rest of us knew about it in 2005. Isn’t it funny how Nancy is only finding out about it now? An excerpt:

“The first three techniques … involve shaking or striking detainees in an effort to cause pain and fear. The fourth consists of forcing a prisoner to stand, handcuffed and with shackled feet, for up to 40 hours. Then comes the ‘cold cell’: Detainees are held naked in a cell cooled to 50 degrees, and periodically doused with cold water. Last is ‘waterboarding,’ a technique that’s already been widely reported. According to the information supplied to ABC: ‘The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.’ ABC quoted its sources as saying that CIA officers who subjected themselves to waterboarding ‘lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in.’ “