'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture
Debate
by Naomi Klein
The Nation magazine, December
26, 2005
It was the "Mission Accomplished"
of George W. Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude
called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right
backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration?
With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown
Panama City.
It was certainly bold. An hour and a
half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious
School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational
institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We
do torture." It is here in Panama and, later, at the school's
new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the
current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified
training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from
across the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive
interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo
and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate
hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation,
sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation,
extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions--and worse.
In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted
that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of
guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."
Some of the Panama school's graduates
returned to their countries to commit the continent's greatest
war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop
Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, the systematic
theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners,
the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador and
military coups too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that
choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a
little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United
States a nation of vegetarians.
And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream
news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How
could they? To do so would require something totally absent from
the current debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by
US officials long predates the Bush Administration and has in
fact been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.
It's a history that has been exhaustively
documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA
training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his
upcoming book A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes
this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an indispensable and
riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric
patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for
what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory deprivation
and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested
by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then
imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training
programs.
It's not only apologists for torture
who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few
bad apples"--so too do many of torture's most prominent opponents.
Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold
war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe
to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing
prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001,
at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo
apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of
Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment,
we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity
intact.
The principal propagator of this narrative
(what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is
Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need
for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner
of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were
different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed,
would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment
of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the
time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the
Phoenix program and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating
forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more
than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more,"
a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as
well as Congressional and Senate probes.
Does it somehow lessen the horrors of
today to admit that this is not the first time the US government
has used torture to wipe out its political opponents--that it
has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported
regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out
of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were traded
and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November
8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim
to the House of Representatives that "America has never had
a question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins,
expressing her shock that the United States is running a prison
gulag, wrote that "it's just this one administration...and
even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Dick Cheney."
And in the November issue of Harper's, William Pfaff argues that
what truly sets the Bush Administration apart from its predecessors
is "its installation of torture as integral to American military
and clandestine operations." Pfaff acknowledges that long
before Abu Ghraib, there were those who claimed that the School
of the Americas was a "torture school," but he says
that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so."
Perhaps it's time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks
coaching illegal torture techniques, all readily available in
both Spanish and English, as well as the hair-raising list of
SOA grads.
Other cultures deal with a legacy of
torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans
insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never
Before"? I suspect it has to do with a sincere desire to
convey the seriousness of this Administration's crimes. And the
Bush Administration's open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented--but
let's be clear about what is unprecedented about it: not the torture
but the openness. Past administrations tactfully kept their "black
ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were practiced
in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush Administration
has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture
without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws.
Despite all the talk of outsourced torture,
the Bush Administration's real innovation has been its in-sourcing,
with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and
transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure
from clandestine etiquette, more than the actual crimes, that
has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms:
By daring to torture unapologetically and out in the open, Bush
has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.
For those nervously wondering if it is
time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this
shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practiced
but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope
that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture
is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it
is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical
person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to
search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger)
of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens
inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream
all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going
to save them.
In Latin America the revelations of US
torture in Iraq have not been met with shock and disbelief but
with powerful déjà vu and reawakened fears. Hector
Mondragon, a Colombian activist who was tortured in the 1970s
by an officer trained at the School of the Americas, wrote: "It
was hard to see the photos of the torture in Iraq because I too
was tortured. I saw myself naked with my feet fastened together
and my hands tied behind my back. I saw my own head covered with
a cloth bag. I remembered my feelings--the humiliation, pain."
Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured in a Guatemalan
jail, said, "I could not even stand to look at those photographs...so
many of the things in the photographs had also been done to me.
I was tortured with a frightening dog and also rats. And they
were always filming."
Ortiz has testified that the men who
raped her and burned her with cigarettes more than 100 times deferred
to a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent whom they called
"Boss." It is one of many stories told by prisoners
in Latin America of mysterious English-speaking men walking in
and out of their torture cells, proposing questions, offering
tips. Several of these cases are documented in Jennifer Harbury's
powerful new book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way.
Some of the countries that were mauled
by US-sponsored torture regimes have tried to repair their social
fabric through truth commissions and war crimes trials. In most
cases, justice has been elusive, but past abuses have been entered
into the official record and entire societies have asked themselves
questions not only about individual responsibility but collective
complicity. The United States, though an active participant in
these "dirty wars," has gone through no parallel process
of national soul-searching.
The result is that the memory of US complicity
in far-away crimes remains fragile, living on in old newspaper
articles, out-of-print books and tenacious grassroots initiatives
like the annual protests outside the School of the Americas (which
has been renamed but remains largely unchanged). The terrible
irony of the anti-historicism of the current torture debate is
that in the name of eradicating future abuses, these past crimes
are being erased from the record. Every time Americans repeat
the fairy tale about their pre-Cheney innocence, these already
hazy memories fade even further. The hard evidence still exists,
of course, carefully archived in the tens of thousands of declassified
documents available from the National Security Archive. But inside
US collective memory, the disappeared are being disappeared all
over again.
This casual amnesia does a profound disservice
not only to the victims of these crimes but also to the cause
of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and
for all. Already there are signs that the Administration will
deal with the current torture uproar by returning to the cold
war model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects
every "individual in the custody or under the physical control
of the United States Government"; it says nothing about torture
training or buying information from the exploding industry of
for-profit interrogators. And in Iraq the dirty work is already
being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by US commanders
like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similarly
lawless units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising
Iraq's Interior Ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners
were recently discovered in a Ministry dungeon, some tortured
so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign
country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He
sounded just like the CIA's William Colby, who when asked in a
1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix--a
program he helped launch--replied that it was now "entirely
a South Vietnamese program."
And that's the problem with pretending
that the Bush Administration invented torture. "If you don't
understand the history and the depths of the institutional and
public complicity," says McCoy, "then you can't begin
to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond
to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus--closing
a prison, shutting down a program, even demanding the resignation
of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But, McCoy says, "they
will preserve the prerogative to torture."
The Center for American Progress has
just launched an advertising campaign called "Torture is
not US." The hard truth is that for at least five decades
it has been. But it doesn't have to be.
Torture watch
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