Monday, October 22, 2007

Torture and Complicity

I read and was outraged by Jane Mayer's article in the New Yorker detailing the C.I.A.'s torture program at black sites. It details a scientifically executed program of torture by agency professionals who, called upon to "get answers" by the administration, dusted off information gleaned from behavioral experiments in the 1950s to produce a chillingly exact system for breaking down human subjects.

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”


The article goes on to detail how suspects were kidnapped, taken to black sites, and then subjected to sensory deprivation, nudity, prolonged periods of loud unbearable noise, hypothermic conditions, waterboarding (which is simulated drowning), among other things. Not surprisingly, those carrying out this program were concerned by the legal ramifications of their actions and so everything inflicted on the prisoners was noted and approved by the chain of command. However, the use of forms, approvals, and other trappings of the banality of corporate America, do not create a morally justifiable program of interrogation. Those who would defend the tactics employed by agency officials would be hard pressed to justify a system whose effects over the course of months are so severe that suicide is frequently attepted by prisoners who, lacking any better means of committing the act, have resorted to trying to beat themselves to death by banging their head aganst concrete walls to the point of unconsciousness.

I knew all of this and I felt sick. I read Frank Rich's excellent column in the New York Times, The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us, in which he points out that we are all complicit in our nation's flagrant abuses of human rights and international laws because we have done nothing. And yet, although the story was nothing new to me, watching Rendition's sadly accurate story of an innocent man abducted by American officials and taken to an unnamed African country to be tortured for information based on a possible link to an Egyptian terrorist this weekend still had a profound effect on me. Maybe it's a credit to the medium that it was so effective, but watching the movie did what none of my news tracking had done before. It made me ask the question, "What am I doing about it?" For some reason, I had never before quite realized that right this moment innocent men, wrongfully and illegally abducted by Americans without the benefit of due process, are shivering in cold darkness without any hope of seeing a familiar face again. All of my self-congratulatory awareness of the problem doesn't do shit for the guy who's slowly losing his mind being asked questions he can't answer by people whose payroll is financed in part by my tax dollars. It had always felt just a bit abstract.

Supporters of what is currently being called enhanced interrogation techniques like to conjure up our war of civilizations against an enemy that is different than any we have ever faced. The defense, and indeed the general motivation behind the program, is basically that terrorists can strike at any moment and as they demonstrated on September 11th have the ability to kill thousands of Americans. Given this new threat, we can't afford to leave any stone unturned in our hunt for terrorists. The immediacy of the danger means that we have to be willing to get tough, be real, and get answers anyway possible. According to this logic, if that means throwing out the Geneva Conventions and Habeus Corpus then that's what we'll do to prevent another catastrophic attack. For me, however, this line of reasoning runs into murky waters for several reasons. First, not everyone who's being subjected to this treatment is guilty. Second, torture has time and time again been shown to be ineffective. More importantly, regardless of the first two points, is this who we are as a people? As a nation, we are outraged by the winning at all costs mentality that leads to blood doping and corporate stock scandals. How then can we not be similarly outraged by an intelligence program founded in the same mentality, which as a consequence shows an absolute disregard for human rights?

At the beginning of the War On Terror, in a moment bit of free market inspiration, we offered cash rewards for tips on members of terrorist groups. This led equally innovative entrepreneurs in countries such as Pakistan to povide tips to U.S. officials about their rivals and enemies. Anger one of these budding free market enthusiasts and you might well find yourself in jail for alleged ties to extremist groups as the NPR show "This American Life" revealed in Habeus Schmabeas in 2006. This episode relates the stories of men who were wrongfully imprisoned in Guantanamo. In stark contrast with the administration's claims that the only people there are "the bad guys" a significant number of Guantanomo detainees are not terrorists. A Seton Hall study cited in the show found that less than 5% of the detainees studied were even captured by Americans on the battlefield. Less than 8% were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. This is not to say that everyone abducted by soldiers in the War On Terrorism are innocent, but how are we to tell? Of course, Guantanamo isn't the only American prison in which people have been unlawfully detained... there are also the black sites that we weren't supposed to know about. So how are we to tell if those were populated mostly by actual terrorists? Amnesty International keeps a list of some people who have wrongfully detained and there have been other cases of people wrongfully imprisoned such as that of Khalid El-Masri. But the complete lack of transparency makes it difficult to make an accurate assessment. The only thing that is clear from these cases is that there are a lot of innocent people being tortured and held indefinitely without reason and no recourse in a court of law.

One actual terrorist who we do know was detained is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was without question a "bad guy". Unfortunately, even in the cases where we have the right guy, torture proves problematic as a means of gathering useful information. Aside from the obvious moral issues in play, it doesn't work. Repeatedly, seasoned interrogators have asserted that torture is an ineffective means of gathering actionable intelligence (Google it). As Mayer's notes in the New Yorker, Khalid Shake Mohammed's confession became confused by what he confessed to,

Perhaps under duress, he claimed involvement in thirty-one criminal plots—an improbable number, even for a high-level terrorist. Critics say that Mohammed’s case illustrates the cost of the C.I.A.’s desire for swift intelligence. Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the top defense lawyer at the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, which is expected eventually to try Mohammed for war crimes, called his serial confessions “a textbook example of why we shouldn’t allow coercive methods.”


And since we are not only interrogating actual terrorists but also innocent men, torture often nets false confessions and fake intelligence designed to please the interrogator and end the pain. So we get inaccurate information from actual terrorists in addition to false confessions from innocent men.

Still, even if we were only capturing guilty men and torture was an effective means of gathering intelligence, I have to echo the fundamental question that Michael Moore asks us in regards to Health Care in Sicko: Who are we? Are we so seduced by our own rhetoric that we are blind to how we look to the rest of the world. In a country that we like to think of as a beacon for freedom, justice, and liberty for all, why are we so quick to throw these virtues out? How can we ignore the fundamental principles upon which our democracy was founded? How, after this display, can we look other countries in the eye and scold them for human rights abuses? We may not be the Chinese government in Tianemen square rolling over a protester with a tank, but how far from a global secret police are we? When Thomas Jefferson said, "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.", it wasn't a defense of the press's ability to publish trashy gossip columns and make personal attacks on public figures, these were side-effects. Jefferson knew that the only defense against tyranny in a democracy was a press which through its reporting kept the activities of the government transparent to its citizens. And so when our government abducts men in secret and creates secret policies advocating the use of torture at undisclosed locations, and inquiries into the government's practices are prevented by claims of endangering national security, where does that leave our democracy? Is it acceptable because most of the people imprisoned are not American? I hope not.

And all of this brings me back to the question that the movie left me with. What am I doing about this? I wondered if the movie alone was bringing more visibility to torture. So I plotted a report on Google Trends that shows over time the volume of search queries on different search terms: Abu Graihb, torture, and rendition.



As it shows, there was a huge increase in google searches on torture when the Abu Graihb scandal broke, but now although searches on rendition have increased since the release of the movie, there hasn't been a corresponding increase in searches on torture. So, although it's early, the movie doesn't seem to have led to increased interest in the torture issue, at least not on google. To add perspective to the search volumes, I plotted these against another search term to give some context about the level of interest in the torture scandal in the U.S.



And still, where do I go from here? Writing a blog posting isn't going to help. I may write to my congressman, but I'm fairly positive that that won't help. The best answer that I've had so far is donating and/or getting involved with Amnesty Internation, which has setup a campaign specifically for human right's abuses in the War On Terror. Unfortunately, reading through the campaign's website doesn't give me a huge amount of hope that there are many ideas of how to tackle the problem, inspiring as a virtual flotilla is. But I guess getting 30,000 people to board a fake flotilla is a start, and in digitally boarding it each one of those people has done more than I have so far.