[Peace-discuss] Our amnesiac torture debate

[Paul Patton]

 *Published on Friday, December 9, 2005 by The
Nation<http://www.thenation.com/>
*
  *'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate *
  *by Naomi Klein*


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 <http://www.americanprogress.org/> 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.

*Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand
Bullies<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312421435/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>(Picador)
and, most recently, Fences
and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization
Debate<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312307993/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>(Picador).
*

(c) 2005 The Nation
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