[Peace-discuss] The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Published on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by TomDispatch.com
	Unexceptional Americans: Why We Can't See the Trees or the Forest
	The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia
	by Noam Chomsky

The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and 
surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that 
Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be 
beyond the reach of the law -- a place, incidentally, that Washington is using 
in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons 
were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same 
expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites," or secret 
prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.

More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of 
the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial 
ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new republic 
-- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that 
torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and 
economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of 
other great powers.

Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those 
Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright 
critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to 
be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly 
betrayed everything our nation stands for." To say the least, that common view 
reflects a rather slanted version of American history.

Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and "what we do" has been 
forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand 
was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a 
classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the 
standard view that the U.S. has a "transcendent purpose": establishing peace and 
freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since "the arena within which the United 
States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But as a 
scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically 
inconsistent with that "transcendent purpose."

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not 
"confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved 
"national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect 
it." What actually happened was merely the "abuse of reality."

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New 
York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American 
Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the 
U.S. is "just one great, but imperfect, country among others." Cohen agrees that 
the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, but nonetheless regards as 
fundamentally mistaken Hodgson's failure to understand that "America was born as 
an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward." The American idea is 
revealed in the country's birth as a "city on a hill," an "inspirational notion" 
that resides "deep in the American psyche," and by "the distinctive spirit of 
American individualism and enterprise" demonstrated in the Western expansion. 
Hodgson's error, it seems, is that he is keeping to "the distortions of the 
American idea," "the abuse of reality."

Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea" of America from its earliest days.

"Come Over and Help Us"

The inspirational phrase "city on a hill" was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, 
borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation 
"ordained by God." One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its 
Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that 
scroll are the words "Come over and help us." The British colonists were thus 
pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable 
natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of "the idea of America," 
from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed 
on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of 
all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald 
Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a "shining city on the 
hill," while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in 
office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of "humanitarian intervention," to use 
the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the 
"humanitarian intervention" led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. 
The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described "the utter extirpation 
of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means "more 
destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico 
and Peru."

Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John 
Quincy Adams deplored the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which 
we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty... among the 
heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to 
judgement." The "merciless and perfidious cruelty" continued until "the West was 
won." Instead of God's judgment, the heinous sins today bring only praise for 
the fulfillment of the American "idea."

The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed that "individualism and 
enterprise," so praised by Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the 
cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the 
respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for 
intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record "of conquest, colonization, and 
territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century," and urged 
that it is "not to be curbed now," as the Cubans too were pleading, in the Great 
Seal's words, "come over and help us."

Their plea was answered. The U.S. sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba's 
liberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained until 
1959.

The "American idea" was illustrated further by the remarkable campaign, 
initiated by the Eisenhower administration virtually at once to restore Cuba to 
its proper place, after Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, finally 
liberating the island from foreign domination, with enormous popular support, as 
Washington ruefully conceded. What followed was economic warfare with the 
clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban population so that they would 
overthrow the disobedient Castro government, invasion, the dedication of the 
Kennedy brothers to bringing "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba (the phrase of 
historian Arthur Schlesinger in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who considered 
that task one of his highest priorities), and other crimes continuing to the 
present, in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and 
Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard 
Porter calls "the saltwater fallacy," the idea that conquest only becomes 
imperialism when it crosses saltwater. Thus, if the Mississippi had resembled 
the Irish Sea, Western expansion would have been imperialism. From George 
Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer 
grasp of just what they were doing.

After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next step in 
the mission assigned by Providence was to confer "the blessings of liberty and 
civilization upon all the rescued peoples" of the Philippines (in the words of 
the platform of Lodge's Republican party) -- at least those who survived the 
murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and other atrocities that 
accompanied it. These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the 
U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of 
colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for 
sophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence. Similar models 
would be adopted in many other areas where the U.S. imposed brutal National 
Guards and other client forces.

The Torture Paradigm

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA's "torture 
paradigm," developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to 
historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture 
methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the 
infamous photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title 
of Jennifer Harbury's penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: Truth, 
Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, 
when investigators of the Bush gang's descent into the global sewers lament that 
"in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way."

None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce 
important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed 
out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own 
government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out 
some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: 
"What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage 
of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the 
system's torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could 
stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so."

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely 
repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to 
the victims. "[H]is is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the 
torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more 
U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."

Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980 
study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid "has tended to flow 
disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their 
citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental 
human rights." Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and 
also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate 
with a favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the 
murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such 
actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of 
human rights.

These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth 
studying because the correlations were so clear.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward -- a 
convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them 
tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

Adopting Bush's Positions

An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA's "torture paradigm" 
never violated the 1984 Torture Convention, at least as Washington interpreted 
it. McCoy points out that the highly sophisticated CIA paradigm developed at 
enormous cost in the 1950s and 1960s, based on the "KGB's most devastating 
torture technique," kept primarily to mental torture, not crude physical 
torture, which was considered less effective in turning people into pliant 
vegetables.

McCoy writes that the Reagan administration then carefully revised the 
International Torture Convention "with four detailed diplomatic 'reservations' 
focused on just one word in the convention's 26-printed pages," the word 
"mental." He continues: "These intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations 
re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory 
deprivation and self-inflicted pain -- the very techniques the CIA had refined 
at such great cost."

When Clinton sent the UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he 
included the Reagan reservations. The president and Congress therefore exempted 
the core of the CIA torture paradigm from the U.S. interpretation of the Torture 
Convention; and those reservations, McCoy observes, were "reproduced verbatim in 
domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention." That is 
the "political land mine" that "detonated with such phenomenal force" in the Abu 
Ghraib scandal and in the shameful Military Commissions Act that was passed with 
bipartisan support in 2006.

Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facie 
violations of international law, and several of his extremist innovations were 
struck down by the Courts. While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our 
unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially 
reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene v. 
Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush 
administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo are not entitled to the right 
of habeas corpus.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve 
the power to abduct people from around the world" and imprison them without due 
process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at 
Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our 
most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game 
-- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional 
rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with 
no judicial process."

Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that, in two 
sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this 
issue," arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in 
the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United 
Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind -- as 
long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo."

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama 
position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to 
Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The Obama administration announced that it 
would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama's Department of Justice, Greenwald 
concludes, "squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, 
pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and 
due-process-less detentions," in radical violation of Obama's campaign promises 
and earlier stands.

The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld appears to be following a similar trajectory. The 
plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for 
their torture in Guantanamo, where they were sent after being captured by Uzbeki 
warlord Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to 
Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious thug, was then a 
leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported by Russia, Iran, 
India, Turkey, and the Central Asian states, and the U.S. as it attacked 
Afghanistan in October 2001.

Dostum turned them over to U.S. custody, allegedly for bounty money. The Bush 
administration sought to have the case dismissed. Recently, Obama's Department 
of Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials 
are not liable for torture and other violations of due process, on the grounds 
that the Courts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners enjoy.

It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to revive military 
commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the 
Bush years. There is a reason, according to William Glaberson of the New York 
Times: "Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers 
have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some 
terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to 
prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to 
use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies." A serious flaw in the 
criminal justice system, it appears.

Creating Terrorists

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting 
information -- the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then 
it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured U.S. pilot 
Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane delivering aid to 
U.S.-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, 
and then sent him back to the U.S., as they did. Instead, they should have 
applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other 
terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small 
matter for a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the global 
superpower.

By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief 
terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then U.S. ambassador in Honduras (later 
appointed as the first Director of National Intelligence, essentially 
counterterrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur), they should have done the 
same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro 
government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to 
bring up what their victims should have done to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, 
and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda in the 
dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further 
"ticking bomb" attacks.

Such considerations never seem to arise in public discussion.

There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism, is 
benign, deriving as it does from the city on the hill.

Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were 
discovered that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is, in 
fact, the conclusion drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], one of the 
most seasoned U.S. interrogators in Iraq, who elicited "the information that led 
to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of 
al-Qa'ida in Iraq," correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports.

Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration's harsh 
interrogation methods: "The use of torture by the U.S.," he believes, not only 
elicits no useful information but "has proved so counter-productive that it may 
have led to the death of as many U.S. soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11." 
 From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters 
came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and that 
they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist 
acts for the same reasons.

There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald 
Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of 
Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantanamo on the charge of "engaging in 
two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance." He ended up in Afghanistan 
after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians.

After four years of brutal treatment in Guantanamo, he was returned to Kuwait. 
He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into 
an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and 13 soldiers -- "the single most 
heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee," according to 
the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his 
abusive imprisonment.

All much as a reasonable person would expect.

Unexceptional Americans

Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the "war on terror" that 
Bush declared after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law 
"quaint" and "obsolete" -- so George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel 
Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney General. The doctrine has been widely 
reiterated in one form or another in commentary and analysis.

The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where the guns 
were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was the 
first attack of any consequence on the national territory of the United States 
since the British burned down Washington in 1814.

Another unique feature was the scale of terror perpetrated by a non-state actor.

Horrifying as it was, however, it could have been worse. Suppose that the 
perpetrators had bombed the White House, killed the president, and established a 
vicious military dictatorship that killed 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured 
700,000, set up a huge international terror center that carried out 
assassinations and helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere, 
and implemented economic doctrines that so radically dismantled the economy that 
the state had to virtually take it over a few years later.

That would indeed have been far worse than September 11, 2001. And it happened 
in Salvador Allende's Chile in what Latin Americans often call "the first 9/11" 
in 1973. (The numbers above were changed to per-capita U.S. equivalents, a 
realistic way of measuring crimes.) Responsibility for the military coup against 
Allende can be traced straight back to Washington. Accordingly, the otherwise 
quite appropriate analogy is out of consciousness here in the U.S., while the 
facts are consigned to the "abuse of reality" that the naïve call "history."

It should also be recalled that Bush did not declare the "war on terror," he 
re-declared it. Twenty years earlier, President Reagan's administration came 
into office declaring that a centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on 
terror, "the plague of the modern age" and "a return to barbarism in our time" 
-- to sample the fevered rhetoric of the day.

That first U.S. war on terror has also been deleted from historical 
consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the 
canon: hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the ruined countries of Central 
America and many more elsewhere, among them an estimated 1.5 million dead in the 
terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan's favored ally, 
apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela's African 
National Congress (ANC), one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," 
as Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be added that, 20 years 
later, Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of terrorist 
organizations, so that Mandela is now, at last, able to enter the U.S. without 
obtaining a waiver from the government.

The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called "American 
exceptionalism." It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to a universal 
habit among imperial powers. France was hailing its "civilizing mission" in its 
colonies, while the French Minister of War called for "exterminating the 
indigenous population" of Algeria. Britain's nobility was a "novelty in the 
world," John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay no 
longer in completing its liberation of India.

Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists in 
the 1930s, who were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China under benign 
Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking and their "burn all, 
loot all, kill all" campaigns in rural North China. History is replete with 
similar glorious episodes.

As long as such "exceptionalist" theses remain firmly implanted, however, the 
occasional revelations of the "abuse of history" often backfire, serving only to 
efface terrible crimes. The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly 
greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while 
indignation in this country was largely focused on this single crime.

Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably 
worse crimes at home and abroad, including the FBI-organized assassination of 
black organizer Fred Hampton as part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or 
the bombing of Cambodia, to mention just two egregious examples. Torture is 
hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq was a far worse crime. Quite commonly, 
selective atrocities have this function.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines 
moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for 
crimes that still lie ahead.

© 2009 Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many 
books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a 
long-time participant in activist movements.

[Note: A slightly longer version of this piece, fully footnoted, will be posted 
at Chomsky.info within 48 hours.]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/19-7