- I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture
in action at an event honouring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is
the world's most famous victim of "rendition", the process by
which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching
planes in New York when US interrogators detained him and "rendered"
him to Syria, where he was held for 10 months in a cell slightly larger
than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings.
-
- Arar was being honoured for his courage by the Canadian
Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organisation.
The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear
mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders
kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some
speakers were unable even to mention the honoured guest by name, as if
he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: the tenuous
"evidence" - later discredited - that landed Arar in a rat-infested
cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful
software engineer and family man, who is safe?
-
- In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly.
He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to
gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating
Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats,
harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, "not a single
person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so."
Fear of being the next Maher Arar.
-
- The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United
States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records
of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of
terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present
threat of torture, the message is clear: you are being watched, your neighbour
may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep,
you could disappear on to a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep
dark hole that is Guantanamo Bay", to borrow a phrase from Michael
Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights.
-
- But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people
being intimidated need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that
they demand justice. This helps explain why the defence department will
release certain kinds of seemingly incriminating information about Guantanamo
- pictures of men in cages, for instance - at the same time that it acts
to suppress photographs on a par with what escaped from Abu Ghraib. And
it might also explain why the Pentagon approved a new book by a former
military translator, including the passages about prisoners being sexually
humiliated, but prevented him from writing about the widespread use of
attack dogs. This strategic leaking of information, combined with official
denials, induces a state of mind that Argentinians describe as "knowing/not
knowing", a vestige of their "dirty war".
-
- 'Obviously, intelligence agents have an incentive to
hide the use of unlawful methods," says Jameel Jaffer of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "On the other hand, when they use rendition
and torture as a threat, it's undeniable that they benefit, in some sense,
from the fact that people know that intelligence agents are willing to
act unlawfully. They benefit from the fact that people understand the threat
and believe it to be credible."
-
- And the threats have been received. In an affidavit filed
with an ACLU court challenge to section 215 of the Patriot Act, Nazih Hassan,
president of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor in Michigan,
describes this new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations
are way down, board members have resigned - Hassan says his members avoid
doing anything that could get their names on lists. One member testified
anonymously that he has "stopped speaking out on political and social
issues" because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself.
-
- This is torture's true purpose: to terrorise - not only
the people in Guantanamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also,
and more importantly, the broader community that hears about these abuses.
Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist - the individual
prisoner's will and the collective will.
-
- This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO
Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors
that noted: "Perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture
and ill-treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualisations
obscure the purpose of torture ... The aim of torture is to dehumanise
the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time set horrific examples
for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can
break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."
-
- Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues
to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable
way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror. But there's
a problem: no one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool
-least of all the people who practise it. Torture "doesn't work. There
are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told
the Senate intelligence committee on February 16. And a recently declassified
memo written by an FBI official in Guantanamo states that extreme coercion
produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative
techniques". The army's own interrogation field manual states that
force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator
wants to hear".
-
- And yet the abuses keep on coming - Uzbekistan as the
new hotspot for renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported
to Iraq. And the only sensible explanation for torture's persistent popularity
comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu
Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had
forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control
them," she replied.
-
- Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust.
But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture.
-
- * A version of this article is published in The Nation
www.thenation.com
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1483893,00.html
-
-
- Comment
- From Paul S. Szymanski
- 5-16-5
-
- Jeff,
-
- The author has it right. And there is more which may
not be obvious at first glance. Recall in Orwell's '1984' when O'Brian,
Winston Smith's torturer, told him the reason he was being treated this
way. I don't have the exact quote handy but it was something like, "Pain
for the sake of pain. Torture for the sake of torture. Power for the sake
of power. Now do you understand?"
-
- Yet, there is another reason few have mentioned which
is simple and has little to do with those being tortured. The system that
orders the torture discovers who are unwilling to inflict it, who are willing
and, perhaps most important, who are good at it and enjoy it. Those who
are unwilling are not punished but are simply found other jobs. The system
makes special note of those who are effective torturers and those who sadistically
enjoy their work. These people are noted for they will be useful when the
work gets more difficult. Say, when one's own citizens must be "influenced."
F.A. Hayek writes in more detail of this principle in his excellent book
'The Road to Serfdom'.
-
- Paul Szymanski
- Eugene, Oregon
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