On Torture

The United States government has been involved in the torture business for some time. During the 1950s, 60, and 70s, the CIA’s adventures in countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, and Iran, among others, involved training U.S.-backed regimes in enhanced interrogation techniques that were used to suppress and terrorize large portions of the population that might represent government opposition. In some respects, the Bush Administration was not significantly less humane that some of its predecessors. The difference, and the impetus behind much of the current discussion and debate, is that under Bush, torture was no longer carried out by proxy. After September 11, 2001, the monument of the attacks on our soil and the level of American anxiety and outrage eliminated the need for pretense and plausible deniability. Now, torture would be performed by U.S. citizens—government employees and private contractors—in U.S. government facilities.

Debating torture from the standpoint of legality is mostly preposterous, especially when it is preceded by your own administration’s actions to change existing law and certain critical defining terms and designations. The Geneva Conventions, to which the U.S. is a signatory, contains a blanket ban on any form of torture or cruelty, physical or psychological. The U.S. Army’s own Uniform Code of Military Justice expressly forbids cruelty and oppression of prisoners. To circumvent this, the Bush Administration “redefined” their captives in the Global War on Terror as “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war. Counsels in the White House as well as the Justice Department then made the claim that as such, they were not protected under existing codes and conventions. Game on.

Recognizing this, as President Obama certainly does, makes his response to questions during last Wednesday night’s prime time press conference all the more puzzling and slightly distressing. When Jake Tapper of ABC asked the president if he believed that waterboarding was torture and that the previous administration sanctioned torture, Obama stated that he considered waterboarding torture, and then opined long on the corrosive nature of such practices to a people. The second part of the question, he dodged. Tapper asked it again. “I believe that water boarding was torture,” said Obama. “And I think that the… whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake.”

Torture was a mistake? Or the legal rationale for torture was a mistake? If the Bush Administration’s legal rationales were incorrect, does that mean that their actions were illegal? If so, are there consequences? And for whom?

That answer was the kind of weird eggshell tango so mind-numbingly typical of politics and Washington, but not the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from President Obama—something that we hear more often from Bush administration officials attempting to justify the unjustifiable. Like Condoleezza Rice at a reception at Stanford last week, where a young man stated that he’d read that she had authorized waterboarding, and asked her if she thought waterboarding was torture.

“The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture,” said Ms. Rice. “So that’s… and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.” Huh? So, basically, because the president said it was okay, then it was okay? Or because somebody did.

At the Obama press conference, in a follow-up question on the same subject, the president referred to the use of torture as a “shortcut”—implying that, as an information-gathering tool, torture actually yields actionable results, but as a method it’s undesirable. Obama stated that the more important question was, Can we gain the same kind of information through other means—means that don’t undermine our humanitarian values?

One can perhaps understand the president’s desire to avoid fanning a political firestorm in the midst of so many other pressing and dire issues. But that’s really not “the more important question.” There are several questions much more important than that. Like, is torture legal? The president seems to have stated, in an elliptical fashion, that it is not. Is it punishable? And is it morally defensible?

Conservative talk show host Sean Hannity recently volunteered to be waterboarded for charity. My guess is that he had hoped to make a point that waterboarding as a form of torture is not really, well, that torturous. Since then, he has not mentioned his offer again. I don’t really blame him, and any prospect of such a thing actually happening is extremely unlikely. I mean, who do you get to waterboard a talk show host anyway? Do you secure a guest torturer?

It’s probably all for the best. Though I expect the sensation of drowning and suffocating would be distressingly real, his ability to endure it would be entirely at this discretion. But there’s no point in even trying to imagine the act in detail; it’s a grotesque circus stunt that will not, and should not, ever happen.

Still, the suggestion represents the callous and simpleminded kind of showboating that demonstrates a rampant ignorance about the nature and conduct of torture. To truly gain a realistic understanding, Mr. Hannity should instead agree to the following. First, he should be abducted in the middle of the night, bound, affixed with blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones, hooded, thrown in the trunk of a car and driven around for several hours. From there, he is bundled onto a plane and flown somewhere. Once there, he’ll be isolated for several weeks, still goggled and hooded, in a state of sensory deprivation. No sights, no sounds. His captors will scramble any sense he has of time by mixing up his meals—one day they’ll bring him his dinner 30 minutes after he’s had his lunch; another day they’ll bring him nothing at all; another day, they wake him up every time he seems to have fallen asleep and make him eat. He’ll see nothing and hear nothing for many days. After this long spell of sensory deprivation, he’ll be interrogated. They will put in him a room, take off his goggles and headphones, and bombard him with strobe lights and blasting tape loops of heavy metal music, dogs barking, cats meowing, and babies crying. They’ll waterboard him. Then he will go back into isolation and sensory deprivation for another extended period before he’s interrogated again.

Two or three months of this kind of enhanced interrogation will provide Mr. Hannity with a pretty good idea of what it’s like for several hundred detainees in Guantanamo. The principle difference will be that some of those detainees have been enduring this for years, not just weeks or months. (Actually, Mr. Hannity won’t have much idea of anything—he’d most likely have the mental competence of a five-year-old after all this. And this points up one the difficulties inherent in closing Guantanamo; portions of the facility are being used to house detainees who have been tortured, through these methods, into permanently delusional and profoundly regressed states. A great many of them can’t be released into society not because they’re dangerous, but because they’ve been psychologically destroyed through sensory deprivation and interrogation—literally driven out of their minds. So much for intelligence gathering.)

Here’s the thing about the torture discussions and debates taking place in the media right now. The conversations always focus on very specific acts or details of conditions—an instance of waterboarding; the placing of an insect in a detainee’s cell, etc. Specific “acts” of torture are debated free of the full context of what it is like to be an “enemy combatant” detainee. As if waterboarding is an entirely isolated act of mistreatment. When the truth is, waterboarding is merely a detail in an endless, unremitting program of abuse, schematic disorientation, and abominable conditions. The question should not be, Is waterboarding torture, but rather, Is torture torture?

And the answer is, Yes, it is. Torture is a fairly widely understood concept. Anything designed to cause suffering in an individual in order to gain information or to change the way he thinks and behaves is torture. Detainees at Guantanamo and other government “black sites” are not simply prisoners. They’re often subjects of around-the-clock physical and psychological abuse that carries on for months and, in some cases, years. If it ever began as such, can anyone believe that it continued to be about gathering information?

I’m not enthused about playing the devil’s advocate on such a topic (I’d much rather play the devil; it’s a meatier role and much more interesting), but in an effort to understand the actions of the Bush administration—along with the acquiescence of so many Americans and members of Congress—I’ve tried to imagine what the world must have felt like for our leaders after September 11, 2001. And I have to believe that the prospects at those moments were all pretty terrifying. Further attacks must have seemed not just possible, but likely. Having failed in their responsibility to protect us from what had just occurred (for which we never received an apology from our government), allowing follow-on attacks and acts of terror had to be prevented at all costs. In the fresh, grim aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, torturing a terrorist to save American lives does not seem such a cold-blooded and repugnant policy.

Ms. Rice said as much in that same interview with Stanford students: “Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemma you faced in trying to protect Americans.” Nevertheless, that dilemma still exists today, absent the immediate post-attack shock and panic. In many respects, that dilemma may be even thornier now than it was then, in light of the previous administration’s conduct. Pursuing un-American behavior (torture, prosecuting an unjustified war under false pretenses) only sowed deeper seeds of anti-American sentiment in farther reaches.

And so, here we are: a cautious optimism both at home and abroad about the form and content a new American image might take; a studied watch over just how we plan on cleaning up our messes. Following legal paths back through the torture legacy with the intent of punishing those who operated outside the bounds of law or America’s inherent sense of its own decency can stir up a divisiveness and distraction that could derail the president’s agenda and erode some of his support. But it would be cynical to consider the president’s tiptoeing through torture issues and questions as purely political calculus: as a candidate, Obama vowed to close Guantanamo and end the use of torture. He made no promise to pursue or punish its perpetrators. At the same time, we can’t overlook that we are a nation of laws, and that those who serve at our pleasure in even the highest levels of government are bound by them.