DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Torture an all-American
nightmare By Peter Van Buren
If you look backward you see a nightmare.
If you look forward you become the nightmare.
There's one particular nightmare that
citizens of the United States need to face: in the
first decade of the 21st century we tortured
people as national policy. One day, we're going to
have to confront the reality of what that meant,
of what effect it had on its victims and on us,
too, we who condoned, supported, or at least
allowed it to happen, either passively or with
guilty (or guiltless) gusto.
If not,
torture won't go away. It can't be disappeared
like the body of a political prisoner, or
conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it
elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing
our bureaucratic eyes.
After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by
staring directly into the nightmare that changed
us - that, like it or not, helped make us who we
now are.
The president, a Nobel Peace
Prize winner, has made it clear that no further
investigations or inquiries will be made into
America's decade of torture. His Justice
Department failed to prosecute a single torturer
or any of those who helped cover up evidence of
the torture practices. But it did deliver a jail
sentence to one ex-CIA officer who refused to be
trained to torture and was among the first at the
CIA to publicly admit that the torture program was
real.
At what passes for trials at our
prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, disclosure of the
details of torture is forbidden, effectively
preventing anyone from learning anything about
what the CIA did with its victims. We are
encouraged to do what's best for the United States
of America and, as Barack Obama put it, "look
forward, not backward", with the same zeal as,
after 9/11, we were encouraged to save America by
going shopping.
Looking into the eyes
of the tortured Torture does not leave its
victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones
it. As an act, it is all about pain, but even more
about degradation and humiliation. It destroys its
victims, but also demeans those who perpetrate it.
I know, because in the course of my 24 years as a
State Department officer, I spoke with two men who
had been tortured, both by allies of the United
States and with at least the tacit approval of
Washington.
While these men were tortured,
Americans in a position to know chose to look the
other way for reasons of politics. These men were
not movie characters, but complex flesh-and-blood
human beings. Meet just one of them once and, I
assure you, you'll never follow the president's
guidance and move forward trying to forget.
The Korean poet The first victim
was a Korean poet. I was in South Korea at the
time as a visa officer working for the State
Department at the US Embassy in Seoul. Persons
with serious criminal records are normally
ineligible to travel to the United States. There
is, however, an exception in the law for political
crimes. It was initially carved out for Soviet
dissidents during the Cold War years. I spoke to
the poet as he applied for a visa to determine if
his arrest had indeed been "political" and so not
a disqualification for his trip to the US.
Under the brutal military dictatorship of
Park Chung-hee, the poet was tortured for writing
anti-government verse. To younger Americans, South
Korea is the land of "Gangnam Style", of
fashionable clothing and cool, cool electronics.
However, within the lifetime of Gangnam star Psy,
his nation was ruled by a series of military
autocrats supported by the United States in the
interest of "national security".
The poet
quietly explained to me that, after his work came
to the notice of the powers that be, he was taken
from his apartment to a small underground cell.
Soon, two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on
his testicles and sodomized him with one of the
tools they had used for the beating. They asked
him no questions. In fact, he said, they barely
spoke to him at all.
Though the pain was
beyond his ability to describe, even as a poet, he
said that the humiliation of being left so utterly
helpless was what remained with him for life,
destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated
empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever
again putting pen to paper.
The men who
destroyed him, he told me, entered the room, did
their work, and then departed, as if they had many
others to visit that day and needed to get on with
things. The poet was released a few days later and
politely driven back to his apartment by the
police in a forward-looking gesture, as if the
episode of torture was over and to be forgotten.
The Iraqi tribal leader The
second torture victim I met while I was stationed
at a forward operating base in Iraq. He was a
well-known leader of Sons of Iraq (SOI). The SOI
were Sunni tribesmen who, as part of Iraq war
commander General David Petraeus's much-discussed
"Anbar Awakening" agreed to stop killing Americans
and, in return for money we paid them, take up
arms against al-Qaeda. That was 2007. By 2010,
when I met the man, the Sons of Iraq, as Sunnis,
had no friends in the Shia-dominated government of
Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad and the US was
expediently allowing its Sunni friendships to fade
away.
Over dessert one sticky afternoon,
the SOI leader told me that he had recently been
released from prison. He explained that the
government had wanted him off the street in the
run-up to a recent election, so that he would not
use his political pull to get in the way of a Shia
victory. The prison that held him was a secret
one, he told me, under the control of some shadowy
part of the US-trained Iraqi security forces.
He had been tortured by agents of the
Maliki government, supported by the United States
in the interest of national security. Masked men
bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him
upside-down. He said that they neither asked him
any questions nor demanded any information. They
whipped his testicles with a leather strap, then
beat the bottoms of his feet and the area around
his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the
bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece
of rebar that would ordinarily have been used to
reinforce concrete.
It was painful, he
told me, but he had felt pain before. What truly
wounded him was the feeling of utter helplessness.
A man like himself, he stated with an echo of
pride, had never felt helpless. His strength was
his ability to control things, to stand up to
enemies, to fight, and if necessary, to order men
to their deaths.
Now, he no longer slept
well at night, was less interested in life and its
activities, and felt little pleasure. He showed me
his blackened toenails, as well as the caved-in
portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like
indentation with faint signs of metal grooves.
When he paused and looked across the room, I
thought I could almost see the movie running in
his head.
Alone in the dark I
encountered those two tortured men, who described
their experiences so similarly, several years and
thousands of miles apart. All they really had in
common was being tortured and meeting me. They
could, of course, have been lying about, or
exaggerating, what had happened to them. I have no
way to verify their stories because in neither
country were their torturers ever brought to
justice.
One man was tortured because he
was considered a threat to South Korea, the other
to Iraq. Those "threatened" governments were among
the company the US keeps, and they were known
torturers, regularly justifying such horrific
acts, as we would also do in the first years of
the 21st century, in the name of security.
In our case, actual torture techniques
would reportedly be demonstrated to some of the
highest officials in the land in the White House
itself, then "legalized" and carried out in global
"black sites" and foreign prisons.
A
widely praised new movie about the assassination
of Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, opens
with a series of torture scenes. The victims are
various Muslims and al-Qaeda suspects, and the
torturers are members of the US government working
for the CIA. We see a prisoner strapped to the
wall, bloody, with his pants pulled down in front
of a female CIA officer. We see another having
water poured into his mouth and lungs until he
wretches in agony (in what during the Middle Ages
was bluntly called "the Water Torture", later "the
water cure", and more recently "waterboarding").
We see men shoved forcibly into tiny confinement
boxes that do not allow them to sit, stand, or lie
down.
These are among the techniques of
torture "lawfully" laid out in a CIA inspector
general's report, some of which would have been
alarmingly familiar to the tortured men I spoke
with, as they might be to Bradley Manning, held
isolated, naked, and without sleep in US military
prisons in a bid to break his spirit.
The
movie scenes are brutal, yet sanitized. As
difficult to watch as the images are, they show
nothing beyond the infliction of pain. Horrific as
it may be, pain fades, bones mend, bruises heal.
No, don't for a second think that the essence of
torture is physical pain, no matter what Zero
Dark Thirty implies. If, in many cases, the
body heals, mental wounds are a far more difficult
matter. Memory persists.
The obsessive
debate in this country over the effectiveness of
torture rings eternally false: torture does indeed
work. After all, it's not just about eliciting
information - sometimes, as in the case of the two
men I met, it's not about information at all.
Torture is, however, invariably about shame and
vengeance, humiliation, power, and control. We're
just slapping you now, but we control you and who
knows what will happen next, what we're capable
of?
"You lie to me, I hurt you," a CIA
torturer in Zero Dark Thirty says to his
victim. The torture victim is left to imagine what
form the hurt will take and just how severe it
will be, almost always in the process assuming
responsibility for creating his own terror. Yes,
torture "works" - to destroy people.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused 9/11
"mastermind", was waterboarded 183 times.
Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj spent six years
in the Guantanamo Bay prison, stating, "They used
dogs on us, they beat me, sometimes they hung me
from the ceiling and didn't allow me to sleep for
six days."
Brandon Neely, a US military
policeman and former Guantanamo guard, watched a
medic there beat an inmate he was supposed to
treat. CIA agents tortured a German citizen, a car
salesman named Khaled el-Masri, who was picked up
in a case of mistaken identity, sodomizing,
shackling, and beating him, holding him in total
sensory deprivation, as Macedonian state police
looked on, so the European Court of Human Rights
found last week.
Others, such as the Court
of Human Rights or the Senate Intelligence
Committee, may give us glimpses into the nightmare
of official American policy in the first years of
this century. Still, our president refuses to look
backward and fully expose the deeds of that
near-decade to sunlight; he refuses to truly look
forward and unambiguously renounce forever the use
of anything that could be seen as an "enhanced
interrogation technique".
Since he also
continues to support robustly the precursors to
torture - the "extraordinary rendition" of
captured terror suspects to allied countries that
are perfectly happy to torture them and indefinite
detention by decree - we cannot fully understand
what men like the Korean poet and the Iraqi tribal
leader already know on our behalf: we are
torturers and unless we awaken to confront the
nightmare of what we are continuing to become, it
will eventually transform and so consume us.
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