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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Impunity at home, rendition
abroad By Alfred W McCoy
After a decade of fiery public debate and
bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States
has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan
compromise over the issue of torture that rests on
two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and
rendition abroad.
President Barack Obama
has closed the CIA's "black sites", its secret
prisons where American agents once dirtied their
hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. But
via rendition - the sending of terrorist suspects
to the prisons of countries that torture - and
related policies, his administration has
outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan,
Somalia, and elsewhere. In this way, he has
avoided the political stigma of torture, while
tacitly tolerating such
abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be
gained from them.
This "resolution" of the
torture issue may meet the needs of this country's
deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long
satisfy an international community determined to
prosecute human rights abuses through universal
jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term risk of
another sordid torture scandal that will further
damage US standing with allies worldwide.
Perfecting a new form of
torture The modern American urge to use
torture did not, of course, begin on September 12,
2001. It has roots that reach back to the
beginning of the Cold War and a human rights
policy riven with contradictions. Publicly,
Washington opposed torture and led the world in
drafting the United Nation's Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions
in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the
Central Intelligence Agency began developing
ingenious new torture techniques in contravention
of these same international conventions.
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret
research effort to crack the code of human
consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of
the mind with two findings foundational to a new
form of psychological torture. In the early 1950s,
while collaborating with the CIA, famed Canadian
psychologist Dr Donald Hebb discovered that, using
goggles, gloves, and earmuffs, he could induce a
state akin to psychosis among student volunteers
by depriving them of sensory stimulation.
Simultaneously, two eminent physicians at Cornell
University Medical Center, also working with the
Agency, found that the most devastating torture
technique used by the KGB, the Soviet secret
police, involved simply forcing victims to stand
for days at a time, while legs swelled painfully
and hallucinations began.
In 1963, after a
decade of mind-control research, the CIA codified
these findings in a succinct, secret instructional
handbook, the KUBARK Counterintelligence
Interrogation manual. It became the basis for a
new method of psychological torture disseminated
worldwide and within the US intelligence
community. Avoiding direct involvement in torture,
the CIA instead trained allied agencies to do its
dirty work in prisons throughout the Third World,
like South Vietnam's notorious "tiger cages".
The Korean War added a defensive dimension
to this mind-control research. After harsh North
Korean psychological torture forced American POWs
to accuse their own country of war crimes,
president Dwight Eisenhower ordered that any
serviceman subject to capture be given resistance
training, which the Air Force soon dubbed with the
acronym SERE (for survival, evasion, resistance,
escape).
Once the Cold War ended in 1990,
Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights,
ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture in
1994, which banned the infliction of "severe"
psychological and physical pain. The CIA ended its
torture training in the Third World, and the
Defense Department recalled Latin American
counterinsurgency manuals that contained
instructions for using harsh interrogation
techniques. On the surface, then, Washington had
resolved the tension between its anti-torture
principles and its torture practices.
But
when president Bill Clinton sent the UN Convention
to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included
language (drafted six years earlier by the Ronald
Reagan administration) that contained diplomatic
"reservations". In effect, these addenda accepted
the banning of physical abuse, but exempted
psychological torture.
A year later, when
the Clinton administration launched its covert
campaign against al-Qaeda, the CIA avoided direct
involvement in human rights violations by sending
70 terror suspects to allied nations notorious for
physical torture. This practice, called
"extraordinary rendition," had supposedly been
banned by the UN convention and so a new
contradiction between Washington's human rights
principles and its practices was buried like a
political land mine ready to detonate with
phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu
Ghraib scandal.
Normalizing
torture Right after his first public
address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001,
president George W Bush gave his White House staff
expansive secret orders for the use of harsh
interrogation, adding, "I don't care what the
international lawyers say, we are going to kick
some ass."
Soon after, the CIA began
opening "black sites" that would in the coming
years stretch from Thailand to Poland. It also
leased a fleet of executive jets for the rendition
of detained terrorist suspects to allied nations,
and revived psychological tortures abandoned since
the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the agency hired
former Air Force psychologists to reverse engineer
SERE training techniques, flipping them from
defense to offense and thereby creating the
psychological tortures that would henceforth
travel far under the euphemistic label "enhanced
interrogation techniques".
In a parallel
move in late 2002, secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to head
the new prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, and gave him
broad authority to develop a total three-phase
attack on the sensory receptors, cultural
identity, and individual psyches of his new
prisoners. After General Miller visited Abu Ghraib
prison in September 2003, the US commander for
Iraq issued orders for the use of psychological
torture in US prisons in that country, including
sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and a
recent innovation, cultural humiliation through
exposure to dogs (which American believed would be
psychologically devastating for Arabs). It is no
accident that Private Lynndie England, a military
guard at Abu Ghraib prison, was famously
photographed leading a naked Iraqi detainee
leashed like a dog.
Just two months after
CBS News broadcast those notorious photos from Abu
Ghraib in April 2004, 35% of Americans polled
still felt torture was acceptable. Why were so
many tolerant of torture?
One partial
explanation would be that, in the years after
9/11, the mass media filled screens large and
small across America with enticing images of
abuse. Amid this torrent of torture simulations,
two media icons served to normalize abuse for many
Americans - the fantasy of the "ticking time bomb
scenario" and the fictional hero of the Fox
Television show "24", counter-terror agent Jack
Bauer.
In the months after 9/11, Harvard
professor Alan Dershowitz launched a multimedia
campaign arguing that torture would be necessary
in the event US intelligence agents discovered
that a terrorist had planted a ticking nuclear
bomb in New York's Times Square. Although this
scenario was a fantasy whose sole foundation was
an obscure academic philosophy article published
back in 1973, such ticking bombs soon enough
became a media trope and a persuasive reality for
many Americans - particularly thanks to the TV
series 24, every segment of which began
with an oversized clock ticking menacingly.
In 67 torture scenes during its first five
seasons, the show portrayed agent Jack Bauer's
recourse to abuse as timely, effective, and often
seductive. By its last broadcast in May 2010, the
simple invocation of agent Bauer's name had become
a persuasive argument for torture used by everyone
from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to
ex-president Clinton.
While campaigning
for his wife Hillary in the 2008 Democratic
presidential primary, Clinton typically cited
24 as a justification for allowing CIA
agents, acting outside the law, to torture in
extreme emergencies. "When Bauer goes out there on
his own and is prepared to live with the
consequences," Clinton told Meet the Press, "it
always seems to work better."
Impunity
in America Such a normalization of
"enhanced interrogation techniques" created public
support for an impunity achieved by immunizing all
those culpable of crimes of torture. During
President Obama's first two years in office,
former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter
Liz made dozens of television appearances accusing
his administration of weakening America's security
by investigating CIA interrogators who had used
such techniques under Bush.
Ironically,
Obama's assassination of Osama bin Laden in May
2011 provided an opening for neo-conservatives to
move the nation toward impunity. Forming an a
cappella media chorus, former Bush administration
officials appeared on television to claim, without
any factual basis, that torture had somehow led
the Navy SEALs to Bin Laden. Within weeks,
Attorney General Eric Holder announced an end to
any investigation of harsh CIA interrogations and
to the possibility of bringing any of the CIA
torturers to court. (Consider it striking, then,
that the only "torture" case brought to court by
the administration involved a former CIA agent,
John Kiriakou, who had leaked the names of some
torturers.)
Starting on the 10th
anniversary of 9/11, the country took the next
step toward full impunity via a radical rewriting
of the past. In a memoir published on August 30,
2011, Dick Cheney claimed the CIA's use of
"enhanced interrogation techniques" on an al-Qaeda
leader named Abu Zubaydah had turned this hardened
terrorist into a "fount of information" and saved
"thousands of lives".
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