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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The urge to confess on
torture By Tom Engelhardt
They can't help themselves. They want to
confess. How else to explain the torture
memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner
sancta of this administration, the most recent of
which were evidently leaked to the New York Times.
Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice
Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted
the administration to the torture techniques it
had been pushing for years.
As the Times
noted, the first of those memorandums, from
February of that year, was "an
expansive endorsement of the harshest
interrogation techniques ever used by the Central
Intelligence Agency". The second "secret opinion"
was issued as Congress moved to outlaw "cruel,
inhuman and degrading" treatment (not that such
acts weren't already against US and international
law). It brazenly "declared that none of the CIA
interrogation methods violated that standard";
and, the Times assured us, "the 2005 Justice
Department opinions remain in effect, and their
legal conclusions have been confirmed by several
more recent memorandums".
All of these
memorandums, in turn, were written years after
John Yoo's infamous "torture memo" of August 2002
and a host of other grim documents on detention,
torture and interrogation had already been leaked
to the public, along with graphic Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI)emailed observations of
torture and abuse at Guantanamo, those "screen
savers" from Abu Ghraib, and so much other
incriminating evidence.
In other words, in
early 2005 when that endorsement of "the harshest
interrogation techniques" was being written, its
authors could hardly have avoided knowing that it,
too, would someday become part of the public
record.
But, it seems, they couldn't help
themselves. Torture, along with repetitious,
pretzled "legal" justifications for doing so, were
bones that administration officials - from the
president, vice president and secretary of defense
on down - just couldn't resist gnawing on again
and again. So, what we're dealing with is an
obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly
irrational in its intensity, that's gripped this
administration. None of the predictable we're
shocked! we're shocked! editorial responses to the
Times latest revelations begin to account for
this.
Torture as the royal road to
power So let's back up a moment and
consider the nature of the torture controversy in
these past years. In a sense, the Bush
administration has confronted a strange policy
conundrum. Its compulsive urge to possess the
power to detain without oversight and to wield
torture as a tool of interrogation has led it,
however unexpectedly, into what can only be called
a confessional stance. The result has been what it
feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not
exhaustive, public record of the criminal inner
thinking of the most secretive administration in
our history.
Let's recall that, in the
wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the
administration's top officials had an overpowering
urge to "take the gloves off" (instructions sent
from secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's office
directly to the Afghan battlefield), to
"unshackle" the CIA. They were in a rush to
release a commander-in-chief "unitary executive",
untrammeled by the restrictions they associated
with the fall of president Richard Nixon and with
the Watergate era.
They wanted to abrogate
the Geneva Conventions (parts of which Alberto
Gonzales, then White House Council and
companion-in-arms to the president, declared
"quaint" and "obsolete" in 2002). They were eager
to develop their own categories of imprisonment
that freed them from all legal constraints, as
well as their own secret, offshore prison system
in which their power would be total. All of this
went to the heart of their sense of entitlement,
their belief that such powers were their political
birthright. The last thing they wanted to do was
have this all happen in secret and with full
deniability. Thus, Guantanamo.
That prison
complex was to be the public face of their right
to do anything. Perched on an American base in
Cuba just beyond the reach of The Law -
American-leased but not court-overseen soil - the
new prison was to be the proud symbol of their
expansive power. It was also to be the public face
of a new, secret regime of punishment that would
quickly spread around the world - into the torture
chambers of despotic regimes in places like Egypt
and Syria, onto American bases like the island
fastness of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, onto
US Navy and other ships floating in who knew which
waters, into the former prisons of the old Soviet
empire, and into a growing network of American
detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, when those first shots of prisoners,
in orange jumpsuits, manacled and blindfolded,
entering Guantanamo were released, no one
officially howled (though the grim, leaked shots
of those prisoners being transported to Guantanamo
were another matter). After all, they wanted the
world to know just how powerful this
administration was - powerful enough to redefine
the terms of detention, imprisonment, and
interrogation to the point of committing acts that
traditionally were abhorred and ruled illegal by
humanity and by US law (even if sometimes
committed anyway).
Though certain
administration officials undoubtedly believed that
"harsh interrogation techniques" would produce
reliable information, this can't account for the
absolute fascination with torture that gripped
them, as well as assorted pundits and talking
heads (and then, through "24" and other TV shows
and movies, Americans in general). In search of a
world where they could do anything, they reached
instinctively for torture as a symbol. After all,
was there any more striking way to remove those
"gloves" or "unshackle" a presidency? If you could
stake a claim the right to torture, then you could
stake a claim to do just about anything.
Think of it this way: if Freud believed
that dreams were the royal road to the individual
unconscious, then the top officials of the Bush
administration believed torture to be the royal
road to their ultimate dream of unconstrained
power, what John Yoo in his "torture memo"
referred to as "the commander-in-chief power".
It was via Guantanamo that they meant to
announce the arrival of this power on planet
Earth. They were proud of it. And that prison
complex was to function as their bragging rights.
Their message was clear enough: In this world of
ours, democracy would indeed run rampant and a
vote of one would, in every case, be considered a
majority.
The crimes are in the
definitions This, then, was one form of
confession - a much desired one. George W Bush,
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their
subordinates (with few exceptions) wished to
affirm their position as directors of the planet's
"sole superpower", intent as they were on creating
a Pentagon-led Pax Americana abroad and a Rovian
Pax Republicana at home. But there was another,
seldom noted form of confession at work.
As if to fit their expansive sense of
their own potential powers, it seems that these
officials, and the corps of lawyers that
accompanied them, had expansive, gnawing fears.
Given this cast of characters, you can't talk
about a collective "guilty conscience", but there
was certainly an ongoing awareness that what they
were doing contravened normal American and global
standards of legality; that their acts, when it
came to detention and torture, might be judged
illegal; and that those who committed - or ordered
- such acts might someday, somehow, actually be
brought before a court of law to account for them.
These fears, by the way, were usually pinned on
low-level
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