Page 2 of
3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The
urge to confess on
torture By Tom Engelhardt
operatives and interrogators, who
were indeed fearful of the obvious: that they had
no legal leg to stand on when it came to
kidnapping terror suspects, disappearing them, and
subjecting them to a remarkably wide range of acts
of torture and abuse, often in deadly combination
over long periods of time.
Perhaps Bush's
men (and women) feared that even a triumphantly
successful commander-in-chief presidency might - a
la the
Augusto Pinochet regime in
Chile - have its limits in time. Perhaps they
simply sensed an essential contradiction that lay
at the very heart of their position: the urge to
take pride in their "accomplishments", to assert
their powers, and to claim bragging rights for
redefining what was legal could also be seen as
the urge to confess (if matters took a wrong turn
as, in the case of the Bush administration, they
always have).
And so, along with the
pride, along with the kidnappings, the new-style
imprisonment, the acts of torture (and, in some
cases, murder), the pretzled documents began to
pour out of the administration - each a tortured
extremity of bizarre legalisms (as with Yoo's
August 2002 document, which essentially managed to
reposition torture as something that existed
mainly in the mind of, and could only be defined
by, the torturer himself); each was but another
example of legalisms following upon and directed
by desire. (Yoo himself was reportedly known by
attorney general John Ashcroft as Dr Yes, "for his
seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever
legal justifications it desired".) Each, in the
end, might also be read as a confession of
wrongdoing.
What made all this so strange
was not just the "tortured" nature of the "torture
memo" (just rejected by the new attorney general
nominee as "worse than a sin, it was a mistake"),
but the repetitious nature of these dismantling
documents which, with the help of an army of
leakers inside the government, have been making
their way into public view for years. Or how about
the strange situation of an American president,
who has, in so many backhanded ways, admitted to
being deeply involved in the issues of detainment
and torture - as, for instance, in a February 7,
2002, memorandum to his top officials in which he
signed off on his power to "suspend [the] Geneva
[Conventions] as between the United States and
Afghanistan" (which he then declined to do "at
this time") and his right to wipe out the
Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War
when it came to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That
document began with the following: "Our recent
extensive discussions regarding the status of
al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees confirm ..."
"Our recent extensive discussions ..." You
won't find that often in previous presidential
documents about the abrogation of international
and domestic law. It wasn't, of course, that the
US had never imprisoned anyone abroad and
certainly not that the US had never used torture
abroad. Water-boarding, for instance, was first
employed by US soldiers in the Philippine
Insurrection at the dawn of the previous century;
torture was widely used and taught by CIA and
other American operatives in Vietnam in the 1960s
and 1970s, as well as in Latin America in the
1970s and 1980s, and elsewhere.
But
American presidents didn't then see the bragging
rights in such acts, any more than a previous
American president would have sent his vice
president to Capitol Hill to lobby openly for
torture (however labeled). Past presidents held on
to the considerable benefits of deniability (and
perhaps the psychological benefits of not knowing
too much themselves). They didn't regularly and
repeatedly commit to paper their "extensive
discussions" on distasteful and illegal subjects.
Nor did they get up in public, against all
news, all reason (but based on the fantastic
redefinitions of torture created to fulfill a
presidential desire to use "harsh interrogation
techniques") to deny repeatedly that their
administrations ever tortured. Here is an exchange
on the subject from Bush's most recent press
conference:
Questioner:
What's your definition of the word "torture"?
The president: Of what?
Questioner: The word
"torture". What's your definition?
The president: That's
defined in US law, and we don't torture.
Questioner: Can you give me
your version of it, sir?
The
president: Whatever the law says.
After a while, this, too, becomes a form
of confession - that, among other things, the
president has never rejected John Yoo's definition
of torture in that 2002 memorandum. Combine that
with the admission of "extensive discussions" on
detention matters and, minimally, you have a
president who has proven himself deeply engaged in
such subjects. A president who makes such
no-torture claims repeatedly cannot also claim to
be in the dark on the subject. In other words,
you're already moving from the Clintonesque
parsing of definitions ("It depends on what the
meaning of the word 'is' ") into unfathomable
realms of presidential definitional darkness.
On the record Of course,
plumbing the psychology of a single individual
while in office - of a president or a vice
president - is a nearly impossible task. Plumbing
the psychology of an administration? Who can do
it? And yet, sometimes officials may essentially
do it for you. They may leave bureaucratic clues
everywhere and then, as if seized by an impulsion,
return again and again to what can only be termed
the scene of the crime. Documents they just
couldn't not write. Acts they just couldn't not
take. Think of these as the Freudian slips of
officials under pressure. Think of them as small,
repeated confessions granted under the
interrogation of reality and history, under the
fearful pressure of the future, and granted in the
best way possible: willingly, without opposition,
and not under torture.
Sometimes, it's
just a matter of refocusing to see the documents,
the statements, the acts for what they are. Such
is the case with the torture memos that continue
to emerge. Never has an administration - and
hardly has a torturing regime anywhere - had so
many of its secret documents aired while it was
still in the act. Seldom has a ruling group made
such an open case for its own crimes.
We're talking, of course, about the most
secretive administration in American history - so
secretive, in fact, that Congressional
representatives considering classified portions of
an intelligence bill, have to go to "a secret,
secure room in the Capitol, turn in their
Blackberrys and cellphones, and read the document
without help from any staff members". Such
briefings are given to Congressional
representatives, but under ground rules in which
"participants are prohibited from future
discussions of the information - even if it is
subsequently revealed in the media ..." So
representatives who are briefed are also
effectively prohibited from discussing what they
have learned in Congress.
And yet, none of
this mattered when it came to the administration
establishing its own record of illegality - and
exhibiting its own outsized fears of future
prosecution. Let's just take one labor intensive -
and exceedingly strange, if now largely forgotten
- example of these fears in action. In 2002, a new
tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC),
was established in the Hague to prosecute
individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity,
and war crimes. "Then-under secretary of State
John R Bolton nullified the US signature on the
International Criminal Court treaty
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