Page 1 of 2 Torture memos and historical amnesia
By Noam Chomsky
The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and
surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.
For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that
Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be
beyond the reach of the law - a place, incidentally, that Washington is using
in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons
were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same
expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites", or secret
prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.
More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the
early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used
as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" - as George Washington called
the new republic - extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in
mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression,
terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened US history,
much as in the case of other great powers.
Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those
Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright
critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to
be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so
utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for". To say the least, that
common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.
Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and "what we do" has been
forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at
hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory.
In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau
developed the standard view that the US has a "transcendent purpose":
establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since "the arena
within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become
world-wide". But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the
historical record was radically inconsistent with that "transcendent purpose".
We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not
"confound the abuse of reality with reality itself". Reality is the unachieved
"national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect
it". What actually happened was merely the "abuse of reality".
The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the
New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American
Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes
that the US is "just one great, but imperfect, country among others". Cohen
agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, but nonetheless regards
as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson's failure to understand that "America was
born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward". The American idea
is revealed in the country's birth as a "city on a hill", an "inspirational
notion" that resides "deep in the American psyche", and by "the distinctive
spirit of American individualism and enterprise" demonstrated in the Western
expansion. Hodgson's error, it seems, is that he is keeping to "the distortions
of the American idea", and "the abuse of reality".
Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea" of America from its earliest
days.
'Come over and help us'
The inspirational phrase "city on a hill" was coined by John Winthrop in 1630,
borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation
"ordained by God". One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its
Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On
that scroll are the words "Come over and help us". The British colonists were
thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable
natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.
The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of "the idea of America",
from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and
displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the
background of all of the former North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung-style worship
of that savage murderer and torturer former president Ronald Reagan, who
blissfully described himself as the leader of a "shining city on the hill,"
while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office,
notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.
The Great Seal was an early proclamation of "humanitarian intervention", to use
the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the
"humanitarian intervention" led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries.
The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described "the utter
extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means
"more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of
Mexico and Peru".
Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John
Quincy Adams deplored the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which
we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty … among the
heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to
judgement". The "merciless and perfidious cruelty" continued until "the West
was won". Instead of God's judgment, the heinous sins today bring only praise
for the fulfillment of the American "idea".
The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed that "individualism and
enterprise", so praised by Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the
cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the
respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for
intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record "of conquest, colonization, and
territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century", and urged
that it is "not to be curbed now", as the Cubans too were pleading, in the
Great Seal's words, "come over and help us".
Their plea was answered. The US sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba's
liberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained
until 1959.
The "American idea" was illustrated further by the remarkable campaign,
initiated by the Eisenhower administration virtually at once to restore Cuba to
its proper place, after Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, finally
liberating the island from foreign domination, with enormous popular support,
as Washington ruefully conceded. What followed was economic warfare with the
clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban population so that they would
overthrow the disobedient Castro government, invasion, the dedication of the
Kennedy brothers to bringing "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba (the phrase of
historian Arthur Schlesinger in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who considered
that task one of his highest priorities), and other crimes continuing to the
present, in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.
American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard
Porter calls "the saltwater fallacy", the idea that conquest only becomes
imperialism when it crosses saltwater. Thus, if the Mississippi had resembled
the Irish Sea, Western expansion would have been imperialism. From George
Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer
grasp of just what they were doing.
After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next step
in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer "the blessings of liberty
and civilization upon all the rescued peoples" of the Philippines (in the words
of the platform of Lodge's Republican party) - at least those who survived the
murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and other atrocities that
accompanied it. These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the
US-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of colonial
domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for sophisticated
modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence. Similar models would be
adopted in many other areas where the US imposed brutal National Guards and
other client forces.
The torture paradigm
Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the US Central
Intelligence Agency's (CIA) "torture paradigm," developed at a cost that
reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A
Question of Torture. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed
from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq's Abu
Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury's
penetrating study of the US torture record: Truth, Torture, and the American Way.
So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush
gang's descent into the global sewers lament that "in waging the war against
terrorism, America had lost its way".
None of this is to say that Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney and former
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld et al did not introduce important
innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to
subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own
government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out
some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points
out: "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small
percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming
bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage.
Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to
do so."
Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely
repositioned it", restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference
to the victims. "[H]is is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the
torture regime of [president Gerald] Ford through [president Bill] Clinton,
which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was
produced during the Bush/Cheney years".
Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980
study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that US aid "has tended to flow
disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens
... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human
rights". Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also
suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, US aid tends to correlate with a
favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of
labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions,
yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human
rights.
These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth
studying because the correlations were so clear.
Small wonder that Obama advises us to look forward, not backward - a convenient
doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see
the world differently, much to our annoyance.
Adopting Bush's positions
An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA's "torture paradigm"
never violated the 1984 Torture Convention, at least as Washington interpreted
it. McCoy points out that the highly sophisticated CIA paradigm developed at
enormous cost in the 1950s and 1960s, based on the "KGB's most devastating
torture technique", kept primarily to mental torture, not crude physical
torture, which was considered less effective in turning people into pliant
vegetables.
McCoy writes that the Reagan administration then carefully revised the
International Torture Convention "with four detailed diplomatic 'reservations'
focused on just one word in the convention's 26-printed pages", the word
"mental". He continues: "These intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations
re-defined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory
deprivation and self-inflicted pain - the very techniques the CIA had refined
at such great cost."
When Clinton sent the United Nations (UN) Convention to Congress for
ratification in 1994, he included the Reagan reservations. The president and
Congress therefore exempted the core of the CIA torture paradigm from the US
interpretation of the Torture Convention; and those reservations, McCoy
observes, were "reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give
legal force to the UN Convention". That is the "political land mine" that
"detonated with such phenomenal force" in the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the
shameful Military Commissions Act that was passed with bipartisan support in
2006.
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