Take a close look at the illustration above. Imagine being stuffed in a tiny wooden box, and then poked at with needles through the holes in the side. You are defenseless. You probably don't speak English. Note the contraption on the right. That is a water board. You are strapped down to this board, head on the lower side, a cloth over your mouth and nose, while water is slowly poured over your face. For thirty to forty-five agonizing seconds, you cannot breathe, and you feel as if you are drowning. Look at a clock now for forty-five seconds, and try to imagine it.
These are just a few of the techniques designed and implemented by our government in the years after the 9/11 attacks. In a remarkable series of interviews now made public by The New York Times, the chief psychologists responsible for these brutal methods of interrogation speak about the process and their mindset through those terrible years. "Enhanced interrogation" is the euphemism; most people would just call it torture, defined as "the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do or say something." The bitter irony is that in racing to combat what we feared the most--terror--we ended up terrorizing in some cases innocent people. One subject who was later deemed harmless and released was waterboarded 83 times in a matter of days. He testified later that he would have much preferred to have had his legs broken. Think about that if you still question whether the techniques qualify as torture.
The psychologists in question, John Jessen and James Mitchell, offer us a fascinating portrait of the role of hierarchy, groupthink, and the shifting of personal responsibility to a faceless bureaucracy. We have been down this road before. In her penetrating analysis of the war criminals of Nazi Germany, the writer Hannah Arendt notes, "the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them."Jessen and Mitchell repeatedly assert that they were just following orders. Jessen says, “They kept telling me every day a nuclear bomb was going to be exploded in the United States."
Do the ends justify the means? Ultimately, in this case, no, since this type of torture has been shown to have uncovered little to no usable intelligence, and the Senate condemned these practices and shut the program down. But theoretically, is there a limit to what we can and should do to protect our nation? If we imagine some hypothetical and breathless Jason Bourne/24 kind of scenario, where a suitcase full of smallpox is about to explode during the Super Bowl halftime show, and one man knows how to stop it, most of us can imagine doing what it takes to get that information, including torture. A simple moral calculus pits one person's suffering against thousands or millions of innocent lives. But in the real world, it is never that simple.
We are a nation of violent tendencies, born out of revolution, slavery, and a frontier culture. Guns are everywhere, competition is enshrined as a national value, and gladiatorial sports such as football, wrestling, and NASCAR earn billions annually. The sight of those towers in Manhattan rendered with holes and burning was too much to bear for our collective psyche. The aftermath was swift and decisive: war in Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, then Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and all the rest. Sixteen years later, where are we? Are we any safer? The aforementioned wars rage on, and new threats--arguably given strength by our reckless use of drones, bombs, and torture--rise on all sides, including ISIS, a resurgent Taliban, Boko Haram, and many more.
Our new president has openly championed torture, claiming that "it works." Even more tellingly, he once claimed that “they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.” This naked statement reveals much of what compels us to resort to tactics like this and look the other way when they are used: the naked lust for revenge. In our mind's eye, reinforced in countless movies and TV shows such as "Homeland," a furtive, dark-skinned, bearded enemy is forever on the horizon, ready to blow up our freedom and way of life. The ascendence of Trump is in no small part due to the fulfillment of scapegoating revenge, as witnessed by the perversely selective so-called "travel ban." Meanwhile, domestic terrorists and mass shooters continue to constitute the bulk of the actual threat. If you want to dive deeper into the completely lopsided and misguided way we slant our terror investigations against Muslims, listen to the latest episode of "Reveal." Here, a white American who torched an Islamic center is given multiple chances and goes free, while a young Muslim American, who was caught in a sting plot, rots in jail until 2037. Listen for yourself.
Meanwhile, disturbing reports of horrific torture are emerging from Yemen, occurring at times adjacent to sites where our own military operates, and almost certainly with the sanction of our allies the Saudis. Our officials claim no knowledge of the abuses, and that may be technically true, but one wonders when we will take the lead in human rights. Side-stepping for now the question of why we are in Yemen in the first place, we need to go beyond looking the other way when torture or other abridgments of basic rights occur. Luckily, these reports have prompted some Senators to initiate hearings on the matter; we can only hope they get the attention they deserve.
President Trump and his feckless State Department head Rex Tillerson have not bothered to recruit any experts in foreign policy, and Tillerson furtively shuns the press. Our affairs with the world are treated as a series of bilateral "deals," in which we are constantly leveraging what is best for America's short-term interest, whether it's selling planes to the Saudis or pulling out of the Paris Accords. We are a superpower, a mighty empire that has imposed our will on the world for decades, from the banana republics of Latin America to secret wars in Cambodia, the Iran-Contra affair, the ouster and assassination of Salvador Allende and on into the present. We have often supported human rights abusers and leaders guilty of outright genocide such as Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. Yet, through it all, there has been a strain of thought that pushes for actual peace, prosperity, and justice.
Those days are over, and Trump is unabashedly obeisant to despots such as the Saudis and openly contemptuous towards liberal allies such as Angela Merkel. Egyptian strongman Sisi gets a warm welcome at the White House, and the repugnant murderer Duterte has more in common with Trump than most other leaders. When we ally ourselves with leaders such as these while making no demands on their use of prisons, disappearances, and torture to enforce their autocratic rule, we tacitly condone, encourage, and promote those activities. We might as well be the torturers, because our money, prestige, and above all, military might provide the cover for it.
We may never know the full extent of what we did to those detainees in the years after 9/11. It has all been carefully documented in a secret report, but the cowardly Senator from North Carolina, Richard Burr, has it under lock and key, and it may be buried for decades or even destroyed. Of course, it was the Trump administration that sent the report back to the Senate. Someday, we can hope that we will begin a national conversation and reconciliation about this dark time in our history. But not if we keep aiding and abetting the abuse of human rights abroad. Given the attack on the free press initiated by this administration, one wonders with a cold shiver how long it will be until the roundups begin here?
My call to action is broad but simple: never let our representatives forget what and who they are funding when it comes to military or other spending that props up autocrats and abusers. Make sure the upcoming hearings on Yemen get plenty of attention. Call your reps, call the members of the committee, write social media posts, and write letters to the editor. If we, ostensibly the most free people in the history of the planet, do not raise our voices against torture, who will?
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