Naeem — The Ideology of National Security ++
Topic(s): "War on Terror" | Comments Off on Naeem — The Ideology of National Security ++Compiments of Shobak:
1.Corey Robin: Protocols of Machismo
2.Marjorie Cohn: Close Guantánamo Prison
3.Zain & Kashan Afzal, US citizens, accuse FBI of torture
LRB | Vol. 27 No. 10 dated 19 May 2005 | Corey Robin
Protocols of Machismo
Corey Robin
Arguing about War by Michael Walzer · Yale, 208 pp, £16.99
Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh [ Buy from the London Review
Bookshop ] · Penguin, 394 pp, £17.99
Torture: A Collection ed. Sanford Levinson [ Buy from the London
Review Bookshop ] · Oxford, 319 pp, £18.50
The 20th century, it’s said, taught us a simple lesson about politics:
of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as
ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power
ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of
an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working
class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard.
Although liberal-minded intellectuals have repeatedly mobilised some
version of this argument against the isms of right and left, they have
seldom mustered a comparable scepticism about that other idée fixe of
the 20th century: national security. Some liberals will criticise this
war, others that one, but no one has ever written a book entitled `The
End of National Security’. This despite the millions killed in the
name of security, and even though Stalin and Hitler claimed to be
protecting their populations from mortal threats.
There are fewer than six degrees of separation between the idea of
national security and the lurid crimes of Abu Ghraib. First, each of
the reasons the Bush administration gave for going to war against Iraq
ˆ the threat of WMD, Saddam’s alleged links to al-Qaida, even the
promotion of democracy in the Middle East ˆ referred in some way to
protecting America. Second, everyone agrees that getting good
intelligence from Iraqi informers is a critical element in defeating
the insurgency. Third, US military intelligence believes that sexual
humiliation is an especially forceful instrument for extracting
information from recalcitrant Muslim prisoners.
Many critics have protested against Abu Ghraib, but none has traced it
back to the idea of national security. Perhaps they believe such an
investigation is unnecessary. After all, many of them opposed the war
on the grounds that US security was not threatened by Iraq. And some
of national security’s most accomplished practitioners, such as Brent
Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as theoreticians like
Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, even claimed that a genuine
consideration of US interests militated against the war. The mere fact
that some politicians misused or abused the principle of national
security need not call that principle into question. But when an idea
routinely accompanies, if not induces, atrocities ˆ Abu Ghraib was
certainly not the first instance of the United States committing or
sponsoring torture in the name of security ˆ second thoughts would
seem to be in order. Unless, of course, defenders of the idea wish to
join that company of ideologues they so roundly condemn, affirming
their commitment to an ideal version of national security while
disowning its `actually existing’ variant.
In its ideal version, national security requires a clear-eyed
understanding of a nation’s interests and a sober assessment of the
threats to them. Force, a counsellor might say to his prince, is a
tool a leader may use in response to those threats, but he should use
it prudently and without emotion. Just as he should not trouble
himself with questions of human rights or international law ˆ though
analysts might add these to a leader’s toolkit, they are quick to
point out, as Joseph Nye does in The Paradox of American Power (2002),
that international norms may have to give way to `vital survival
interests’, that `at times we will have to go it alone’ ˆ he should
not be excited by his use of violence. National security demands a
monkish self-denial, where officials forego the comforts of conscience
and the pleasures of impulse in order to inflict when necessary the
most brutal force and abstain from or abandon that force whenever it
becomes counter-productive. It’s an ethos that bears all the marks of
a creed, requiring a mortification of self no less demanding than that
expected of the truest Christian.
The first article of this creed, the national interest, gives leaders
great wiggle room in determining what constitutes a threat. What,
after all, is the national interest? According to Nye, `the national
interest is simply what citizens, after proper deliberation, say it
is.’ Even if we assume that citizens are routinely given the
opportunity to ponder the national interest, the fact is that they
seldom, if ever, reach a conclusion about it. As Nye points out, Peter
Trubowitz’s exhaustive study of the way Americans defined the national
interest throughout the 20th century concluded that `there is no
single national interest. Analysts who assume that America has a
discernible national interest whose defence should determine its
relations with other nations are unable to explain the failure to
achieve domestic consensus on international objectives.’ And this
makes a good deal of sense: if an individual finds it difficult to
determine her own interest, why should we expect a mass of individuals
to do any better?
But if a people cannot decide on its collective interest, how can it
know when that interest is threatened? Faced with such confusion,
leaders often fall back on what seems the most obvious definition of a
threat: imminent, violent assault from an enemy, promising to end the
independent life of the nation. Leaders focus on cataclysmic futures,
if for no other reason than that these are a convenient measure of
what is or is not a threat, what is or is not security. But that
ultimate threat often turns out to be no less illusory than the errant
definition inspiring the invocation of the threat in the first place.
Hovering about every discussion of war and peace are questions of life
and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael
Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the `moral as well as physical
extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation
will find its `ongoingness’ ˆ its ability `to carry on, and also to
improve on, a way of life handed down’ from its ancestors ˆ
threatened. But at moments of what Walzer, following Winston
Churchill, calls `supreme emergency’, a leader may have to commit the
most obscene crimes in order to avert catastrophe. The deliberate
murder of innocents, the use of torture: the measures taken will be as
many and almost as terrible as the evils a nation hopes to thwart.
For obvious reasons, Walzer insists that leaders should be wary of
invoking the supreme emergency, that they must have real evidence
before they start speaking Churchillese. But a casual reading of the
history of national security suggests not only that in practice the
rules of evidence will be ignored or flouted, but that the notion of
catastrophe encourages, even insists on, the flouting.
`In normal affairs,’ Richelieu declared at the dawn of the modern
state system, `the administration of justice requires authentic
proofs; but it is not the same in affairs of state . . . There, urgent
conjecture must sometimes take the place of proof; the loss of the
particular is not comparable with the salvation of the state.’ As we
ascend the ladder of threats from petty crime to the destruction of
the state, we require less and less proof that those threats are real.
The consequences of underestimating serious threats are so great we
may have no choice but to overestimate them. Three centuries later,
the American jurist Learned Hand invoked a version of this rule,
claiming that `the gravity of the “evil”‘ should be `discounted by its
improbability’. The graver the evil, the higher the degree of
improbability we demand in order not to worry about it. The graver the
evil, the lower the degree of probability that authorises ˆ or permits
ˆ us to take pre-emptive action against it.
Though neither statement was meant to justify great crimes of state,
both suggest an inverse relationship between the magnitude of a danger
and the requirements of facticity. Once a leader starts pondering the
nation’s moral and physical extinction, he enters a world where the
fantastic need not give way to the factual, where present benignity
can seem like the merest prelude to future malignance. So intertwined
at this point are fear and reason that early modern theorists, less
shy than we are about such matters, happily admitted the first as a
proxy for the second: a nation’s fear, they argued, could serve as a
legitimate rationale for war, even a preventive one. `As long as
reason is reason,’ Francis Bacon wrote, `a just fear will be a just
cause of a preventive war,’ which is a fairly good description of the
logic animating the Cold War: fight them there ˆ in Vietnam,
Nicaragua, Angola ˆ lest we must stop them here, at the Rio Grande,
the Canadian border, on Main Street.
As Seymour Hersh shows in his indispensable guide to the politics of
American security after 9/11, these are by no means merely ancient or
academic formulations. While liberal critics claim that the Bush
administration lied about or deliberately exaggerated the threat posed
by Iraq in order to justify going to war, the fact is that the
administration and its allies were often disarmingly honest in their
assessment of the threat, or at least honest about the way they
assessed it. Trafficking in the future, they conjured the worst ˆ `we
don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud’ ˆ and left it to
their audience to draw the most frightful conclusions.
In his 2003 State of the Union address, one of his most important
statements in the run-up to the war, Bush declared: `Some have said we
must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists
and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice
before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly
emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too
late.’
Note that Bush does not affirm the imminence of the threat. In fact,
he implicitly disavows it by ducking behind the past, darting to the
hypothetical, and arriving at a nightmarish, though entirely
conjectured, future. He does not speak of `is’ but of `if’ and `could
be’. These words are conditional (which is why Bush’s critics,
insisting that he take his stand in the realm of either fact or
fiction, never could get a fix on him). And the conditional is often
the tense of fear, where evidence and intuition, reason and
speculation, combine to make the worst-case scenario seem as real as
the realest fact.
After the war had begun, the television journalist Diane Sawyer
pressed Bush on the difference between the assumption, `stated as a
hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction’ and the
hypothetical possibility that Saddam `could move to acquire those
weapons’. Bush replied: `So what’s the difference?’ This was his most
articulate statement of the entire war, an artful parsing of a
distinction that has little meaning in the context of national security.
Probably no one near or around the administration better understood
the way national security blurs the line between the possible and the
actual than Richard Perle. `How far Saddam’s gone on the nuclear
weapons side I don’t think we really know,’ Perle said on one
occasion. `My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further
than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to
what we’re able to prove and demonstrate . . . And, unless you believe
that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more
than we’re able to report.’
Like Bush, Perle neither lies nor exaggerates. Instead, he imagines
and projects, and in the process reverses the normal rules of forensic
responsibility. When someone recommends a difficult course of action
on behalf of a better future, he must defend himself against the
sceptic, who insists that he prove his recommendation will produce the
outcome he anticipates. But if someone recommends an equally difficult
course of action to avert a hypothetical disaster, the burden of proof
shifts to the sceptic. Suddenly she must defend her doubt against his
belief, her course of action against his (although she probably
thought that she wasn’t proposing a course of action, only a series of
tough questions). And that, I suspect, is why the Bush
administration’s prewar mantra, `the absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence’ ˆ laughable in the context of an argument for,
say, world peace ˆ could seem surprisingly cogent in an argument for
war. `Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions,’ Burke noted,
`than ruined by too confident security.’
As Walzer suggests, an entire people can face annihilation. But the
victims of genocide tend to be stateless or powerless, and the world
has difficulty seeing or acknowledging their destruction, even when
the evidence is undeniable. The citizens and subjects of great powers,
on the other hand, rarely face the prospect of `moral and physical
extinction’. (Walzer cites only two cases.) Yet their leaders seem to
imagine that destruction with the greatest of ease.
We get a slight, though only slight, taste of this indulgence of the
state and its concerns ˆ and a corresponding scepticism about
non-state actors and their concerns ˆ in Walzer’s own essays.
Throughout Arguing about War, Walzer wrestles with terrorists who
claim that they are using violence as a last resort and antiwar
activists who claim that governments should go to war only as a last
resort. Walzer is equally dubious about both claims. But far from
revealing a dogged consistency, his scepticism about the `last resort’
suggests a double standard. It sets the bar for using force much
higher for non-state actors than it does for state actors ˆ not
because terrorists target civilians while the state does not but
because Walzer refuses to accept the terrorist’s `last resort’ while
he is ready to lend credence to the government’s, or at least is ready
to challenge critics of the government who insist that war truly be a
last resort.
For Walzer, the last resort argument of antiwar activists is often a
ruse designed to make a government’s going to war impossible ˆ and a
muddy ruse at that. For `lastness’, he says, `is a metaphysical
condition, which is never actually reached in real life: it is always
possible to do something else, or to do it again, before doing
whatever it is that comes last.’ We can always ask for `another
diplomatic note, another United Nations resolution, another meeting’,
we can always dither and delay. Though Walzer acknowledges the moral
power of the last resort argument ˆ `political leaders must cross this
threshold [going to war] only with great reluctance and trepidation’ ˆ
he suspects that it is often `merely an excuse for postponing the use
of force indefinitely’. As a result, he says, `I have always resisted
the argument that force is a last resort.’
But when non-state actors argue that they are resorting to terrorism
as a last resort, Walzer suspects them of bad faith. For such
individuals, `it is not so easy to reach the “last resort”. To get
there, one must indeed try everything (which is a lot of things) and
not just once.’ Even `under conditions of oppression and war’, he
insists, `it is by no means clear when’ the oppressed or their
spokespersons have truly `run out of options’. Walzer acknowledges
that a similar argument might be applied to government officials, but
the officials he has in mind are those who `kill hostages or bomb
peasant villages’ ˆ not those who claim they must go to war. Thus,
Walzer is willing to entertain the possibility that governments, with
all their power, will find themselves racing against time, while
insisting that terrorists, and the people they claim to represent,
have all the time in the world.
What is it about being a great power that renders the imagining of its
own demise so potent? Why, despite all the strictures about the
prudent and rational use of force, are those powers so quick to resort
to it? Perhaps it is because there is something deeply appealing about
the idea of disaster, about manfully confronting and mastering
catastrophe. For disaster and catastrophe can summon a nation, at
least in theory, to plumb its deepest moral and political reserves, to
have its mettle tested, on and off the battlefield. However much
leaders and theorists may style themselves as realpolitik’s cool
adepts, war remains the great romance of the age, the proving ground
of self and nation. `Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ So said
Plato, at least according to General MacArthur, the Imperial War
Museum and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. It’s not clear that Plato
did say this, but regardless of the statement’s provenance, its
constant iteration throughout the 20th century suggests a notion we
still hold dear: war is life, peace is death.
Exactly why the strenuous life should be so attractive is anyone’s
guess, but one reason may be that it counters what many since the
French Revolution have believed to be the corrosions of modern
culture: the softened mores and weakened will, the subordination of
passion to rationality, of fervour to rules. As an antidote to the
deadening effects of contemporary life ˆ reason, bureaucracy, routine,
anomie, meaninglessness ˆ war is modernity’s great answer to itself.
`War is inescapable,’ Yitzhak Shamir declared, not because it ensures
security but because `without this, the life of the individual has no
purpose.’ Though this sensibility seeps across the political spectrum,
it is essentially an ideal of the Counter-Enlightenment, which found
its greatest fulfilment during the years of Fascist triumph (`war is
to men,’ Mussolini said, `as maternity is to women’) ˆ and is now, it
seems, prospering in our own time as well.
Nowhere is this romanticism more apparent today than in the struggle
between neocons and the generals, spies and analysts who make up the
American security establishment. Since 9/11, Hersh, along with
Nicholas Lemann, has been the master chronicler of this conflict, and
Chain of Command is the definitive catalogue of its key moments: the
arguments over prewar intelligence, over how to prosecute the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, over whether or not to use torture.
Listening to neo-con complaints about US intelligence, one can hear
distant echoes of Carlyle’s assault on the `Mechanical Age’ (`all is
by rule and calculated contrivance’) and Chateaubriand’s despair that
`certain eminent faculties of genius’ will `be lost, and imagination,
poetry and the arts perish’. Perle is not alone in his impatience with
what Hersh calls the intelligence community’s `susceptibility to
social science notions of proof’. Before he became secretary of
defense, Donald Rumsfeld criticised the refusal of intelligence
analysts to use their imaginations, `to make estimates that extended
beyond the hard evidence they had in hand’. Once in office, he mocked
their desire to have `all the dots connected for us with a ribbon
wrapped around it’, and his staffers derided the military’s quest for
`actionable intelligence’, for information solid enough to warrant
assassinations and other pre-emptive acts of violence. Another
neo-con, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, recently blasted
the CIA’s `bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians’
and praised those analysts who make `novelistic judgments’ informed by
`history, literature, philosophy and theology’.
Rumsfeld’s war on the rule-bound culture and risk aversion of the
military reveals a deep antipathy to law and order ˆ not something
usually associated with conservatives but familiar enough to any
historian of 20th-century Europe. Issuing a secret directive that
terrorists should be captured or killed, Rumsfeld goes out of his way
to remind his generals that the goal is `not simply to arrest them in
a law-enforcement exercise’. Aides urge him to support operations by
US Special Forces, who can conduct lightning strikes without approval
from generals. Otherwise, they warn, `the result will be decision by
committee.’ One of Rumsfeld’s advisers complains that the military has
been `Clintonised’, which could mean anything from becoming too
legalistic to being too effeminate. (Hersh does an excellent job of
documenting the ongoing struggle within the security establishment
over the protocols of machismo.) Geoffrey Miller, the man who made
`Gitmoize’ a household word, relieves a general at Guantanamo for
being too `soft ˆ too worried about the prisoners’ well-being’. Both
the FBI and the CIA finally decide to pull out of Guantanamo and Abu
Ghraib because they believe torture is ineffective and immoral ˆ and,
Hersh reports, because they checked with their lawyers. One can only
imagine the howls of derision this provoked in Rumsfeld’s office.
It soon becomes apparent when one reads Hersh that the neo-cons were
drawn into Iraq for the sake of a grand idea: not the democratisation
of the Middle East, though that undoubtedly had some appeal, or even
the conquest of the world, but rather an idea of themselves as a brave
and undaunted army of transgression. The gaze of the neo-cons, like
that of America’s autistic ruling classes, does not look outward
nearly as much as it looks inward: on their restless need to prove
themselves, to demonstrate that neither their imagination nor their
actions will be constrained by anyone or anything ˆ not even by the
rules and norms they believe are their country’s gift to the world.
If Torture is any indication of contemporary sensibilities, neo-cons
in the White House are not the only ones in thrall to romantic notions
of danger and catastrophe. Academics are too. Every scholarly
discussion of torture, and the essays collected in Torture are no
exception, begins with the ticking time bomb scenario. The story goes
something like this: a bomb is set to go off in a densely populated
area in the immediate future; the government doesn’t know exactly
where or when, but it knows that many people will be killed; it has in
captivity the person who planted the bomb, or someone who knows where
it is planted; torture will yield the needed information; indeed, it
is the only way to get the information in time to avert the
catastrophe. What to do?
It’s an interesting question. But given that it is so often posed in
the name of moral realism, we might consider a few facts before we
rush to answer it. First, as far as we know, no one at Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib or any of the other prisons in America’s international
archipelago was tortured in order to defuse a ticking time bomb.
Second, Hersh and others cite reports documenting that anywhere
between 60 and 90 per cent of American-held prisoners in Iraq are in
jail by mistake or pose no threat at all to society. Third, many US
intelligence officials have opted out of torture sessions precisely
because they believe that torture does not produce accurate
information. These are the facts, and yet they seldom, if ever, make
an appearance in these academic exercises in moral realism.
The essays in Torture pose one other difficulty for those interested
in reality: none of the writers who endorse the use of torture by the
United States ever discusses concretely and extensively the sorts of
torture actually used by the United States. The closest we get is an
essay by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in which she asks:
Is a shouted insult a form of torture? A slap in the face? Sleep
deprivation? A beating to within an inch of one’s life? Electric prods
on the male genitals, inside a woman’s vagina, or in a person’s anus?
Pulling out fingernails? Cutting off an ear or a breast? All of us,
surely, would place every violation on this list beginning with the
beating and ending with severing a body part as forms of torture and
thus forbidden. No argument there. But let’s turn to sleep deprivation
and a slap in the face. Do these belong in the same torture category
as bodily amputations and sexual assaults? There are even those who
would add the shouted insult to the category of torture. But, surely,
this makes mincemeat of the category.
Distinguishing the awful from the acceptable, Elshtain never mentions
the details of Abu Ghraib or the Taguba report, making her list of dos
and don’ts as unreal as the ticking time bomb scenario. Even her list
of taboos is stylised, omitting committed crimes for the sake of
repudiating hypothetical ones. Elshtain rejects stuffing electric
cattle prods up someone’s arse. What about a banana? She rejects
cutting off ears and breasts. What about `breaking chemical lights and
pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees’? (Taguba). She condemns
sexual assault. What about forcing men to masturbate or wear women’s
underwear on their heads? She endorses `solitary confinement and
sensory deprivation’. What about the `bitch in the box’, where
prisoners are stuffed in a car boot and driven around Baghdad in 120º
heat? She supports `psychological pressure’, quoting from an article
that `the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance
more effectively than coercion itself.’ What about threatening
prisoners with rape? When it comes to the Islamists, Elshtain cites
the beheading of Daniel Pearl. When it comes to the Americans, she
muses on Laurence Olivier’s dentistry in Marathon Man. Small wonder
there’s `no argument there’: there is no there there.
The unreality of Elshtain’s analysis is not incidental or peculiar to
her. Even writers who endorse torture but are squeamish about it can’t
escape such abstractions. The more squeamish they are, in fact, the
more abstractions they indulge in. Sanford Levinson, for example,
tentatively discusses Alan Dershowitz’s proposal that government
officials should be forced to seek warrants from judges in order to
torture terrorist suspects. Hoping to make the reality of torture ˆ
and the pain of its victims ˆ visible and concrete, Levinson insists
that `the person the state proposes to torture should be in the
courtroom, so that the judge can take no refuge in abstraction.’ But
then Levinson asks us to consider `the possibility that anyone against
whom a torture warrant is issued receives a significant payment as
“just compensation” for the denial of his or her right not to be
tortured’. Having just counselled against abstraction, Levinson
resorts to money, the greatest abstraction of all, as payback for the
greatest denial of rights imaginable.
And the cash keeps on flowing. After deliberating to whom he should
dedicate his book ˆ to the `victims of torture’, Levinson says, seemed
like a `sentimental gesture, especially inasmuch as several of the
essays, including my own, countenance the possibility that under some
very restricted circumstances, it might be the “lesser evil” to engage
in torture’ ˆ Levinson decides to send `this book . . . into the world
without a dedicatee’. But all those victims who had hoped to find
themselves on the dedication page of Levinson’s book need not despair.
For he is `pleased to say that every contributor concurred in a
suggestion that all of the royalties attached to this book will go not
to the authors but rather to the Torture Abolition and Survivors
Support Coalition’.
If the unreality of these discussions sounds familiar, it is because
they are watered by the same streams of romanticism that course in and
out of the White House. Notwithstanding Dershowitz’s warrants and
Levinson’s addenda, the essays endorsing torture here are filled with
hostility to what Elshtain variously calls `moralistic code fetishism’
and `rule-mania’, and what we might simply call the rule of law. But
where the White House seeks to be entirely free of rules and laws ˆ
and here the academics depart from the politicians, rendering silly
any accusation that the former are faithful propagandists for the
latter ˆ the contemplators of torture seek to make the torturers true
believers in the rules. For two reasons.
One reason, which Walzer presents at great length in a famous essay
from 1973, reprinted in Torture, is that the absolute ban on torture
makes possible ˆ or forces us to acknowledge ˆ the problem of `dirty
hands’. Like the supreme emergency, the ticking time bomb forces a
leader to choose between two evils, to wrestle with the devil of
torture and the devil of innocents dying. Where other moralists would
affirm the ban on torture and allow innocents to die, or adopt a
utilitarian calculus and order torture to proceed, Walzer believes the
absolutist and the utilitarian wash their hands too quickly; their
consciences come too clean. He wishes instead `to refuse “absolutism”
without denying the reality of the moral dilemma’, to admit the
simultaneous necessity for ˆ and evil of ˆ torture. Why? To make space
for a moral leader, as Walzer puts it in Arguing about War, `who knows
that he can’t do what he has to do ˆ and finally does’ it. It is the
familiar tragedy of two evils ˆ or two competing goods ˆ that is at
stake here, a reminder that we must `get our hands dirty by doing what
we ought to do’, that `the dilemma of dirty hands is a central feature
of political life.’ It is the dilemma Walzer wishes to draw attention
to. Should torturers be free of all rules save utility, or constrained
by rights-based absolutism, there would be no dilemma, no dirty hands,
no moral agon. They must be denied their Kant and Bentham ˆ and leave
us to contend with the brooding spirit of the Counter-Enlightenment,
which insists that there could never be one moral code, one set of
`eternal principles’, as Isaiah Berlin put it, `by following which
alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous and free’.
But there is another reason that some writers insist on a ban on
torture that they believe must also be violated. And that is to
maintain the frisson of transgression, the thrill of Promethean
criminality. As Elshtain writes in her critique of Dershowitz’s
proposal for torture warrants, leaders `should not seek to legalise’
torture. `They should not aim to normalise it. And they should not
write elaborate justifications of it . . . The tabooed and forbidden,
the extreme nature of this mode of physical coercion must be preserved
so that it never becomes routinised as just the way we do things
around here.’ What Elshtain objects to in Dershowitz’s proposal is not
the routinising of torture; it is the routinising of torture, the
possibility of reverting to the `same moralistic-legalism’ she hoped
violations of the torture taboo would shatter. This argument too is
redolent of the Counter-Enlightenment, which always suspected, again
quoting Berlin, that `freedom involves breaking rules, perhaps even
committing crimes.’
But if the ban on torture must be maintained, what is a nation to do
with the torturers who have violated it, who have, after all, broken
the law? Naturally it must put them on trial; `the interrogator,’ in
Elshtain’s words, `must, if called on, be prepared to defend what he
or she has done and, depending on context, pay the penalty.’ In what
may be the most fantastic moment of an already fantastic discussion,
several of the writers here ˆ even Henry Shue, an otherwise steadfast
voice against torture ˆ imagine the public trial of the torturer as
similar to that of the civil disobedient, who breaks the law in the
name of a higher good, and throws himself on the mercy or judgment of
the court. For only through a public legal proceeding, Levinson
writes, will we `reinforce the paradoxical notion that one must
condemn the act even if one comes to the conclusion that it is indeed
justified in a particular situation’; a notion, he acknowledges, that
is little different from the comment of Admiral Mayorga, one of
Argentina’s dirtiest warriors: `The day we stop condemning torture
(although we tortured), the day we become insensitive to mothers who
lose their guerrilla sons (although they are guerrillas) is the day we
stop being human beings.’
By now it should be clear why we use the word `theatre’ to denote the
settings of both stagecraft and statecraft. Like the theatre, national
security is a house of illusions. Like actors, leaders are prone to a
diva-like obsession, gazing in the mirror, wondering what the next
day’s ˆ or century’s ˆ reviews will bring. It might on the face of it
seem difficult to imagine Liza Minnelli playing Henry Kissinger, but
I’m not sure the part would be such a stretch. And what of the
intellectuals who advise these leaders or the philosophers who analyse
their dilemmas? Are they playwrights or critics, directors or
audiences, or are they some uncharted figures of fun? I’m not entirely
sure, but the words of their greatest spiritual predecessor might give
us a clue. `I love my native city more than my own soul,’ cried
Machiavelli, quintessential teacher of the hard ways of state. Change
`native city’ to `child’, replace `soul’ with `life’, and we have the
justification of every felonious stage mother through history, from
the Old Testament’s rule-breaking Rebecca to Gypsy’s ball-busting Rose.
Corey Robin, author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea, teaches
political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the
City Univerity of New York.
===== Close Guantánamo Prison
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 23 May 2005
Last month, in a little-noticed vote, the Senate rejected
Democratic Senator Robert Byrd’s proposal to delete funding for the US
prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The amendment to the Emergency
Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror,
and Tsunami Relief, 2005 would have stripped HR 1268 of $36 million
earmarked for construction of a permanent, 220-person military prison
at Guantánamo. Opponents of the amendment said a new prison would keep
detainees from being transferred to the United States, where
terrorists might seek to free them.
These folks may well see the US federal courts, which now hear the
Guantánamo inmates’ habeas corpus petitions, as “terrorist.” Before
the Supreme Court instructed the Bush administration it must give
prisoners access to our courts to challenge their detentions (see
Supreme Court: War No Blank Check for Bush), the International
Committee of the Red Cross called the Guantánamo prison a “legal black
hole.” Between 500 and 600 men and boys have been detained there for
more than three years with no criminal charges against them, in
violation of US and international law.
Many Republican opponents of Byrd’s amendment are those who strive
to destroy the time-honored filibuster in order to appease their
right-wing Christian base. Some, such as Pat Robertson, would put
independent judges in the same category as terrorists. In an interview
with George Stephanopoulos, Robertson affirmed that judges who don’t
share his Christian values are a more serious threat to us than Al Qaeda.
It is not just Republican senators who voted against de-funding a
permanent prison at Guantánamo Bay. Seventeen Democrats, including
John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, joined all Republicans
senators except Arlen Specter in supporting the new prison construction.
Although Democratic senators are currently waging a valiant battle
to preserve the independence of the judiciary, many have wilted in the
face of Bush’s conflating of the war in Iraq with his “war on terror.”
They are afraid to stand up to him, demand that we save thousands of
lives by pulling out of Iraq, and vote to bring a halt to the disgrace
that is, in the words of the National Lawyers Guild and the American
Association of Jurists, a veritable “concentration camp” at Guantánamo
Bay.
Desecration of the Koran
Last week, the Bush administration forced Newsweek to back off a
story about the desecration of Korans at Guantánamo after it provoked
demonstrations, riots and more than a dozen deaths in Afghanistan. The
Pentagon refuses to release the Southern Command’s report, on which
Newsweek based its article. Publicizing its content could disprove the
magazine’s allegations, if they are indeed false, as the Pentagon
claims. The Red Cross documented “credible information” that supports
“multiple” instances of disrespecting or mishandling the Koran there.
Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times reported that court records and
transcripts contain “dozens of accusations involving the Koran.”
Allegations include having a guard dog carry the Koran in its mouth,
guards scrawling obscenities inside Korans, kicking Korans across the
floor, urinating on the Koran, ridiculing the Koran, walking on the
Koran, and tearing off the cover and throwing the Koran into trash or
dirty water.
Hunger strikes erupted in 2002 at Guantánamo after word got around
that Korans were being desecrated. On Friday, 500 British Muslims
chanted “Desecrate today, die tomorrow,” in front of the United States
Embassy in London.
Illegal US Occupation of Guantánamo
The real question the media should be asking is why our government
continues to illegally operate its prison at Guantánamo Bay, scene of
widespread of torture and abuse. The occupation of Guantánamo by the
US military violates the 1903 and 1934 treaties concluded between the
United States and Cuba.
Guantánamo Bay came under United States control in 1903 when Cuba
was occupied by the US army after its intervention in Cuba’s war of
independence against Spain. The Platt Amendment, which granted the US
the right to intervene in Cuba, was incorporated into the Cuban
Constitution as a prerequisite for the withdrawal of US troops from
Cuba. That provision provided the basis for a treaty granting
jurisdiction over Guantánamo Bay to the United States.
The 1903 Agreement on Coaling and Naval Stations gave the United
States the right to use Guantánamo Bay “exclusively as coaling or
naval stations, and for no other purpose.” Twenty-one years later,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a new treaty with the Republic
of Cuba, which abrogated the Platt Amendment and the 1903 treaty.
But this 1934 treaty, in the spirit of Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor”
policy, maintained US control over Guantánamo Bay in perpetuity until
the United States abandons it or until both Cuba and the U.S. agree to
modify it. The new treaty, however, specified that “the stipulations
of [the 1903] agreement with regard to the naval station of Guantánamo
shall continue in effect.” That is, Guantánamo Bay can be used only
for coaling or naval stations. Additionally, article III of the 1934
treaty provides that the Republic of Cuba leases Guantánamo Bay to the
United States “for coaling and naval stations.” Nowhere in either
treaty did Cuba give the United States the right to utilize Guantánamo
Bay as a prison camp.
Torture at Guantánamo Prison
US forces have used the Guantánamo prison to engage in torture and
inhuman treatment of prisoners, in violation of the Geneva Conventions
and the US War Crimes Statute.
A high-level military investigation concluded last month that
several prisoners at Guantánamo were mistreated or humiliated. The
findings were based on FBI agents’ accounts that were never meant to
be made public. The agents saw female interrogators forcibly squeeze
male prisoners’ genitals, and witnessed detainees stripped and
shackled low to the floor for many hours.
Psychological torture has also been documented at the Guantánamo
prison. “At least since 2002,” according to Physicians for Human
Rights, “the United States has been engaged in systematic
psychological torture” of Guantánamo prisoners.
Several detainees released from Guantánamo last month allege they
were tortured by US military guards. Seventeen Afghans said they had
been victims of “indescribable tortures.” Nasser Nijer Naser
Al-Mutairi was picked up on an Afghan battlefield in 2001. His lungs
and right leg were severely injured. After he was shipped to
Guantánamo, he underwent several chest operations and an interrogation
session that almost killed him, he said.
Mustafa Ait Idr, an Algerian citizen living in Bosnia, has been
detained at Guantánamo Bay for three years. He filed a lawsuit
alleging that US military guards jumped on his head, resulting in a
stroke that paralyzed his face, broke several of his fingers, and
nearly drowned him in a toilet.
Guantánamo: Symbol of US Hypocrisy
Instead of furthering the war on terror, the torture and abuse of
prisoners at Guantánamo Bay has had the opposite effect. “For many
Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in
which they believe the United States holds them,” according to the New
York Times. “For many non-Muslims, regardless of their feelings toward
the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American hypocrisy.”
Testimonials and photographs of atrocities emerging from
Guantánamo feed anti-American sentiment. “Guantánamo provides
rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down United
States-allied rulers in their own countries,” the New York Times
reported. “It offers a ready rallying point against American
dominance, even in countries whose own police and military have been
known for severe violations of human rights.”
As in US-run prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, high-ranking
military and civilian officials remain unaccountable for their
torturous policies at Guantánamo. (See Team Bush Goes Unpunished for
Torture). The State Department disclosed that 11 soldiers have been
punished for abusing detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Yet only one was
court-martialed, and he was acquitted.
Human Rights Watch says the United States should allow UN human
rights monitors, including the special rapporteur on torture, to visit
detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. If it had nothing to hide, the US
would welcome the monitors.
The National Lawyers Guild and the American Association of Jurists
have called on the United States to close its concentration camp at
Guantánamo, release the prisoners there or hold trials in accordance
with international legal norms, and return Guantánamo Bay to Cuba.
As a January editorial in the French daily, Le Monde, said, “The
simple truth is that America’s leaders have constructed at Guantánamo
Bay a legal monster.”
Democrats in the Senate must find their voice, not just on the
filibuster, but also to oppose the perpetuation of one of the most
disgraceful situations the United States has ever created.
Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h o u t, is a
professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president
of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the
executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.
FBI accused over torture in detention
Declan Walsh in Lahore
Wednesday May 25, 2005
The Guardian
Two US citizens yesterday alleged that FBI
interrogators were complicit in their torture and
illegal detention by Pakistani security forces over an
eight-month period.
Brothers Zain and Kashan Afzal, American passport
holders of Pakistani origin, said they had been beaten
with whips and rods, refused medical treatment and
imprisoned in “grave-like” rooms from August 2004
until their release last month.
American agents questioned them at least six times but
refused their pleas to help end the torture, provide a
lawyer or seek consular assistance, they said.
Instead, the FBI threatened to have them sent to
Guantánamo Bay unless they admitted belonging to
al-Qaida.
Article continues
“They told me that … you are a terrorist and you
could be taken to Cuba,” said Zain Afzal, 23, in a
statement issued yesterday through Human Rights Watch,
which campaigned for their release.
The brothers were released three weeks ago when they
were abandoned blindfolded on Karachi’s main airport
road. They took a taxi home. Since then Kashan Afzal,
25, has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.
HRW said the case highlighted US complicity in
“outrageous” human rights abuses committed in the name
of a “war on terror”.
A US embassy spokesman in Islamabad refused to comment
on the allegations, as did the Pakistani government.