[Mb-civic] The True Pupose of Torture

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

"As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to
social control, nothing works quite like torture.'

The Nation - May 30, 2005 issue
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050530&s=klein

Torture's Dirty Secret: It Works

by Naomi Klein

I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an
event honoring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world's most
famous victim of "rendition," the process by which US officials outsource
torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when
US interrogators detained him and "rendered" him to Syria, where he was
held for ten months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out
periodically for beatings.

Arar was being honored for his courage by the Canadian Council on
American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organization. The
audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed
in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept
their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some
speakers were unable even to mention the honored guest by name, as if he
had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: The tenuous
"evidence"--later discredited--that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was
guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful
software engineer and family man, who is safe?

In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the
audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather
evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when
investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of
stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar
said, "not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them
from doing so." Fear of being the next Maher Arar.

The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the
Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque,
school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links.
When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of
torture, the message is clear: You are being watched, your neighbor may be
a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you
could disappear onto a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole
that is Guantánamo Bay," to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president
of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people being intimidated
need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that they demand justice.
This helps explain why the Defense Department will release certain kinds
of seemingly incriminating information about Guantánamo--pictures of men
in cages, for instance--at the same time that it acts to suppress
photographs on a par with what escaped from Abu Ghraib. And it might also
explain why the Pentagon approved the new book by a former military
translator, including the passages about prisoners being sexually
humiliated, but prevented him from writing about the widespread use of
attack dogs. This strategic leaking of information, combined with official
denials, induces a state of mind that Argentines describe as "knowing/not
knowing," a vestige of their "dirty war."

"Obviously, intelligence agents have an incentive to hide the use of
unlawful methods," says the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer. "On the other hand, when
they use rendition and torture as a threat, it's undeniable that they
benefit, in some sense, from the fact that people know that intelligence
agents are willing to act unlawfully. They benefit from the fact that
people understand the threat and believe it to be credible."

And the threats have been received. In an affidavit filed with an ACLU
court challenge to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, Nazih Hassan, president
of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, Michigan, describes 
this
new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations are way down,
board members have resigned--Hassan says his members fear doing anything
that could get their names on lists. One member testified anonymously that
he has "stopped speaking out on political and social issues" because he
doesn't want to draw attention to himself.

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in
Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more
important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is
a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's
will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human
Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted:
"perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill
treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations
obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the
victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples
for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can
break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the
United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract
information, not an instrument of state terror. But there's a problem: No
one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool--least of all
the people who practice it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways
to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate
Intelligence Committee on February 16. And a recently declassified memo
written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion
produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative
techniques." The Army's own interrogation field manual states that force
"can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to
hear."

And yet the abuses keep on coming--Uzbekistan as the new hot spot for
renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported to Iraq. And the only
sensible explanation for torture's persistent popularity comes from a most
unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked
during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked
prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control them," she replied.

Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to
social control, nothing works quite like torture.


------------------------------


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050514/2298af5d/attachment.htm