[Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: The true purpose of torture

[richard haase]

i thought the true purpose of torture was for use on the actors
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <harry.sifton at sympatico.ca>
To: <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 14, 2005 8:50 AM
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: The true purpose of torture


> Harry spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should
see it.
>
> To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site,
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk
>
> The true purpose of torture
> Guantánamo is there to terrorise - both inmates and the wider world
> Naomi Klein
> Saturday May 14 2005
> The Guardian
>
>
> I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an
event honouring 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 10 months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out
periodically for beatings.
>
> Arar was being honoured for his courage by the Canadian Council on
American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organisation. 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 honoured 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 neighbour may be
a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you
could disappear on to a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole
that is Guant&#225;namo Bay", to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner,
president of the Centre 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 defence department will release certain kinds of
seemingly incriminating information about Guant&#225;namo - 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 a 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 Argentinians 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 Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU). "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 in Michigan, describes this
new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations are way down,
board members have resigned - Hassan says his members avoid 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 terrorise - not only the people in
Guant&#225;namo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more
importantly, 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 conceptualisations
obscure the purpose of torture ... The aim of torture is to dehumanise 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 practise 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 Guant&#225;namo 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 hotspot 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.
>
> &#183; A version of this article is published in The Nation
>
> www.thenation.com
>
> Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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