Dr. J.'s Commentary: Why Torture?

In my Commentary of Nov. 8, 2007, "A Torturous Debate," I discussed the genius of the Rove-inspired (if not still Rove-directed) Georgite propaganda machine in causing the torture discussion during the confirmation hearings on Judge Mukasey for Georgite Attorney General (sic) to focus on the question of the definition of waterboarding: is it or isn't it? I discussed what should have been, and still should be, the central agenda item: the unconstitutionality and illegality of the use of torture by any United States government at any time, in this case the BushCheney Regime operating in its self-declared "time of war on flanking maneuvers" (oh there I go again; I mean "terror"). But they are doing it, and they are not being challenged by the Democratic controlled Congress in any serious way. Thus the next question becomes "Why?"

Why does the BushCheney Regime use torture as a primary instrument for dealing with captives? Even if the Justice Department's apparently tortured (if I may use that term) legal reasoning were to prove that what it sanctions somehow isn't, legalistically, torture, in addition to the fact that most people think it is, it is described by the Regime itself as "enhanced" methods. After all, we are talking about waterboarding, extreme isolation, piercing sound, extreme cold, fake suffocations, prolonged confinement in rigid positions. So even though this Regime would give us an argument, let's for the sake of argument and brevity call it "torture."

Before we can answer "why," we can quickly dispose of what torture is not good for, based on the references from The New Yorker below. According to many experts in the field, it is not good for gathering intelligence from military captives. For the most part, tortured subjects just give their torturers what they want to hear, often, apparently, to making the stuff up as they go along. Experts have testified over and over again that sophisticated, non-torture psychological techniques developed in the last century by both U.S. and Soviet intelligence agencies are much more effective than torture in gaining useful information from military and paramilitary personnel. It is not useful in the "ticking bomb" scenario either. Any asset highly enough placed in an operation to know the details in enough detail to help any captors stop the operation just before it is about to take place will a) know that they are going to be killed anyway, and b) will be totally dedicated to achieving its desired outcome. As the Gestapo, the Iranian Savak under that great U.S. ally the Shah, the NKVD, the Japanese fascist era Kempeitai, the Argentine Generals, the Pinochet Regime, and the Spanish Francoists have proved over and over again, torture does have its uses and they are manifold.

First and foremost, it is a major instrument of terror against one's own population: it is a really good repressor of dissent. A principal tool of Gestapo control in Nazi Germany was to pick up someone who had been making mildly anti-Hitler remarks, give them a good session or two of torture downtown and then send them back to the neighborhood. You can bet the neighbors got the message.

Second, it is indeed very useful in extracting information from politically active civilian regime opponents who have no military training or training in resisting torture, such as the civilian opponents of the Pinochet Regime and the civilian targets of the Argentine "Dirty War." Third, it is a very good tool for extra-judicial punishment, just as long as the regime using it makes sure that its details leak out, in a totally deniable way of course, to its own citizens. Do you think that Argentineans didn't know their leftist loved ones were being tortured well before they were dropped out airplanes into the South Atlantic without a parachute? Fourth, it is a very useful tool for civilian repression in military-occupied territories. Just ask the Kempeitai that operated in Korea and Occupied China. Fifth, it is very helpful when a regime is out to change the culture of its country, and to wipe out historical memory of anything that went before it came to power. Doing so was perhaps the principal long-term goal of the Spanish Francoists, once they had restored corporate-clerical control of the country. Torture was one of their stocks-in-trade. Sixth, it is really good at extracting false confessions, then to be used in show trials, such as those of the Soviet Union of the late 1930s that killed off so many of the good Communists who were already challenging Stalinism as the way not to try to build socialism.

Seventh, in countries that use it but claim they do not, it helps to establish a record of lawlessness, of total disregard for the rule of law, as long as the Regime says things like, "We are doing what we are doing to keep our people safe and fight terror." For this one, we need look no farther than our own doorstep. The current U.S. regime is obviously out to change the culture here. "Torture [except of course we don't call it torture, just ‘enhanced interrogation'] is OK, that is as long as we are doing the Deciding as to who gets it." No rule of law, no adherence to international treaties or our Constitution for which they are a part, just as long as the Regime says "we're doing to live up to our responsibilities to keep the American people ‘safe from terrorism."

Then, to have a useful instrument of national policy, there has to be a cadre of torturers, another reason for the BushCheney torture program. Until they came to power, Americans didn't do such things, officially at least. So there weren't very many, if any, trained torturers amongst our armed and intelligence forces. But now they are being trained, apparently by the carload. And if the Georgites stay in power, they will be needing more of them. Further, BushCheney seem to be converting the CIA from an intelligence gathering agency (after all, it so often produces intelligence that they the Georgites just don't want to hear so why not change its function) to a torture agency which, given how little attention the Georgites pay to the law, could be useful at home as well as abroad.

Finally, for BushCheney, the whole institution, its use, and the whole "we don't have to tell either the Congress or the Courts or the American people any of the details just as long as we say we are using it in the war on terrorism]" tactic just strengthens their "Unitary Executive/F**k Congress" (otherwise known as fascist) approach to governance and governing.

So, don't tell me torture isn't useful. It's just not useful for what the torturers tell us it's useful for.

This Commentary is based in part on my Column No. 167, published on The PoliticalJunkies.net, on October 17, 2007.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly Contributing Author for the Web zine The Political Junkies.net; a Special Contributing Editor for Cyrano’s Journal Online; and an invited contributor to the Web log The Daily Scare.

Technorati Tags: Steven Jonas torture war on terror George W. Bush Dick Cheney Iraq Mukasey