The Wall Street Journal has come out for torture in its leader on Saturday:
“Yet according to many Bush Administration critics, the aggressive and stressful questioning techniques used successfully against the likes of KSM put the U.S. on a slippery slope to widespread ‘torture’ and the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. John McCain (R., Arizona) has pushed an amendment through the Senate that would effectively bar all stressful interrogation techniques. The danger for American security is that this would telegraph to every terrorist in the world that he has absolutely nothing to fear from silence should he fall into U.S. hands.”
updated after the fold
But still there is this curious tribute that vice pays to virtue: on the one hand they demand the right to torture — and note how it is assumed, first that every prisoner is a terrorist, and second tha tht alternative to silence is truth — and secondly that it mustn’y be called by its proper name: if we do it, it can’t be torture.
“As for ‘torture,’ it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to “torture.” The “stress positions” that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.”
This argument does tend to reinforce what I wrote yesterday about the point of torture being the infliction of fear. Except for a very small minority of active sadists, the torture apologists don’t like to think about the vulgar physical aspects. Being beaten half to death, threatened with dogs, half-drowned — in all these, the pain is purely incidental, almost, one might say accidental — just a byproduct of a psychological technique.
Of course by this definition, the KGB never tortured anyone either. They just used psychological techniques — heat cold, lack of sleep, uncertainty, beatings. I hope the WSJ will print an apology for al those nasty editorials it once wrote claiming that the KGB was somehow morally deficient.
I wrote that almost flippantly, and then found from this morning’s New York Times that this was exactly where the US army had got its torturing from. There had been a special army school — called SERE — at the big Fort Bragg base in North Carolina, where soldiers were trained to resist the torture methods used by the North Koreans and North Vietnamese.
“At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went ‘up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques’ for ‘high-profile, high-value’ detainees. General Hill had sent this list – which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees’ phobias – to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.”
In another echo of yesterday’s post, it turns out that there were doctors or “SERE-trained mental health professionals”) involved in the torture.
“The SERE program’s chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the “behavioral science consultants” who helped to devise Guantánamo’s interrogation strategy (we’ve been unable to learn the content of that guidance).
“SERE methods are classified, but the program’s principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life’s most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the ‘confessions’ they sought.”
No doubt the Wall Street Journal will tell us that if psychologists were involved, then it can’t be torture. It’s only psychological. Some mor eof this exciting modern psychology:
On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We’ve obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators – a former SERE trainer – who cites command authorization of “stress positions” as justification for using what he called ‘the sleeping bag technique.’
‘A cord,’ he explained, ‘was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions.’ In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be ‘very effective.’ Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were ‘allowed out as soon as they start to provide information.’