The True Purpose
Of Torture
By Naomi Klein
15 May, 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 Guantánamo 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 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 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 Guantánamo'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 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 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.
· A version
of this article is published in The Nation
www.thenation.com