World of Pain

Peter Lee

January 9, 2005

The other two defendants… were made to strip and they were laid over chairs and their backs were cut to pieces with a leather strap with buckles on it, and they were likewise made by the said deputy definitely to understand that the whipping would be continued unless and until they confessed, and not only confessed, but confessed in every matter of detail as demanded by those present; and in this manner the defendants confessed the crime, and, as the whippings progressed and were repeated, they changed or adjusted their confession in all particulars of detail so as to conform to the demands of their torturers.

That’s Mississippi 1934, not Iraq 2004. It’s from the landmark Supreme Court case that recognized the abuses inherent in coerced confessions and imposed the ultimate legal sanction of inadmissibility on them.

Five hundred years after the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition and seventy years after Brown v. Mississippi it might seem strange that we are debating the morality and efficacy of torture.

And bizarre that we are forced to wrestle with the nomination of Alberto Gonzales, the Tattoo-esque moral midget enabler who stokes George Bush’s Fantasy Island vision of unchecked power and imperial pre-eminence.

What should be an effortless dwarf-toss of Gonzales into the dustbin reserved for intellectually and ethically tainted nominees — a torture apologist for Attorney General, for Chrissakes! - instead looks like another step forward for Bush’s attempts to surpass the horrors of his first term.

Despite Gonzales’ unconvincing protestations, torture is what we’re going to get in our overseas facilities — just under another name, “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”.

The current shucking and jiving has nothing to do with the moral, legal, and procedural issues of torture and everything to do with semantic games to protect our administration — aggressively committed to physical coercion of detainees on a global scale — from potential legal sanctions under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which was ratified during the reign of Bush I.

In the famous August 2002 torture memo , Gonzales was straining to provide our troops and the pasty white rump of his padrone, George W. Bush, ironclad protection against an indictment for torture under CAT, just as Colin Powell has been laboring mightily to shield us from war crimes prosecutions by convincing our allies and satraps to opt out of the International Criminal Court on a friendly, bilateral basis with Uncle Sam.

First, the bar for “torture” was raised ridiculously high. The exemption for plain vanilla “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” - nasty and reprehensible, but not grave enough to justify an intervention to abridge the sovereignty of the United States and expose its leaders and military personnel to criminal proceedings under the provisions of a CAT — was pushed to include everything short of major organ damage and death.

Torture was defined subjectively as “conduct, the mere mention of which sends chills down one’s spine”, such as “the piercing of eyeballs”.

Which gives me the opportunity to say that torture, like pornography, is in the eye of the beholder. Ouch!

Secondly, unconvincing legal jiujitsu was performed over the last 15 pages to protect King George in the event that somebody took issue with our interpretation of what torture is and actually tried to file a case: The president is immune because It’s War! And nobody can limit the president’s powers during war.

Post Abu-Ghraib, even a mindlessly kowtowing sock puppet like Gonzales realized that now is not the time to proclaim Dear Leader’s right to order torture from every mountaintop.

So the August 2002 memo became inoperative but the substitute — the December 2004 memo - simply lowers the bar a bit to include severe physical suffering as well as pain, while shrugging apologetically that “drawing distinctions among gradations of pain…is not an easy task”.

Yes, it’s hard work.

But not for George Bush.

The issue of whether or not George could be on the hook for torture is rendered (at least in the opinion of the DOJ) moot because:

“Consideration of the bounds of such authority would be inconsistent with the President’s unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture”.

That takes care of that! For Bush, anyway…

…if not for our bewildered screws and spooks who now have to face the perils of a torture indictment while simultaneously trying to punch and kick their way through a botched occupation and mismanaged war on terror.

What we do in our prisons overseas might not be enough to get the U.N. off its ass, but it’s “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” enough to qualify as torture:

They…beat us very hard and they put a hood over my head…they had me kneel in front of my friend. They told my friend to masturbate and told me to masturbate also, while they were taking pictures…After that they brought in my friends…and put us two on the bottom, two on top of them, two on top of those, and one on top. They took pictures of us…After the end of the beating…they opened the water in the cell and told us to lay face down in the water and we stayed like that until the morning, in the water, naked, without clothes…Q: How did you feel when the guards were treating you this way? A: I was trying to kill myself but I didn’t have any way of doing it.

Sworn statement of Abu Ghraib detainee Hussein Mohssen Mata Al-Zayiadi

Torture is a powerful, horrible weapon of last resort, to be employed only when heeding the counsels of despair and with full, terrible knowledge of the misinformation it may obtain and the moral corruption it engenders.

Believe it or not, mental and moral giants are in short supply in this land, and you’re not going to find Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa choosing a career in the burgeoning field of state terror and security services.

In fact, the so-called expert consensus seems to be that our police and counterintelligence work — except for the brilliant indifference of our fearless leader GWB and heroic myopia of our sword of justice John Ashcroft — sucked.

Torture is not going to make it all better. It is no substitute for diligent police work or perceptive intelligence gathering — or capable policemen and smart spooks.

As Confucius said, you can’t build a wall out of shit — and you can’t create a superior intelligence capability by arming incompetents with the weapons of barbarism.

Encouraging torture makes it the first option and easy recourse for the lazy, vicious, and stupid — the kind of people drawn to secret police work and who are dismayingly abundant in Bush-world.

As cited in the Miranda decision , the pioneering Wickersham report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement — the first step in official repudiation of the practice of using the third degree to obtain coerced confessions — quoted law enforcement officials condemning the practice: "It is a short-cut, and makes the police lazy and unenterprising." Or, as another official quoted remarked: "If you use your fists, you are not so likely to use your wits."

Whether practiced by the so-called hillbillies of Abu Ghraib or the pros at Guantanamo, torture becomes the no-brainer choice for softening up and interrogation.

And it becomes the easy choice for extracting confessions for cases that are too hard to make using conventional methods.

Then it becomes the easy choice for coercing false confessions for cases that are just plain wrong.

Then it becomes the easy choice for knowingly extracting false confessions for making bogus cases to fit the coercive style of law enforcement that is the vogue nowadays in our RICO-ized world of shock and awe prosecution.

There are quite a few innocent people in prison because felons flipped and provided false testimony that the police found too useful to examine closely and objectively.

What happens when those felons are classified as “enemy combatants” and subjected to the kind of physical coercion — involving the loss of physical extremities and non-vital organs — that Gonzalez feels doesn’t clear the high bar he proposes to set for a legal definition of torture?

It makes you wonder what happened to Jose Padilla — who was cited as an example of the ticking time bomb type of enemy combatant whose circumstances cry out for torture in Gonzales’ notorious August 2002 memo — two years ago in a Navy brig. That was the time when the Bush administration was at the height of its hysterical self confidence, eagerly pushing the envelope to include every horror from torture to bunker busting nukes and pre-emptive war under the sheltering umbrella of the War on Terror

And it makes you wonder whether Jose’s sorry ass and whole story will ever emerge from detention to educate the American public about justice, Bush style.

And what happens when the Patriot Act can not only threaten some dumb goober with 20 years in jail for shining a laser pointer into an airplane cockpit — it can also cut off a few of his fingers to get some useful confessions and accusations on file?

And that’s not just how things were done in Soviet Russia setting up the show trials.

It’s how things were done in the United States, when dumb, lazy, and racist cops used the third degree not just to clean up their casebooks but also terrify minorities with the real threat of unchecked police violence, like they did in the case cited in Brown v. Mississippi.

It is apparent that much of the motive for torture is not urgency.

It’s laziness, cruelty, and something more — the idea that this is the best tool available to deal with people who hate and fear us, but have as yet committed no crime we can identify.

The true aim of a policy of torture is not to identify the guilty — it is to torment and intimidate the innocent.

Torture creates a world of pain for us all.

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.

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