The carceral state

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

-- Adam Gopnik quotes from Charles Dickens on solitary confinement in an outstanding piece on incarceration in the United States. Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. At any one time around 50,000 of them are in solitary confinement.

Doing the right thing

Well done, Dave

Are we the baddies?

asks P.Z. Myers

The answer judging by this is: yes.

How it was

The Ambassador's Reception, broadcast earlier this month on BBC Radio 4, included two anecdotes from the publisher and editor Murat Belge, who was held by the military after the 1980 coup in Turkey.

At one time the jailor required Belge and other political prisoners to capture exactly one hundred flies every day and present them in the evening for inspection. On the occasions they failed they were required to eat the flies. 'Imagine having to eat ninety seven flies.'

Another time Belge was being tortured so badly that he gave way and agreed to sign a confession. He went to the next room with his torturer to sign a document. They both sat down at the table and the torturer's knee accidently brushed against his. Please excuse me, said the torturer most politely.

Worse than a crime

Marc Thiessen's Courting Disaster embraces horrible, foolish crimes. In letting these go, Jane Meyer reminds us, the Obama administration has made a grave mistake:

By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it.

'Where language is corrupted...'

Waterboarding is not now and never has been, under any legal, moral or historical authority, an interrogation technique. No one can be "interrogated" with a cloth across their face and water poured over them to bring them to the point of drowning 183 times. They can merely be tortured, and then their broken psyche can be questioned.

That the NYT, that Isaacson and Tanenhaus, two decent and intelligent and humane people, should now be forced by style manuals to say that torture is something else, suggests how far we've come. And how fast.

-- Andrew Sullivan

Which is it, Mr Miliband?

I have had a copy of the infamous Bybee memo for months, and this allows us to consider which of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" the British government would rather keep under wraps. As identified by Bybee, the 10 techniques are:

(1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard.

-- from Britain's torture cover-up continues by Clive Stafford-Smith

Tavab TV

Laura Secor comments on show trials that only Seamus Milne and Hugo Chavez could love:

The nefarious plotters engaged in “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters in “gathering information,” and “presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” Apparently, the Iranian citizen is meant to consider it self-evident that the country’s national interest depends on concealing human-rights abuses, censoring the news, and obfuscating the electoral process.

Recalling echoes of the 1980s:

Ervand Abrahamian, the author of “Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran,” quotes a witness who said of the night a major leftist recanted, “Something snapped inside all of us. We never expected someone of his reputation to get down on his knees. Some commented it was as revolting as watching a human being cannibalize himself.”

But Secor concludes optimistically:

Iran was a radical place in the eighties. Both the regime and much of its opposition were absolutist, utopian, messianic, apocalyptic. Forced confessions, so effective in that climate, convey little more than illegitimacy when they are used against an opposition that is asking for the counting of votes and the rule of law. Today’s show trials are a sign of how much Iran has changed in the past thirty years, and how poorly its regime has kept pace.

War music

Why is the American military using music [to break down prisoners]? After all, it could as easily use white noise, or ‘sonic booms’, Israel’s weapon of choice whenever it has wanted to frighten Lebanon without going to war. Moustafa Bayoumi, in an article in the Nation in 2005, suggested that music is used to project ‘American culture as an offensive weapon’. But if the use of American music is a blunt assertion of imperial power, why are metal and gangsta rap the genres favoured by interrogators at Gitmo? One reason [suggests Jonathan Pieslak, author of Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War] is that metal is uniquely harsh, with its ‘multiple, high-frequency harmonics in the guitar distortion’, and vocals that alternate between ‘pitched screaming’ and ‘guttural, unpitched yelling’. ‘If I listened to a death metal band for 12 hours in a row, I’d go insane, too,’ James Hetfield of Metallica says. ‘I’d tell you anything you’d want to know.’ (One interrogator told Pieslak that he tried Michael Jackson on Iraqi detainees, but ‘it doesn’t do anything for them.’)

One can imagine other dissonant forms of music – serial music, or free jazz – being equally effective. But not many military interrogators listen to Schoenberg or Stockhausen – or, for that matter, to Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. The use of metal and rap, it turns out, mainly reflects the soldiers’ taste. As Pieslak shows, it’s the music many of them listen to when they’re ‘getting crunked’ – pumped up for combat missions. Songs like Slayer’s ‘Angel of Death’ put them ‘in the mood’ to fight because their pounding, syncopated rhythms sound very like a volley of bullets being fired from an automatic gun, but the same songs are also deployed in interrogation, and in combat, to terrify people and break them down. It all depends on where you’re listening, and who controls the loudspeakers.

-- Adam Schatz, LRB

'Absolutely torture'

As The Man said, it's a no-brainer:

More than the photos

...to date the only Americans who have been prosecuted and sentenced to imprisonment for the criminal policies that emanated from the highest levels are ten low-ranking servicemen and women—those who took and appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs, and embarrassed the nation by showing us what we were doing there. Charles Graner is the only one remaining in prison, serving ten years. His superior officers enjoy their freedom, and C.I.A. interrogators, who spent years committing far worse acts against prisoners than Graner did even in the darkest days at Abu Ghraib, have been assured immunity.

But, if full justice remains impossible, surely some injustices can be corrected. Whenever crimes of state are adjudicated—at Nuremberg or The Hague, Phnom Penh or Kigali—the principle of command responsibility, whereby the leaders who give the orders are held to a higher standard of accountability than the foot soldiers who follow, pertains. There can be no restoration of the national honor if we continue to scapegoat those who took the fall for an Administration—and for us all.

-- from Interrogating Torture by Philip Gourevitch.

Courage

Mr. Cheney's politics of torture, Mark Danner says, looks, Janus-like, in two directions:

back to the past, toward exculpation for what was done under the administration he served, and into the future, toward blame for what might come under the administration that followed.

Obama chooses to take this bull by the horns:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during World War Two, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said 'we don't torture', when all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And the reason was that Churchill understood you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

But the narrative gets a little more complicated if you recall that Churchill sanctioned the area bombing of civilian populations in Germany.

P.S. 2 May Dowd on corrosion of character

Alternative sets of procedures

Mark Danner does a useful job on government sanctioned torture (US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites, The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means). One can see the violence inherent in doublethink at work. As George W. Bush asked, 'What does that mean, "outrages upon human dignity"?'

Less publicized, perhaps, has been the widespread use of solitary confinement in U.S prisons and the ramifications of this practice, which is a form of torture. In his remarkable investigation, Hellhole, Atul Gawande observes:

With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door

Blair's children

I am not asking for vengeance; only that the truth should be made known so that nobody in the future should have to endure what I have endured.

-- from a statement by Binyam Mohamed read out by his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith.

Barbara Ehrenreich here.

A necessary hypocrisy

Pursuing the Bush administration for crimes long known to the public may amount to a kind of hypocrisy, but it is a necessary hypocrisy. The alternative, simply doing nothing, not only ratifies torture; it ratifies the failure of the people to control the actions of their government.

-- Scott Horton

'Cheney Confesses To A War Crime'

notes Andrew Sullivan

'The lexicon of totalitarianism'

Three sentences for four years of a young Afghan’s life, written in language Orwell would have recognized.

-- Roger Cohen on what Obama is putting behind

Torture TV

Philippe Sands is the critic

'The freedom to be creative'

...a phrase used by one of the American practitioners in an excerpt trailed for The Torturer's Tale.

Congo, Greece under the colonels, and the present day U.S. provide the grist.

Congo, Greece (when it was a brutal military dictatorship), the United States.

Saddam Hussein, supported for two or three decades by the U.S. (and others), partly rose to the attention in the Ba'ath thanks to his creativity and virtuosity in the development and application of an alternative set of procedures. He used to offer some of his clients a menu to choose from, like a chef.

Thankyou, 24

So America's peers in the fight against torture, in terms of public opinion are Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, and Iran. This is what America now is: a country with the moral values of countries that routinely torture and abuse prisoners, like Egypt and Iran. Even the Chinese, living in a neo-fascist market state, oppose torture in all circumstances by 66 percent, compared to Americans where only 53 percent do! More horrifying: a higher percentage of Americans - 13 percent - believe that torture should generally be allowed than in any other country save China, Turkey and Nigeria. And in the last two years, as the American president celebrates and authorizes the torture of people who have not been allowed a fair trail, support for torturing terror suspects has increased from 36 percent to 44 percent.

-- from America, global pioneer of torture by Andrew Sullivan.

Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

-- from Just Asking by David Foster Wallace.