The true purpose of torture

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salaam calaykum

 

brothers i just wanted to share this interesting article i came across....

 

 

The true purpose of torture

 

Guant醤amo is there to terrorise - both inmates and

the wider world

 

Naomi Klein

Saturday May 14, 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.

 

Article continues

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 Guant醤amo

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 Guant醤amo - 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 Guant醤amo'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 Guant醤amo 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