Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy

...In his account, it is democratic monitoring that drives the torturers to their evasions...

...Moreover, if torture is an option, then governments will be tempted to use it...

...Richard Posner, for one, has written that there is "abundant evidence that torture is often an effective method of eliciting true information...

...the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland beat Irish captives in the genitals and with straight finger prods to the abdomen...

...Torture is a device for terrifying a populace into submission, and it can work for that...

...And once that bright-line rule against torture is dimmed, the descent down the slippery slope has started...

...Recent American experience bears this out...

...But Does It Work...

...He notes, "The application of emerging strategic interrogation strategies and techniques contain new approaches and operational art...

...Khan is protected in Pakistan by his status as a national hero, but with the potential death toll from his commerce in the millions, other states could not be expected to show the same deference...

...Bush refused to accept the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, who was fired only after the Republicans lost the Congress in the 2006 midterm elections...

...Torture, although an underground activity, has managed to quietly adapt itself worldwide to new political conditions...

...Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Centcom commander in 2003 and 2004, was pressured into retiring early, cutting short his career...

...Professionals become less disciplined, more brutal, and less skilled while their organizations become more fragmented and corrupt...

...Miller's visit set the stage for the nightmare abuse at Abu DISSENT / Fall 2008 • 101 BOOKS Ghraib from October to December 2003: detainees deprived of sleep, menaced by dogs, in naked pyramids, forced to simulate homosexual acts, forced to wear women's underwear, and beaten to death...

...Democratic publics, according to Rejali, also might be more willing to overlook torture when they think it is necessary for national security, or if it is done to different kinds of people, or in wars or colonialism...

...This flat prohibition is implemented in title 18 of the United States code—the law that Bybee and Yoo had to try to circumvent...

...Instead, "torture breaks down professionalism...

...AI issued its first global overview of torture in 1973...

...Nobody was seriously damaged...

...If a nuclear weapon were to go off in Los Angeles or other cities, it is almost unimaginable what the American government would do...

...This, too, is anything but hypothetical...

...it was showily used in Nazi-occupied France, Iran in the 1960s, Brazil and Argentina in the 1970s, and El Salvador and Syria in the 1980s...

...For instance, if you smash someone where flesh meets bone, it leaves bruises, which could tell the tale to investigating authorities...

...Bybee, of the torture memo, now sits on the U.S...

...This marked an effort to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib...

...The answer is, in their own special way...

...GARY J. BASS is associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton and the author of Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf...

...Starting in the spring of 2002, the National Security Council's principals' committee signed off on the CIA's so-called "combined" interrogation techniques on hard-to-crack terrorism suspects: whether to slap them, push them, deprive them of sleep, or waterboard them...

...It is a device for securing false confessions, and it works for that...

...The United States has signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture and accepted without reservation Article 2(2): BOOKS "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture...

...To evade them, the democratic torturer has to turn to "electric prods and electroshockers, tortures by water and ice, drugs of sinister variety, sonic devices—and also by methods that are less technical, but no less sophisticated or painful...

...Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the military police at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and demoted to colonel...

...Early in the twentieth century, dictatorships had little need to hide their tortures...

...Given the scientific pretensions of torturers, it turns out that doctors play a major role in finding them out...

...Since Abu Ghraib, a staggeringly public display of American torture that undermined the war effort in Iraq and tarred the country's image, there has been not much in the way of punishment...

...Bush used the ninth veto of his presidency, in March 2008, to ensure that the CIA is not bound by the U.S...

...He wanted the interrogators to shift from "tactical interrogation operations" to "strategic interrogation operations," in order to provide "GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] oriented" intelligence...

...Traumatized brains may suffer amnesia, and even cooperative prisoners may, in their torment, get their facts wrong...

...During the cold war, the Soviet Union spread torture know-how in East Germany, and the United States in Brazil...

...They forget normal police skills: "Why do fingerprinting when you've got a bat...

...For torture to extract accurate information, it must somehow be made scientific...

...Still, today, governments that would torture have to figure out ways to do so under the nose of monitors like the United Nations, the European Union, Human Rights Watch, and so on...

...Torture is so profoundly incompatible with modern liberalism that it took just six weeks after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 for France's deputies to abolish judicial torture...

...He cautiously suggests that this is because of British fears of getting caught out in Palestine by the watchful eye of the Anglican Church...

...In other words, Bybee and Yoo are trying to redefine torture mostly as the visible kinds of torture, while winking at the more common democratic ways of "clean torture...

...Democratic torture, on Rejali's account, goes on in a much different political arena...

...When North Vietnamese interrogators demanded the names of members of John McCain's squadron, the captive McCain fed them the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line...

...He might take comfort from Michael Mukasey, the attorney general, who says he is unsure if waterboarding is torture, and recently complained of "breathtakingly casual" suggestions that "some of these lawyers should be subject to civil or criminal liability for the advice they gave...

...Similarly, Rejali finds little evidence that professionalism can restrain torture...

...The torturers have to be worried about the interference of judges, lawyers, reporters, activists, and voters...

...But as Rejali admits, this may not hold up: "Monitoring may also collapse through political pressures and public BOOKS indifference...

...Most of them suffered psychological damage, which could be considered invisible...

...This began, according to ABC News, with Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda leader who was waterboarded with White House approval...

...Rejali, an expert on Iranian torture, writes, "When we watch interrogators, interrogators get sneaky" They also get lawyers...

...So much for keeping torture limited...

...As Jack Goldsmith put it, the country goes through "cycles of timidity and aggression" toward the state's intelligence apparatus...

...Although individual torturers may imagine that they have a particular knack for it, Rejali coldly writes, "Once the torture session starts, it necessarily devolves into an unrestrained hit-or-miss affair...

...THIS Is THE terrifying domain of maximum emergency, leading to such proposals as Charles Fried's "catastrophe exception" (to use Sanford Levinson's term) and Bruce Ackerman's plans for declaring a state of emergency while still restraining presidential power...

...Whether torture works depends, first of all, on what you think it is supposed to do...

...The torturers tend to innovate, and those innovations in cruelty spread...

...So strict prohibitions on torture will always be under siege...

...Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with lifetime tenure...

...Given the willingness of governments to turn a blind eye to their own abuses or those of their allies (Rejali points to British cover-ups in Northern Ireland and French whitewashes in Algeria), this is somewhat less convincing...

...It is not just that the president's words are demonstrably false, as evidenced by the sworn congressional testimony of the director of Central Intelligence and the horrific photographs from Abu Ghraib...

...At Guantanamo, Mohamed alQahtani, the alleged "20th hijacker" in the September 11 plot, had been menaced by growling dogs, leashed, and forced to wear women's underwear on his head...

...By the latter part of the last century, it was only the most isolated and extreme authoritarian states (such as North Korea) that could afford to ignore the international costs of torturing...

...And finally, it could be a device for getting accurate and actionable intelligence about security threats...

...they just do it evasively...

...He is clear that authoritarian governments have a worse record on torture than democratic governments do...

...But abuse then spread far beyond...

...In the first major medical examination of former detainees in American military jails, Physicians for Human Rights assessed eleven men, four of whom had spent an average of three years in custody in Afghanistan or Guantanamo and seven of whom had been detained in Iraq for an average of six months...

...the French Empire used to discipline its troops with the silo and the crapaudine), crucifixion (used, incredibly, as a British punishment during World War I), dorsiflexing, eyeball pressing, sweatboxes, waterboarding...

...So how can democracies torture today...

...But Rejali paints torture as a kind of Clausewitzian activity, where the ostensibly rational goal of the violence is overwhelmed by confusion, friction, and escalation...

...Japanese fascists, in a 1943 manual on interrogating prisoners of war, thought torture was "most clumsy...

...For an American debate on torture that has been largely theoretical, here is a book full of facts...

...One of Bush's worst lies is this: "I've said to the people that we don't torture, and we don't...

...There are, of course, non-torturing ways of getting intelligence, and the advocates of torture need to prove not just that their way works, but that it works better than the more decent methods...

...This, then, wastes time and effort as the authorities go check it out...

...When democracies did not fear public monitoring, they were more brazen in their use of torture—as in colonial wars, or when the victims were from a group marginalized or despised by the public...

...For a dictator, the use of torture— like other spectacular exercises of coercive state power—is meant not just to break the victim, but to cow all the other people...

...Acid torture, for example, leaves victims either dead or scarred...

...Worse, governments have been tempted to let slip the leash for much less than maximum emergency...

...Perhaps most strikingly, Major General Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, visited Iraq to review army prisons there from August 31 to September 9, 2003...

...This creates distinctive national—and sometimes international—styles of torture...

...In contrast, Rejali points to the impressive success of public information in helping British authorities swiftly catch the men suspected of putting bombs on London buses and trains on July 21, 2005...

...Many authoritarian governments found themselves embarrassed by new international human rights groups like Amnesty In100 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 ternational, founded in 1961...

...Khan, the Pakistani nuclear-bomb maker, to try to discover the ins and outs of his network of proliferation profiteering that extended to North Korea, Libya, and Iran...

...After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter said, "We need to remove unwarranted restraints on America's ability to collect intelligence...

...There was scant international monitoring of their internal coercion...

...Democratic torture can grow not just from national security imperatives, but from judicial systems that are too enamored of confessions or from police trying to torture their way to safe streets...

...and the attempt to ratchet up the pain can lead to numbness or sensory overload...

...In Algeria, torture took an awful toll on the French military, deprofessionalizing soldiers and splintering the military...

...Jack Goldsmith, the former Justice Department lawyer who withdrew this memo, called it "legally flawed, tendentious in substance and tone, and overbroad and thus largely unnecessary...

...Army field manual's interrogation techniques, which forbid physical force and thus things like waterboarding...

...Rejali argues that "clean torture" picked up substantially in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in authoritarian governments with close ties to powerful democracies like America, Britain, and France...

...In reality, torture is not so much a precise science as, in Rejali's words, "a craft apprenticeship...

...In Turkey in the 1990s, torturers gave up on the falaka—beating the soles of the feet with a rod—as doctors figured out how to detect it in victims up to six months after the assaults...

...One of the most useful things about Rejali's book is the demonstration of this process...

...Even so, Rejali argues, the prospect of oversight pushed colonial powers toward non-visible forms of torture...

...But Japanese police would beat prisoners in the midriff, hips, thighs and buttocks...

...Among these horrors, he documents a democratic preference for the refinements of cruelty that do not leave marks—what he calls "clean torture...

...No less a defender of basic liberties than Ackerman writes that, after a big terrorist attack, "early dragnets may well be functional," even though he is painfully aware that they will throw many innocent people into detention...

...The bulk of Rejali's book is a massive dictionary of the unspeakable: the electric bath, the electrified prod, paddling, sleep deprivation, stress positions (the British Empire pioneered the Gag, the Wooden Collar, and the Whirligig...

...As noted by both a 1963 CIA intelligence manual and an Indonesian interrogation manual found in East Timor in 1983, people being tortured will often give up junk information...

...some resist more than others...

...To compensate for variation in pain tolerance, torturers can aim for maximum pain early on—but this risks the victim's passing out, being badly 102 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 hurt, or dying...

...Mutilated victims are a hobbled reminder not to mess with the big man...

...As Darius Rejali explains in a sprawling, essential book, Torture and Democracy, the kind of torture depends on the political landscape...

...It is vital to interrogate A.Q...

...Torturers ignore regulations to get past a victim's pain threshold (as at Abu Ghraib), engage in competitive cruelty for career advancement, and deceive their own governments about what they are up to...

...Judge Posner should read this book and then think again...

...Different people feel pain differently...

...But the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has given us real-world situations that make it miserably unnecessary to ponder law school hypotheticals like the ticking time-bomb scenario...

...It is impossible to read this book without hearing the echoes of the August 2002 memorandum signed by Jay Bybee and chiefly written by John Yoo at the Justice Department, held up as a "golden shield" against potential prosecutions of the Americans who harshly interrogated senior Qaeda suspects such as Abu Zubaydah...

...Once the techniques of clean torture had been pioneered by democracies, they were adopted by dictatorships later in the twentieth century...

...In the light of Rejali's book, it is also exactly what you would expect...

...the modern democratic torturer knows how to beat a suspect senseless without leaving a mark...

...A weak dose of criminal justice was meted out to a handful of low-ranked officers, but went no further up the chain of command...

...As Stephen Holmes has pointed out, with the example of Russian operations against Chechen terrorists, the question is not just whether torture works, but what the opportunity costs were...

...As an example of almost all of those dynamics, in 1902, during the war in the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt coolly noted, "The enlisted men began to use the old Filipino method of mild torture, the water cure...

...Depressing as Rejali's book is, it does rest on a certain weak faith in democracy...

...Rather than develop a corps of Arabic-speaking experts on Iraq, the government could just torture detainees...

...Torturers have a way of rounding up more suspects than originally approved and using nastier methods than originally authorized...

...But according to a June 2008 report, the medical examiners found scars and injuries that fit the men's own stories of beating and electric shocks, as well as at least one case of sodomy...

...More recently, Americans have not been quite as adept at "clean torture...

...Democracies torture...

...Here, Rejali makes a devastating case against its effectiveness...

...And Rejali notes that there has been systematic torture in all sorts of democracies that were not facing grave danger: Japan, Brazil, Russia, South Africa after democratization, and the American cities of New York and Chicago...

...What is most pernicious about Bush's lie is that almost everyone would desperately want to believe it...

...There is little formal training, leaving many torturers relying on habit or word of mouth to confront a flummoxing range of complications thrown at them by the human beings they are tormenting...

...Trying to skirt the American domestic law that implements the Convention Against Torture, Bybee and Yoo wrote, "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death...

...But by the 1970s, that had all changed...

...Aristotle wrote that "evidence from torture may be considered utterly untrustworthy...

...And, of course, at the top of the chain of command, George W. Bush, the Abu Ghraib president, won a second term as president in 2004...

...Slippery Slopes As a matter of law, of course, none of this should happen...

...But Miller (whose report is available in Mark Danner's invaluable Torture and Truth) was unimpressed with Abu Ghraib's interrogations...

...British colonial police were more likely to use visible torture in Kenya in the 1950s than in Mandatory Palestine fifteen years prior...

...Vice President Dick Cheney said, of criticism of Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib: "Get off his back...

...and an AmeriDISSENT / Fall 2008 n 99 BOOKS can interrogator noted that he could beat Vietnamese prisoners senseless with an open hand and not leave reddened skin...

...Rejali explains this as mostly the result of monitoring too...