Tortured over torture
EVER since President Barrack Obama ordered the release of the Bush torture memos, the Americans are torturing themselves over torture. They are torturing themselves with the rights and wrongs of their government's use of inhuman techniques to inflict pain on terrorism suspects. Somebody needs to tell them that torture isn't a moral dilemma. It's a moral delusion.
We aren't talking about occasional torture, not the kind applied in police custody such as beating or sleep deprivation to get confessions out of common criminals. Hardcore offenders are hard nuts to crack, and torture works like a magic potion. In the right dose, it unlocks their tongues and makes them sing like canaries. Torture yields results; it salvages truth from the wreckage of facts.
But this is about torture that has the pathology of a sadistic mind. The interrogators swooped down on their prisoners like the Visigoths destroying a civilisation. Even better, they approached their captives like the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, pounding fragile bodies to occupy rock-ribbed minds.
It was as though a mini Kabul or a little Baghdad was buried inside each of those prisoners. Their bodies were, therefore, ransacked so that their minds could be thoroughly searched, lane-by-lane, house-by-house, spider hole by spider hole. The interrogators must have expected an Osama bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein to pop out anytime.
Did it work? It can be argued like two sides of a coin. Maybe the information extracted from the prisoners, names, places, and dates, pieced together leads for the US government to hunt down terrorists and prevent another 9/11 from being repeated. It's possible that torture has kept America safe.
But on the flipside, it's also possible that what has kept America safe also has kept terrorism alive. Torture performed a sartorial contradiction. It cut and stitched, both at the same time when the victims opened their mouths and closed their hearts. The confession hardened their conviction, their loyalty to the cause evermore consolidated by their hatred for the tormentors.
Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay detention camp will go down in history as museums of moral holocaust where the souls of oppressive minds were incinerated in the gas chambers of moral opprobrium. In these and countless other places where the United States conducted torture, something interesting happened. The moral authority of the persecutors evaporated every time the persecuted squirmed in pain.
Many of the prisoners have survived torture and returned home. Many of them proved innocent, undeserving of the cruel fate they suffered in the hands of their captors. May be they will still suffer from aching bones and muscles, internal organ failures, shame and grief of how they were subjected to unspeakable horror. The water-boarding victims might still wake up from their nightmares, having the feeling of sinking and suffocating in their beds. They will be tortured by memories of torture for the rest of their lives.
But the nation that tortured them appears to be equally, if not more, disturbed. One wonders why? A. J. Langguth claimed in an article, which appeared in Los Angeles Times on May 3, that the United States has a 45-year history of torture. As CIA toppled governments in foreign countries, it also regularly trained the police and army of those countries to torture political prisoners.
Amongst many examples, Langguth mentions the experience of Flavio Tavares Freitas. This Brazilian journalist and Christian nationalist had wires jammed into his ears, between his teeth and into his anus. Before electricity was sent through him, he was able to recognise the small gray generator producing the shocks. It had on its side the red, white and blue shield of the USAID.
So, why are the Americans torturing themselves over torture after all these years? Their governments, most of them, more or less, authorised torture and assassination in foreign countries. Bush was more adventurous than his predecessors. For a change, he brought foreigners home and tortured them on American soil.
Is it the moral side of torture that bothers the Americans? If that's so, it has the absurdity of driving with an expired license. At least for a good half-century, the American hegemony has redrawn the moral map of the world. Right is what is in the American interest. Wrong is what fails that litmus test. Convenience not conscience is the theme of that new moral anthem.
Elaine Scarry writes in her book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, that when a political power resorts to torture as a show of strength it's actually weak and unstable. That defines the American delusion. Challenged or threatened, it goes any distance to show it won't take shit from others.
Torture violates human dignity. Dilemma is when one doubts that violation. Delusion is when one doubts that dignity.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
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