War With Terror

by digby

Greenwald discusses the absurd Fred Hiatt column expressing outrage that Secretary of State Clinton refuses to condemn other countries for the very things the United States is known to have done. Read it an laugh at the sheer chutzpah of the village, as it insists that we can still credibly speak on human rights after what our country did (and, sadly, continues to do.)

Greenwald links to this post about the ongoing revelations in the Mohammed Bunyam case, which continue to astonish. I’ve been following the torture issue from the beginning, and I’ve often wondered at the motivations behind the torture regime. It’s obvious the CIA knew that it was an unreliable interogation technique — it’s their business. Ex CIA oficers have testified to that fact. If they were truly looking for information, torture wouldn’t be the best way to obtain it. So what was it?

And what was all this torture for? According to Mr. Mohamed, it was during his stay at the Dark Prison that U.S. interrogators went beyond inducing confessions. They wanted him to finger other individuals, and use him to testify in the military commissions trials they were planning. Later, when Mohamed arrived in Guantanamo in September 2004, interrogators got worried Binyam would testify he only “confessed” or gave information because he was tortured, and tried to conduct “clean” interrogations, so they could say the testimony was uncoerced. They demanded he give his confession “freely”. After Obama was elected president and announced Guantanamo would close, Mohamed says his treatment became more brutal.

The entire Mail article goes into much, much more detail, and makes important reading for those trying to understand what kinds of crimes the U.S. and UK governments have committed when they undertook the torturing of individuals in their custody. Andy Worthington has also written an excellent summary and review of Binyam’s interview, and furthermore, writes from the standpoint of one who has followed both Mr. Mohamed’s case, and that of a myriad of other Guantanamo prisoners for years now.

Andy Worthington’s article makes abundantly clear that the torture of prisoners like Binyam Mohamed was not about, or at least not solely about, the collection of information. It was about the manufacture of information, including false confessions and fingering others for prosecution or further torture. In an earlier interview with Binyam Mohamed’s attorney, Clive Stafford Smith:

Binyam explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers “would tell me what to say.” He added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still “training me what to say,” and one of them told him, “We’re going to change your brain.”

This emphasis on brainwashing — for that is the popular terminology for such an assault on the psyche of a prisoner — is a key component of the kind of psychological torture that was researched by both the United Kingdom and the United States in the years following World War II. It highlighted the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, stress positions, manipulation of the environment, of food, the use of humiliation and both sensory deprivation and sensory overload upon the prisoner. The idea was to overwhelm the nervous system and make a human being collapse without a blow being made, without scars, without evidence usable in court.

Much to the chagrin of some in the government, I suppose, the Moroccans had some ideas of their own regarding torture, and it included the use of razor blades. According to the Mail account, there are plenty of pictures of Mr. Mohamed’s scarred penis in his files. That may be bad news for somebody, if anyone’s head is ever going to fall over this monstrosity of a treatment.

Brainwashing. False confessions. Show Trials. Of course. That’s the main purpose of torture. Indeed, it’s the only thing it’s capable of. That’s been the case going all the way back to the Inquisition. So the purpose of torture is to use the power of the authority to force people to make false confessions — and, more importantly, use those false confessions in kabuki procedings which many people know are show trials but which are powerless to challenge due to their superficial legality. The sheer power of that is awe-inspiring to the victims and the torturers alike.

The Bush administration’s simplistic approach to national security was to show that they were the biggest, meanest bastards on the planet. Part of that is to create the impression that there is no rhyme or reason for our violence other than a demonstration that we have the power to do it. The inexplicability of it is the point. And to that end, all those creepy rituals with the prisoners in the orange jumpsuits and the goggles on their knees were designed to show that the United States was engaged in a form of bureaucratic, systematic sadism. Which it clearly was.

Interrogations for the purpose of gaining intelligence were never the point. The point was to create terror. And there’s a word for that.

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