Sophistry hides a brutal truth

Sunday Herald, The, Feb 27, 2005 by Iain Macwhirter

TORTURE AND TRUTH: AMERICA, ABU GHRAIB AND THE WAR ON TERROR BY MARK DANNER

(GRANTA, pounds-16.99)

THREE years ago, American civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz argued that the US government should legalise torture. It was the only way, he believed, that it could be brought under control. Reading Mark Danner's disturbing account of how the US used legal sophistry to deny abuse in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, I wondered if he didn't have a point.

Now, I do not subscribe to the view that the US regime is no better than Saddam Hussein's. The occupiers at least believe in the rule of law, even if they don't always observe it. The rule of law is necessary to ensure common humanity prevails.

Danner shows how it is possible for a democratic government to justify barbaric acts provided they are cloaked in the correct legal formulations.

Danner documents how most of the abuses which came to light in Abu Ghraib had already been in widespread use since the GWOT - Global War On Terror - began after 9/11. Framed as "enhanced interrogation techniques", the US government explicitly sanctioned hooding, humiliation, threats, disorientation, sleep deprivation, extremes of heat and cold and much more.

Americans like to do things by the book.

Much of it is set out in key manuals, such as the CIA's 1963 KUBARK - Counter-intelligence Interrogation. The procedures are regarded as a "scientific" means of eliciting information from reluctant subjects without using extreme violence. They are presented as humane alternatives to torture.

The acts are described using chunky euphemisms which deodorise them of the funk of terror. My favourite is "extraordinary rendition" which means sending detainees to be interrogated in countries that don't endorse the UN convention on torture.

Mind you, export was hardly necessary.

Under the doctrine of "homeostatic derangement", US interrogators already had wide powers. They could use extreme exercise, pain, fatigue and anxiety to achieve "the debility-dependence-dread state".

Interrogators are advised to induce in their prisoners "feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring and being plunged into the strange". This leads to feelings of intense fear, dependence and guilt, which cracks the hardest terrorist nut.

The camera plays an important role in these psychological techniques. They call it the "shame multiplier". The existence of a permanent record of such acts, and the uncertainty about how the photos might be used in future, places the detainee in a state of dependency on his interrogators. But torture it is not - until you see the pictures.

Forcing someone to stand hooded on a box for hours with electrodes on their fingers may not sound so bad if you know the electrodes are never going to be used. But the prisoner doesn't know that. Similarly, the sexual horseplay, simulated masturbation and involuntary homosexual acts may not sound as bad as thumbscrews and the rack.

Until you see it in the flesh.

Things got out of hand in Abu Ghraib.

Inadequately-trained personnel interpreted "homeostatic derangement" as exposing naked prisoners to dogs, kicking and beating them and forcing them to roll in their own excrement. But, heck, no lasting damage was done, so what's the beef? A former US defence secretary described Abu Ghraib as "Animal House on the night- shift" - college-type ragging that got out of hand.

That is absurd. But even more so is the superficial plausibility of the pseudoscientific and legal justifications.

The virtue of Danner's book is not that it recounts yet more tales of the Dante-esque nightmare - endless accounts of inmates being sodomised with blunt objects just induces insensitivity in the reader. What is more valuable than any polemic is the documentation, which takes up the bulk of this book. It makes it a hard read, but nobody can say that it is tendentious.

Danner sets out, baldly and without comment, extensive classified correspondence between the various agencies of the US state as they debated torture. "For an act to be 'torture', " says a memo from the US Justice Department, "it must . . . cause severe pain and suffering and be intended to cause severe pain and suffering." In other words, if the interrogators don't know that what they are doing is torture, then it isn't.

Moreover, the pain inflicted must be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions and even death". Anything short of that is fair game. "We conclude that the [UN] treaty's text prohibits only the more extreme acts by reserving criminal penalties solely for torture and declining to require such penalties for cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

In other words, most of what went on at Abu Ghraib was legal. No surprise then that it is also happening at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan and, indeed, Camp Breadbasket in Basra. Many of the techniques were used in Northern Ireland.

So confident, or naive, were the architects of the 9/11 gulag that they allowed the Red Cross to witness much of it.