Just hazing? The US and torture

Tom Engelhardt over at
Mother Jones
has written an excellent article about the Untied States’ use of torture, the way it has become a religion with the current administration and the wider Republican establishment and how it intersects with the wider politics of the Bush administration.

A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees’ ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee’s shoulders, so that the man “danced as he was shocked”; mock drowning or “waterboarding”; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee’s head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, Afghanistan to the CIA’s secret prisons around the world.

Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses.
Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those “bad apples” manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland.

The warmongers and the pro-war socalled left have from the first tried to deny both the truth of these
tortures and its severity, claiming, in the words of at least one well-known rightwing radio commentator, that these are little more than frat hazings. Having had Misha Glenny’s excellent book on the Balkans and its history for reading material lately though, I cannot help but notice the simularity between the above list and some of the descriptions of torture in that book. It’s easy to minimise these tortures if you’re not the one who has to undergo them, but I doubt any of these scoffers would like to trade places.

The larger point Tom Engelhardt raises is that the use of torture by the US government, either directly or indirectly is not new to the Bush administration; succesive Democratic and Republican presidents both had no qualms to use it when convenient. What is new however is the institutionalisation of torture as a political instrument and the legalisation of it. There is the Gulag Archipelago the US has now finished constructing in Guantanomo, Diego Garcia and in client states in Central Asia. There is the legal ass covering done by the man Bush now wants to be his attorney general, head of the department of justice. There is the propaganda that lies about the severity of the torture while not so subtly implying these people deserve it anyway.

It all seems like classic fascism, doesn’t it: the insistence that might makes right, that the leader
should be followed unquestionably, the idea that the current (neverending) crisis justifies extreme behaviour and above all the idea that there is an omnipresent enemy, easily identifyable yet shadowy, that is out to do us harm. It’s only a matter of them, I fear, before torture is going to be used against Bush’s internal enemies…