Stumble It!Feb 25 2009
How Now?
“Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
-Steps 8, 9, 10 of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program
As military historian Thomas Bass reminds us in June 2008’s edition of The American Quarterly, counterinsurgency and torture are, unfortunately, historically linked. In fact, many of the “lessons” on tactics to break an insurgency were borrowed directly from the manuals and memorandums published by French Colonel Roger Trinquier, the commander during the (in)famous “Battle of Algiers.” Like Trinquier, American specialists utilized torture, disappearances, intimidation, and indefinite imprisonments to achieve their short-term goals; to “break” an insurgency. But now that “success” in Iraq appears to be at hand, and the War on Terror seems to be shifting to the original battlefront, Afghanistan, the problem arises: what to do with the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Baghram Air Base? Many of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have been subject to psychological torture and physical torture, deprived of the protection of the American justice system and international legal frameworks, and even denied visits by international human rights observers. After all this, and some prisoners having been detained for 7 or more years, the order has come down to release the prisoners.
But objections have also arisen; what to do with the prisoners?They can not come to America and European countries don’t want them. They can’t be returned to their home countries because (it is assumed) they will fall into the employ of terrorist organizations, such as Al Qaeda and they can not remain indefinitely. Torture, though successful in the short run, has become a problem in the long run.
To digress a bit, torture has become the fare of light television entertainment of late; from psychological tortures of reality television shows like Big Brother and Survivor to the play-acted torture scenes in 24 and Jericho, torture is no longer the domain of the sadistic, the malicious, and the evil; torture indeed has become patriotic. What if the roles are reversed? What if the hero is the one in the chair and the sweaty guy with the juper cables and needle-nosed pliers is a swarthy guy with an “Arab” accent? Who do we root for? And given that the criminal justice system - with all its safeguards to protect evidence and “due process” - still convicts a fair percentage of innocent people, what percentage of captured detainees are nothing more than poor shleps who were in the wrong place at the wrong time? What happens to an innocent man, woman, or child who is detained without rights for almost a decade, deprived of sleep, deprived of respect and decent care, deprived of basic human rights, and psychologically and/or physically tortured? We know for a fact it happened - we know it was Americans who did it. We know it was Iraqis, Lebanese, Saudis, Americans, British, and Egyptians who suffered through it. Now we are afraid of letting our victims out of the jail we have kept them in, and justifiably so.
What happened when Jack Bauer, lauded patriotic hero of the Republic, was tied to a chair and tortured? Should he have been glad to go home and hug his daughter, settled into an office job, and become a happy, productive citizen who has no ill will toward his captors? Or did you cheer when he lunged at his captor, biting his carotid artery with a feral ferocity that spattered the small screen with blood? What if Jack Bauer’s name was Yusef Birstani? What if he sat in that chair for six, seven, or eight years? Who is the hero and who is the villain?
As Mr. Bass writes, “The most informed and thoughtful members of the U.S. military are thick in the middle of this debate about counterinsurgency and torture. These issues swirl around every mention of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo bay, and Baghram. This reality may ultimately force the military to confront the history of torture, while busily constructing historical narratives and trying to control historical interpretations about the use of torture in recent wars. The efforts will fail, and the military will harm itself in the process, if it leaves this assignment to the revisionists who want to erase torture from the historical record and lull us into refighting “better” wars than the wars we actually fought. We need to confront the truth of our contingent choices and realize that some of them were bad and others were both bad and wrong.” We can not undo the torture of the past, but we desperately need to acknowledge the wrongness of our choice to either commit it or to turn a blind eye while it was don. We need to set ourselves above the evils done to us and be a better nation; one whose enemies can not parade innocents who have been maimed and terroized by the “Free World.”
—————————sources——————–
Thomas A Bass’s “Counterinsurgency and Torture” (notes from a counterinsurgency seminar at the U.S. Army War College) in American Quarterly 60(2) (June 2008 )
