Torture And Its Discontents

There are many on the left, including me, who really, really, really wish that Obama had the gumption to go after Bush Administration officials for criminal activity during those horrid eight years. To be sure, we have had more than enough to deal with - like the near collapse of our economy - but it might have been nice had Pres. Obama spent just a tad bit of his electoral capital on making some kind of case that his predecessors in the Executive Branch were pretty awful people. We were given a reminder of just how awful today with former Pres. Bush admitting that he personally gave the order to torture Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

This information is a bit of synchronicity. I was reading Carlo Ginzburg's Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method yesterday. In an essay, "Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519", he discusses the interplay among the officials doing torture, the victim, and the competing narratives at stake:

It may seem unnecessary to dwell so minutely on this monotonous succession of confessions extracted by torture and followed by equally punctual retractions. But torture, in reality, only reaffirms in an extreme form the essential characteristics of the witchcraft trial itself. However, obvious, it may not be superfluous to recall that a large majority of inquisitors accept the existence of witchcraft, just as many witches believed what they confessed before the Inquisition. In other words, in the trial we have an encounter between inquisitors and witches, though on different levels, who share a common vision of reality, one which implies the everyday existence of the Devil, the possibility of having relations with him, and so forth. but precisely because of the discrepancies inherent in the encounter, there is always a gap between the beliefs of the defendant and those of the judge, even when the defendant is, as happens more often than is generally supposed, really a witch who does conjure the Devil in her incantation. And the judge, generally in good faith, seeks to overcome this hiatus, even, if necessary, by recourse to torture. That insidious interrogation technique which we have observed at work, a device which tends to draw out of the defendant what the inquisitor already believes is the truth, also serves the same purpose. In various ways judges superimposed predetermined ideas on the witches' confessions. And we must keep these accretions in mind in our attempt to understand the real character of popular witchcraft, in contrast to the "learned" witchcraft on the demonological treatises.c

Let us move this analysis to the years when Bush and Company was waterboarding, using stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other tactics on prisoners in Eastern Europe, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. On the one hand, we have the CIA and the Bush Administration who assumed that those in custody were "terrorists" (or that made-up category, unlawful enemy combatants). They had a model in mind as to who a terrorist was, what they did, how they interacted, the general shape and structure of the variously linked terrorist organizations, and so on.

The individuals in custody may or may not have "been" terrorists in some strict legally defined sense, but they certainly may, in all likelihood, either have meant direct harm either to US troops or the United States itself or sympathized and given material support to terrorist organizations and their affiliates. Through interrogation that became more and more coercive, to the point of using methods defined by international convention as torture, there was an effort underway to bridge what Ginzburg here calls the "hiatus" between the narrative of the official doing the interrogation and the mix of emotional, political, and religious sympathies combined with any actual involvement regardless of how extensive that may or may not have been, on the part of the prisoner.

Along with all the other reasons to be disgusted with torture - moral, legal, practical - we have this incredible interchange at work which actually prevents anything like seriously usable information emerging through torture. What is at stake is not information, reliable or otherwise. Rather, each side wishes to complete a narrative, with the "hiatus" bridged by the strenuous use of painful interrogation. What results, regardless of anything else, is nothing like a reflection of actual facts of the matter, but a general agreement that the person under interrogation "is" a terrorist.

Even if we were to set aside the legal and moral ramifications of torture, the detailed description of the effect of torture on this young Modenese witch by Ginzburg should serve as an object lesson in why torture doesn't work.