When I first read about the allegations made by prisoners who were released from Guantanamo Bay, specifically those that told of visits by prostitutes, smearing of menstrual blood, and so on, I thought that they were so over the top that they just weren’t credible. How wrong I was.
As the Washington Post reports,
Female interrogators repeatedly used sexually suggestive tactics to try to humiliate and pry information from devout Muslim men held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a military investigation not yet public and newly declassified accounts from detainees.
In particular, the reports about women smearing the faces of detainees with menstrual blood sounded too bizarre to be believable. Moreover, al Qaeda manuals instructed those captured to insist that they had been tortured, whether true or not. (That tactic tends to undermine the credibility of reports of torture generally.) Well, it turns out that those stories were quite likely true — if not the tales of physical torture, then almost certainly the accounts of sexual humiliation:
The inquiry uncovered numerous instances in which female interrogators, using dye, pretended to spread menstrual blood on Muslim men, the official said. Separately, in court papers and public statements, three detainees say that women smeared them with blood.
Assuming that the accounts are true, I’m not sure what to think about them. If you have a captured terrorist (and it seems that some of those who have been released were not terrorists, although there is evidence that others have indeed turned out to be), is it out of bounds to threaten such a humiliation if the information you get might break up a terrorist cell? It’s shocking. It’s degrading. It’s disgusting. Is it immoral? It’s not obvious to me what the answer to the last question is.
I think we can agree that the events that took place at Gitmo are…disturbing. But I’m troubled by the overall issue of “stress and duress” information extraction. How far exactly can interrogators go to extract information that would lead to securing the safety of Americans? There always is the possibility for abuse by an ever power hungry state, but we can’t also be so cynical as to assume that every state official has torture as a manifestation of his own sadism, can we?
Brian R. asks: “There always is the possibility for abuse by an ever power hungry state, but we can’t also be so cynical as to assume that every state official has torture as a manifestation of his own sadism, can we?”
Sure we can. The people interrogating Gitmo prisoners are not randomly selected Americans. They are filtered. They are relatively young men, facile with guns and weaponry, more strongly devoted to American heroic mythos and the importance of following orders than other Americans who wouldn’t have made the grade for this particular job. Just like true generalizations can be made about radiologists that don’t fit the general American population (smarter, more visually oriented), so too generalizations (not always true but not easily ignored) can be made about those who get the job of Gitmo interrogators. I’d think it fairly safe to say that, told the prisoner in cell 3 likely has information vital to preventing another 9/11 (whether such a claim has any supporting evidence, and these people are not particularly selected to question information given by superiors), I doubt there’s little they wouldn’t do to gain that “info”. Using Occam’s Razor, I submit this IS the easiest way to explain the known facts coming out of Guantanamo.
If even 1% of the allegations about Guantanamo are true, there is no way that any decent human could defend such barbarity, at least within the confounds of a decent philosophy. Such torture is also not practical. It is needless, disgusting, immoral, unconstitutional and uncivilized behavior, not fitting of a free society. To put anyone through such treatment, and without due process and a habeas corpus hearing, destroys hundreds of years worth of efforts to liberalize and bring sanity to our legal and political systems.
If there is some bizarre hypothetical case, where you KNOW someone is a terrorist who KNOWS where WMD are planted in American cities, for example, and you take it upon yourself to sink to such depraved depths to save a hundred thousands lives, or something, I could see a case for pardoning you once it comes to trial. But torture is still an offense, and should never be officially legal, let alone systematically practiced by the state, in a civilized culture.
Of course, a good number of these victims are just innocents, persecuted by US empire. I’m surprised any libertarian would see this issue as the least bit debatable. Torture? It’s not like we’re talking about something like rent control here. And it’s not like the US can provide evidence that practically ANY of its efforts at Gitmo (or in the temporary Gulags that emerged right after 9/11, wherein they threw hundreds or thousands of innocent, eventually exonerated, people, all deprived of basic due process and none of whom were ever convicted of terrorism) have done ANYTHING to make us safer.
Moreover, this type of torture is probably the tip of the iceberg. I will make a safe bet that in 10 years stories will come out that make even some of the worst hawks disgusted that they condoned, even tacitly, such uncivilized, inexcusable brutality.
>>If you have a captured terrorist (and it seems that some of those who have been released were not terrorists, although there is evidence that others have indeed turned out to be),
A big problem is that once you sufficiently torture/humiliate someone, if they weren’t a terrorist before, they sure as heck are now. If I was some dumb shmuck who got sucked into Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib by accident, it would take a superior level of wisdom and discipline NOT to devote the remainder of my life to finding US soldiers and cutting out their hearts.
What this means is that as a practical matter, anyone who gets tortured simply MUST be executed. It’s not pretty, but there it is — torture by necessity leads to extrajudicial execution. (Further contemplation will lead to even more horrific insights.) We don’t need to be going there.
>>The people interrogating Gitmo prisoners are not randomly selected Americans. They are filtered.
YES. Finally, a rare person who understands selection pressure and institutional logic. Actually the situation is much worse. Remember, Milgram demonstrated that 2/3 of the US population will torture an innocent person to death if asked to nicely by an authority figure. How many standard deviations down the humanity scale does one have to go before 2/3 becomes 95%? ONE.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t equate smearing dye/blood on someone with torture.
The main thrust of an interrogator is to create a degree of emotional distress that will secure information from the prisoner without pushing him past a point where the information is useless.
Torture is designed to create that emotional state by generating an intense fear of the torturer and the pain he might inflict. It generally results in pushing the person to a point where any information is useless.
The tactics used at GITMO…and Abu Graihb for that matter…are designed to create emotional distress in a humane manner. No one was hurt and “emotional scarring” isn’t something you can sell me on.
What is being said here is that any method used to create emotional distress is torture. By that definition, good old American protests are torture. Protesters use signs and actions that are designed to shock and create an emotional reaction in the protests target to get him/her to change their mind about something – torture by such a simple definition.
We, as a country, have to define what “torture” is and what interrogation is before we can have this discussion.
Let’s stop and take a serious look at the atrocious state of our prisons before we get all teary eyed for a few detainees smeared with red dye. Nothing that allegedly happened at either Abu Ghiraib or Gitmo sounds nearly as bad as the systemic documented environment of sexual assault that groups like SPR are working to reform.
I think there is a difference between violation and humiliation and we should prioritize our attention accordingly.
What many people are missing, here, is this:
“It’s all well and good for various assholes and morons to go about holding forth on what “torture” is, according to their own values, and never considering that the whole issue turns on the values of the person being violated in any given instance before the court.”
Source: http://tinyurl.com/6k6jq
I was thinking hypothetically. But Mr Doland makes a good point. The idea of torture (now called “duress interrogations”) is nothing new in the prison system either. That doesn’t morally excuse the violations at Gitmo, but it does raise the interesting question as to the level of tolerance that exists allowing torture for the sake of “public safety.”
As to Mr Farley’s argument that Abu Ghraib’s incidents somehow “humane” I think might prove my point. Nuremberg examined the Nazi tactics used against Jews and other prisoners in order to extract the whereabouts of their contacts *by threatening them with dogs.* One of the high points of the Constitution reifies the premise that even prisoners posess some human dignity. Piling prisoners onto one other may not create visible injury, but it doesn’t justify it as “humane” under any reasonable standard. It may not be torture, but it isn’t excuseable.
Torture or not, smearing menstrual blood on prisoners is disgusting and unbecoming a civilised people. This is the enlightenment of democracy: “We’re so much better than you, watch us act like depraved animals.”
Actually, scratch that, animals don’t treat eachother this poorly.
Aaron G. – please note that nobody actually smeared menstrual blood on anybody. It was red dye (or so, at any rate, we’re told).
What I can’t figure out is what this was supposed to be accomplishing. If I was being interrogated and someone smeared “menstrual blood” on me, I’d probably think, “wow – what a disgusting pervert!” but it wouldn’t exactly *scare* me into telling them anything – any more than being forced to sit in a comfy chair or being poked with soft cushions.
Do muslims have a greater than average aversion to menstrual blood for some reason?
I guess I have no moral values!
All I can think about when I hear
these stories is what this does for
recruitment of anti-U.S. terrorists.
The Americans are devils. Even
their women will committe vile and
disgusting acts. They all deserve
to die.
Beating the prisoners would be less
harmful to the long run interests of
the American people.
The prison system is atrocious, and the tacit legitimization of rape in prisons is another thing many libertarians don’t concern themselves with enough. But I’m guessing Gitmo is probably worse.
As to the Muslim/menstrual blood question, I do believe that, culturally, it is particularly a taboo in Islam. Which is probably why the interrogators did it.
I’m confused why Dr. Palmer assumed these allegations were too bizarre to be true. By now we shouldn’t assume the US state is above such depravity. Look at the ways even the IRS, FBI, DEA and FDA treat Americans. Look at the police brutality. Look at the warfare tactics of killing civilians by trade sanctions and bombings. It wasn’t too long ago that the US bombed civilian infrastructure, as a matter of policy. The menstrual blood humiliation is horrible, and uncivilized. But it is hardly too bizarre to be true, not even in the US prison system and certainly not in its “terrorist” prisons.
Anthony Goodman: why the scare-quotes around “terrorist?” Aren’t there any?
I’m on a break from my conference and am learning from the above comments. Thanks. I’ll drop back in later. I find this an important and difficult set of questions that deserve careful thought, which is why I posed the problem, hoping that smart people would help me to sort it out.
I’ll answer for Anthony his query about why I found the initial accusations too far over the top to be credible. I don’t merely assume that the most bizarre accusations about the police, for example, are always true. Sometimes they are, but quite frankly, most claims of police torture in the U.S. are not credible. Some are credible and some of those are true, and sorting through them and visiting justice on the guilty (as in the shocking abuse that was proved in the Abner Louima case) requires that one look for the evidence. We now have strong evidence of the truth of the claims of sexual humiliation. That’s important. (I would have been more inclined to consider credible claims that interrogators had gotten out rubber hoses than that female interrogators had bared their breasts to detainees. I had never heard of such an interrogation technique, although I confess that my knowledge of such matters is certainly very limited.)
P.S. And just to rib you a bit, Anthony, I should point out that in the Los Angeles Times some years ago your friend and publisher wrote a quite shocking and disturbing defense of the beating of Rodney King. His only suggestion for any legal change as a result was that video cameras should be banned. He provided a rather rare, but enthusastic, defense of police brutality in that case.
I haven’t seen the LA Times piece, Tom, which you mention. I haven’t found a copy. I don’t know exactly what it says, so I reserve judgment (I think this is reasonable; I would reserve judgment regardless of the author; though, I must admit, that the respect for Lew I have does make me particularly suspicious that he called for the banning of cameras: I’ve never seen him call for the banning of anything, except perhaps government activities). However, EVEN if everything you say about it is true, it doesn’t make the current abuses in the War on Terrorism, which, according to credible research, seem to be on the par of Rodney King times a thousand, any more excusable.
You say some things are credible and only a subset of them are true. I would say that much of what the US government does is incredible, and nevertheless true. This is a rhetorical play, I admit, but I think it carries some weight in the real world. As you said, you originally thought the claims were too strange to be credible. Now you see that even claims that originally seem incredible are likely true.
On the question about “terrorist,” with the quotation marks. Of course terrorists exist. The mass murderers who slaughtered thousands of innocents on 9/11 did in fact exist, and the engineers of that atrocity still do (and are at large), as far as I know.
But to say Gitmo is a “terrorist prison,” without any qualifications, is to ignore some crucial points. Many of these people were rounded up in Afghanistan for a reward. They got no due process. Some have been freed on lack of evidence. Some of them alleged being hauled in metal boxed, forced to contort their bodies in unspeakable tortuous positions, subjected to extreme heat and cold, deprived of food and water, beaten, mocked, confined to small cages and only allowed to walk for short distances as recreation. One said, “After a while, we stopped asking for human rights – we wanted animal rights.” Now, considering that many of these people — who were never formally brought up on charges, never had the benefit of an attorney, never were able to confront their accusers, never were given the rights to habeas corpus that have been a staple of Western due process and common law since 1215; and many of whom were detained on the basis of the say-so of their countrymen in exchange for a reward — were freed on account of their most likely being innocent of terrorism, I ask: why should we not at least take these allegations seriously, at least more seriously than we take the Bush administration’s claims regarding terrorism, when it has been exposed in its lying about Iraq, aluminum tubes, uranium from Niger, and other particulars?
It is not a “terrorist” prison, because there hasn’t even been any sort of process to determine, even credibly, to say nothing of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” that they are terrorists and deserve to be “imprisoned” (rather than, say, confined in a jail cell for a reasonable time before a proper hearing). I don’t know about you, but the idea of systematic torture being used in this fashion against many people who probably are innocent of terrorism warrants the sarcastic quotation marks, and it troubles me more than even some of the worst allegations Dr. Palmer has flung toward my friend and publisher. I think libertarians these days should be far more concerned with a state that has gone totally out of control, that has abandoned every semblance of the protections in the Bill of Rights and common law, that sees itself as infallible and omnipotent, than we should be concerned with each other’s alleged opinions from more than ten years ago. To the extent that others in the libertarian movement might have disgusting views, why not focus our energy and criticism toward “democratic peace theorists,” like RJ Rummel, who have called for more war, and for “censorship” and state management of the media to purge it of all antiwar sentiments? Why not be concerned about the Objectivists who have literally called for global holocaust and World War IV? Why not be disturbed about “libertarians” who seem content with US torture chambers, bombing campaigns, censorship and the end of the Bill of Rights? I’m an open-borders libertarian, and I disagree with many libertarians (probably half the ones I’ve met) on the immigration issue. I think they are wrong. I’ve said I think they are wrong. But if we want to talk about police brutality, the greatest threat to our liberty right now comes from the potential emergence of a total US police state, and the brutality that may very well emerge is more urgent to me than a single incident that happened more than ten years ago. We can’t go back in time and stop the LAPD from doing what it’s done. But we can, possibly, stop crimes on a far larger scale that will do irrevocable damage to countless American lives and freedoms. To do so, we need to focus on issues like Guantanamo seriously, be willing to consider that the state is doing things that at first might seem too incredible to be true, and stop wasting our energy on opposing anti-police state, anti-warfare state libertarians when a number of people in our movement are full-blown defenders, apologists, and enthusiasts for one of the most dangerous administrations in American history.
Here’s something Rothbard wrote about Rockwell and the cameras from http://www.b.150m.com/writers/rothbard/suprise.html
“When Lew Rockwell, in response to the doctored Rodney King-tape, humorously suggested outlawing camcorders, he was deluged by protests from dimwit and serioso (sic) libertarians. But he was the first person to raise a serious concern that must be dealt with.”
WTF does Rothbard mean by the “doctored” Rodney King tape?
>>The tactics used at GITMO…and Abu Graihb for that matter…are designed to create emotional distress in a humane manner. No one was hurt and “emotional scarring” isn’t something you can sell me on.
It is my understanding that several people were murdered at Abu Ghraib.
Who knows if the persons being tortured are terrorists or not? I don’t want that decision to be left to the torturers. The idea of someone innocent (without access to a lawyer) being exposed to such things is scary.
A quick note before I have to run again. Anthony’s attitude toward Lew Rockwell’s quite disgusting endorsement of the Rodney King beating and suggestion that video cameras be banned is eminently reasonable. Email me on Monday, when I have access to Nexis, and I will get you the article. It ain’t pretty. And of course nothing like that could validate the scandals at Abu Ghraib, etc. But it does suggest that certain people are not especially good spokespeople on such matters.
T. J.,
If your understanding is correct, then that would be wrong. However, the people complaining obviously lived.
I’m still confused as to where the line is drawn between interrogation and torture. Many people are either saying, or implying, that many, many detainees at GITMO were tortured. But, they haven’t really defined what the torture was. Smearing dye on someone doesn’t add up to torture…even if it were real menstrual blood, I couldn’t call it torture. I think of torture as containing a more brutal element. Diallo was tortured, King was tortured, but I haven’t seen reports of that kind of brutality. Am I missing something?
So, can anyone give me a better definition of torture than “I know it when I see it.”
As for Anthony’s comments. Is it appropriate, in this instance, to assign constitutional rights to the GITMO detainees that aren’t US citizens? Humane treatment, yes, but that definition seems a bit fuzzy to me as well. How much needs to be done for the conditions to be considered humane?
Chris, the Bill of RIghts doesn’t apply to citizens or non-citizens, but to the federal government. It limits what the fedgov may do, to “persons,” “the people,” and certain freedoms. If the fedgov extends its jurisdiction to Cuba (unconstiutionally, I might add) its limits extend with it. If the fedgov is only bound by the Bill of Rights as it regards citizens, then the US government can simply strip people of citizenship and treat them like dogs or worse. Patriot Act II, for these reasons, included a provision to deny anyone of citizenship, on the sole discretion of the executive.
America was born as a country in the midst of war with the British empire. One of the big grievances was that the British crown treated its colonial subjects by much different standards than how it treated British citizens. Britain had done so much to advance liberal principles, with its Magna Carta, common law, and Glorious Revolution, and yet treated colonial subjects like swine (and continued to do so, up until the mid 20th century). The idea of a government treating “others” with a lower standard than “its” own citizens was not lost on the American founding fathers. Indeed, I’m sure it was fresh on their minds when they wrote the Bill of Rights, and they never thought to include a clause to allow the fedgov to torture prisoners, or even deprive them of due process, so long as they were foreigners in some colonial satellite such as Guantanamo Bay.
Currently, the US government is more humane toward Americans than foreigners. This is the case with most empires. For the sake of liberty and decency, the Bill of Rights must bind the fedgov, period. And besides, what they do to non-citizens today they just might do to citizens in the near future.
What interesting remarks. Thanks again.
I think that Anthony makes some quite strong points about the morality or wisdom (the latter point also being raised quite forcefully by a few others, including William Woolsey and T. J. Madison) of unleashing interrogators with little or no concern for the rights or the dignity of the detainees. It does seem to me that battlefield detainees (some of them simply turned over for money, to be sure) are in a different situation from people who are arrested by the police. I don’t think that the same procedural rights should be extended to them. But…surely *some* constraints on and some judicial supervision over the treatment of battlefield detainees is warranted, as the U.S. courts have finally held.
I remain, however, unconvinced that putting detainees (substitute another word, such as “prisoners,” if that seems too clinical a term) under some duress is always a bad thing. Having female interrogators bare their breasts or simulate smearing of menstrual blood strikes me as quite odd, but it seems to me a lower level of torment than beating people on the soles of their feet, an immoral and disgusting practice that is practiced in plenty of other countries. (Whether the sadism of the guards in Abu Ghraib was a result of deliberate policy or of unsupervised rogues is not clear; they clearly went far, far over the line and indulged their own cruel impulses, for which they are being punished.)
So, are the practices characterized in the article linked above immoral per se, regardless of whether they yield useful information? And are they likely to simply generate more terrorists? Those seem to me to be unresolved issues.
(And thanks also to Levatter, Brian Radzinsky, Vinteuil, Chris Farley, P. J. Doland, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, John Lopez, Vinteuil, Aaron G., and Adam W. for their comments. We all have a lot to think about.)
I have been following your discussion on the interrogation of prisoners/detainees.
I’ve read that a traditional British interrogation method for Muslims was the threat of death. Death was not the significant threat. The detainee was very motivated by the threat of being killed and then being buried in a bloody pig skin. It is supposed that this got the desired result.
For me the death threat would probably do it. The pig skin would really not matter after I was dead. The point is that threats can be culturally specific. Blood and bare breasts would not necessarily be seen as a serious threat by a westerner. Pigs and females may be much higher on the middle eastern “scary index” than they are in the west. Do they then constitute “torture?
So, who gets to define just what acceptable and what unacceptable interrogation methods are? I don’t like the idea of allowing the interrogators to make that determination for me or for the rest of the country. We as a people and as a country are expected to stand behind the actions of our representatives, the military. Our actions define who we are.
Nor am I comfortable with letting the U.N. or some other international entity with a questionable agenda make that determination. The consequences to us are too critical.
So, for me the question is: what would a universally acceptable and effective set of interrogation methods look like?
Just some thoughts.
Well, Tom, it’s Monday. Let’s see the goods.
As far as the whole torture thing goes, and apropos my earlier statement, I find the entire concept of a “freedom loving nation” holding political prisoners revolting, especially if they were garnered abroad. And to those people who want to discount torture as being no worse than our prisons, I would say I don’t approve of our prison system either, and would much rather see a set of laws that stressed financial restitution rather than capital punishment. That’s not a conversation for here, really, but it perhaps it gives my anti-Gitmo stance some context.
I finally figured out that Aaron G. is probably referring to my promise to email Anthony Goodman the text of Lew Rockwell’s defense of the beating of Rodney King. So, without implying any endorsement of Rockwell’s sickening thesis, or of my own humble self by Rockwell, here it is:
I would agree that his editorial does not follow Austrian or anarcho-capitalist lines of argument.
I guess Aaron G. is in a pretty charitable mood. How about “his editorial shows a man who is opposed to individual rights, the constitution, the old Ameican idea of innocent until proven guilty, the rule of law, and even, heck, civilization itself.”?
Or maybe we could read between the lines: “As recently as the 1950s — when street crime was not rampant in America — the police always operated on this principle: if they’re black, beat the hell out of them and make sure they know their place.”
You go, Lew “Kick-Em-While-They’re-On-the-Ground” Rockwell! Show ’em what you’re really made of! Give ’em the old Rebel Yell….Yeeee haaaaa! Now git out there and light that cross in yer nayber’s yard!
The line “Liberals talk about banning guns. As a libertarian, I can’t agree. I am, however, beginning to wonder about video cameras.” I think he was being sardonic.