THE TORTURER-ELECT?
By Steve Hendricks
AlterNet and CounterPunch, January 2009

Two months ago we denied the presidency to a man who, for a few votes, forsook his long opposition to torture and pledged his America would continue the barbarity. This month we evict from the White House its resident torturer. These are great victories, but they are tempered by having elevated to the White House, as we learn weekly that we have, a torturer of another kind.

Obama will probably not, as Bush has, send men to overseas dungeons to have their fingernails ripped from the flesh, one by one, with pauses only to revive them after they lose consciousness. He probably will not, as Bush has, cause men to be strapped to water-soaked mattresses with jumper cables clamped to their testicles and electricity shot through them so that they scream until they lose their voices and we our morality. He probably will not, as Bush has, oversee the beating of innocent men by American guardsmen until their thigh muscles resemble oatmeal and they die slow, horrible deaths. He probably will not, as Mr. Bush has, hold men in desolate Caribbean cages day upon day upon day--2,500 hopeless days--with no word from family, hardly any from a lawyer, and no prayer of trial (indeed, of even being charged) until they lose their minds and try to destroy themselves by smashing their heads into concrete walls or strangling themselves with bed sheets. The great likelihood is that Obama will abandon most of the cruelties that our jingoists (still) justify as necessary “so that America might be free.”

For this retreat from pure evil, we are grateful. But we should not be content, for Obama tells us he will continue to torture the men (and in a few cases women, girls, and boys) whose torture Bush began. Naturally Obama has not put the matter so baldly. He has sent his advisors--or allowed them; it is the same--to tell reporters that he will not prosecute the officials responsible for our in-house torture (as in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib) or our outsourced torture (via extraordinary rendition). In fact, so far is Obama from prosecuting these criminals that he has asked several to work for him, including CIA torture chiefs Stephen Kappes, who will remain the agency’s second-in-command, and John Brennan, who will be promoted to senior White House counterterrorist. The best we can expect of our new president, his dependents say, is that he will ask a commission of politicians to say whether their colleagues erred during the years of American terror.

Obama’s course is not just head-in-the-sand-ism. It is a continuation of the Bush torture. If we do not see it as such, it is because we misunderstand what torture is. Torture is not, as we think, an immediate, excruciating brutality against a captive, nor two or two hundred such brutalities--that is only torture’s most visible part. Torture is a war on the soul, a fight to extinguish the will, with the body as the field of battle. In torture a man is so bowed before authority that his humanity--his personhood, his individuality--is demolished and the void filled by fear, humiliation, and submission. Always the torturer plies his trade with an eye to the future. His work must outlive the physical insult, must last as long as he holds power, and must ripple across the mind of the proximate victim to a million others until all believe it is futile to resist the torture. This is the end of the state torture chamber, whether conceived in the Reichskanzlei or the White House, whether carried out in Cairo or Guantánamo.

Of torture’s persistence the essayist Jean Améry, tortured first by the Gestapo in Belgium and later at Auschwitz, wrote, “Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. . . . Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world; the abomination of annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.” Améry struggled three decades against his torture before taking the bottle of sleeping pills from which he never woke.

“Torture was for him an interminable death,” wrote Primo Levi, who, himself a victim of Auschwitz, contended with his torture four decades before throwing himself from a third-floor landing.

This is the essential point of torture: for the tortured, it never ends. To stop the torture of the body but do no more is like breaking the fever of a cancer patient but letting the cancer devour him from within.

These facts are not an excuse to do nothing. A tortured person is not beyond salvation. She may never again have faith in fellow humans, but her sufferings can be eased. But for America to help, it must out with its crime because the tortured have a vehement need to have known what was done to them, by whom, and why. A repentant nation of torturers, if its repentance is sincere, must document its crime, apologize for it, and legislate against it--but this is only the beginning of the long work to repair what can be repaired.

The greatest act of repair is the trial and punishment of the criminals: those who ordered the torture, those who implemented it, those who abetted it. The greater the number of senior torturers who are tried--Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Rice, Tenet, Rumsfeld, and Powell for a start--the fewer trials need be held of torture’s thousand grunts and straw bosses. What is vital (I mean the term literally since lives hang in the balance) is that the tortured have the chance to confront their torturers in court. The victims need the catharsis of seeing the once omnipotent authority brought low. They also thirst to be safe again, and although we can never fully quench that thirst, we can relieve it somewhat by showing that even crimes committed in dark cells in distant wastelands can be brought to light and the criminals punished.

Where trials are not possible (though in America they are), a victim may find lesser relief in a survivor-driven truth-and-reconciliation commission of the kind South Africa used to reckon with Apartheid. What will not do is an inquiry of the kind Obama is contemplating, a variant of the 9/11 Commission, which will give the tortured little public voice, will levy no penalties, and will urge them to “trust the authorities” about an abuse of the highest authority and a savage rupture of trust.

But even trials will not be enough. The United States, having damaged its victims for life, must offer them care--medical, psychological, financial--for life. The innocence or guilt of the victims, all of whom Bush has accused of terrorism and some of whom may be guilty, is irrelevant. We have to repair the individual to repair humanity, which is our burden since torture, however we try to forget, is a crime against humanity. Muslim innocents by the million have come to fear our midnight knock, the black hood descending swiftly over the head, and they deserve peace from our terror. When we give that peace to one person, we give it to many. In doing so--here, an argument even an American president might understand--we also dissuade a few young men from strapping bombs to their chests.

Obama sent his advisors, rather than himself, to dangle the line on torture because he worried the waters would roil. They did not. Only a few minnows jumped (in the great pond of the American presidency, even Rachel Maddow is a minnow), while down from the mainstream came schools of pundits and solons to nibble deferentially at Obama’s bait and declare the futility, even immorality, of holding the torturers to their crimes. We must look forward, they said, not backward. We cannot undo what has been done. We are a house divided and would be torn apart in pursuit of justice--the last word said derisively or falsely modified with “pie-in-the-sky.” These are old lies. We heard them at the end of Reconstruction, when the North lacked the courage to make blacks the equals of whites and postponed the reckoning that the Civil War demanded. The grandchildren of slaves paid for that cowardice in lynchings and rapes and pulverizing poverty until the reckoning came at last, at Little Rock and Selma. We heard the same lies when Washington stank of Vietnam and Watergate, and Ford pardoned Nixon for declaring himself above than the law, and the press and parties of power nodded their agreement--so we still await our reckoning with presidents who would be kings. We should suspect by now that when Americans say they will be torn apart by reckoning with their crimes, they mean they would rather have someone other than themselves torn apart.

Obama is not to blame that men tortured in our gulag are tortured still. But come January 20 the responsibility will be his, ours. To do nothing is not to do no harm. It is not even to do nothing. It is a choice, an act, and a monstrous one. It is not equivalent to the acts of Bush, which will be judged alongside, say, Franco's. It is more (at risk of melodrama) the act of Pilate. Obama knows (for he has often trod it) that an ugly, ill-defined line separates prudence from cowardice. He knows that in a few great matters of state, the same line separates good from evil. He is stepping across that line. If he does not reverse himself, he condemns hundreds or thousands to unending torture and some--among them a few Amérys and Levis--to death. Their surnames will be Muslim instead of Jewish, but in other essentials they are same. They are human beings, worthy of dignity.

Steve Hendricks, author of The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, is writing a book on American torture for W. W. Norton. His website is SteveHendricks.org.

© 2009–2010 Steve Hendricks