Christians and Torture II: Defining Torture

Tw: torture, torture apologism, description of techniques

This is part two of a four-part series. 
Part One
Part Three
Part Four
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In my last post, I wrote about the state of American Christianity - and the populace in general - among whom support for torture has been on an upward swing for the past fifteen years.  The reasons include the presence of an American antithesis which shuts out "the other" from American concepts of equality, human dignity, and the rule of law; and the idea that Christians place national security questions in a different ethical bracket from other moral questions, meaning that national security questions are subsumed into national realist/utilitarian frameworks instead of religious frameworks.
But there are other issues to bring up:  How do we define torture?  And what does torture do in terms of the story we tell about ourselves?  These questions matter because it is common to talk about American torture as “enhanced interrogation”, which is supposed to be less brutal than “real” torture.   Also, beyond the issue of whether or not torture “works”  there is the matter of what story we tell about ourselves and our use of torture to help justify its use.  These are the matters I will address below.

But first, what techniques were we using on prisoners?  There is an illustrated guide here (trigger warnings apply here, too.)  A list would include: denial of medical treatment; waterboarding; forced rectal feeding with no medical cause; numerous stress positions; confinement in small boxes; and enforced standing for days, sometimes on broken limbs; forced nudity and humiliation; sensory deprivation or overload; ice water baths; physical attacks; threatening violence—sexual and physical— against the person and their family members; and sleep deprivation, among others.

How do we define torture?

In an online video, a journalist for Playboy, Mike Guy, agreed to undergo waterboarding.  In fact, he placed a bet with a member of the filming crew that he could withstand the application of the technique for 15 seconds.  Before the application of the technique, he started a conversation with an individual, dressed in fatigues and hooded, who is identified as a U.S. military interrogator. Guy asked the interrogator if waterboarding is torture, to which the interrogator replies that “some consider it torture.”  When Guy asked how the interrogator would describe waterboarding, the interrogator says that it is the invocation of an existing fear­­­---the fear of drowning.  When the interrogator is asked to then define “torture,” he explains that he believes torture is along the lines of whipping, the shedding of blood, or actual physical pain.  The interrogator gives a meticulous description of what will happen physiologically to Guy in the course of the application of water.  We then see Guy being tied to a board with his feet elevated; he is given a weight to drop when the application becomes too much for Guy to take.  After the application (Guy loses his bet as he gives after five or six seconds), Guy describes his experience firsthand.  Very pointedly, he describes that the fact that the application was in a controlled setting did not matter in the course of the application.  He says that he could no longer rationally believe he was not in any danger.  Presumably minutes later, in conversation with the interrogator, Guy mentions that he has spent a lot of money on psychotherapy in the past…to which the interrogator quickly replied “be prepared to spend more.”[1]

The video brings focus to certain issues that inevitably must be dealt with when addressing torture.  Is the interrogator correct that torture is merely the realm of bodily pain?  Does one need to shed blood for a technique to be considered torture?  Does it matter if there are psychological repercussions to a technique years after the fact?  In order to elucidate what torture is, it will be necessary to address some problems of definition.  I will then briefly glance at the way legal definitions have been used; then I will proceed to broaden the category since torture is not simply a matter of what we do legally, but how we behave morally.

A complaint that is frequently made by commentators in debates on the use of torture is that the meaning of the word loses some precision on a practical level.  Torture is hard to quantify in relation (or as opposed) to other categories, such as inhuman or degrading treatment.  Edward Peters claims that the word loses its meaning with over-identification— that when means everything, it means nothing.[2]  Jean Bethke Elshtain puts the point well in her contribution to Torture:  A Collection[3]: 

“If everything from a shout to the severing of a body part is “torture,” the category is so indiscriminate as to not permit of those distinctions on which the law and moral philosophy rest.  If we include all forms of coercion and manipulation within “torture,” we move in the direction of indiscriminant moralism and legalism­—a kind of deontology run amok.  At the same time, we deprive law enforcement, domestic and international, of some of its necessary tools in an often violent and dangerous world.” 

Elshtain’s reflections juxtaposes two positions:  those who would seek to include in the definition of torture any kind of unpleasant experience while one is in custody versus those who and those who would be willing to forego moral restraint in war because it gives the enemy an unfair advantage.  The advantage to navigating between these two positions, which Elshtain does, is that there is much room to maneuver in the gray zone between an unpleasant experience and grievous bodily harm.  Elshtain was forgiving when it comes to psychological manipulation and pressure, and perhaps, “moderate physical pressure,” even if its use is regrettable.  By physical coercion, Elshtain means methods, dubbed “torture lite,” detailed in Mark Bowden’s essay “The Dark Art of Interrogation”: 

These [methods] include sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.[4]

But this characterization of coercive techniques significantly underscores how successful the push to muddy the category of torture has been.  Yes, there does seem to be a significant difference between amputating body parts in order to elicit pain and subjecting someone to sleep deprivation.  These differences will be addressed below.  But Bowden, in his quote above, notes that even these “lite” torture methods deserve to be described as excruciating. 

An appropriate starting point for defining torture is the definition given by the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment since legal definitions are attempts to codify what is permissible in complex situations:

The term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.[5]

The Convention’s definition of torture begs to be interpreted, as does the Convention’s terms “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”   Human rights groups of course argue for expansive understandings of these terms, and seek to include as many unpleasant experiences as possible.

But it is important to note how the U.S. Government interpreted the term torture in light of national and international law and in the context of the Global War on Terror. John Yoo, who penned memoranda relating to the U.S. torture program while serving in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel defined torture thus:

We conclude that for an act to constitute torture…it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture…it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.[6]

This contrived interpretation leaves ample room for the significant elevation of interrogation techniques that cause intense suffering and pain, yet do not amount to organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death.  Such line-treading with torture leads one very easily into the territory of the cruel, inhuman, and degrading, which is also forbidden ground.[7]  Such interpretation also highlights the weaknesses of merely legal definitions, which are “carefully negotiated compromises that do not exhaust the questions of what torture is or how it operates.”[8]  Furthermore, such forgiving interpretations show the propensity for states to try to test the outward bounds of the moral and legal in the pursuit of national self-interest and security.  It also seems that torture “lite” may be a misnomer, especially in regards to the “coercive interrogation techniques” which were approved by the Bush Administration and mentioned in Bowden’s article.  It is more appropriate to talk about “clean” torture.

The practicing of clean torture (as opposed to scarring torture) is a marked effort to find techniques that are less likely to shock the conscience.  As Darius Rejali notes in his book Torture and Democracy, “a victim with scars to show to the media will get sympathy or at least attention, but victims without scars do not have much to authorize their complaints to a skeptical public.” [9] This would seem to be especially true of a public who sees the victim of such clean techniques as a terrorist (or just a suspected terrorist)—a person who uses violence outside of acceptable means, including the intentional targeting of noncombatants.  Clean torture denies that torture has occurred by rendering the signs of suffering invisible.  The point of clean torture is not to necessarily be easier on the tortured, but easier on the torturer and the public in whose name the practice is used, since the pain, suffering, and anguish can be denied or minimized.  Using clean torture allows those who support the use of such techniques to point to more horrible forms of torture being used globally, and say that their techniques are not the most immoral.  Proponents of clean torture may point to, say, the use of electric drills on a person’s limbs or suicide bombing, to show the supposed superiority and humaneness of the pain they inflict.  They may also use such comparisons to deny that sadism plays a part in their own use of techniques­­—and so clean torture becomes a denial of monstrosity.  Granted, there does appear to be a marked difference between waterboarding a person and amputating a person’s limbs one by one. 

And given the fact that waterboarding was an approved torture technique billed as less than “actual torture,” Darius Rejali notes that waterboarding is not simply a psychological torture but a physical one.  “When one’s head is stuck under water, the painful sensation of near asphyxiation and fiery distension of the bowels is just that…CIA waterboarding is no less a physical torture than the Inquisitional water torture.  Both procedures cause extreme and intense pain, and that is why interrogators, classical and modern, favor it.”[10]

But it should also be said that while these techniques may sound rather clinical in writing, the reality is hard to stomach. A number of CIA personnel witnesses the over 150 times Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded expressed discomfort and a desire to transfer--it even brought some to tears and sobs to watch (Senate Report, pg. 70/pdf). 

The stories we tell ourselves about torture

The similarities between clean and scarring torture do not lie solely in suffering and pain, but with the consideration of additional elements. To arrive at a more complete understanding of torture, we should consider that “torture is also the infliction of potentially escalating pain for purposes that include dominating the victim and ascribing responsibility to the victim for the pain incurred.”[11]  This is certainly the case in the U.S. torture program.  The psychiatrists who designed the program note that its purpose was to create a sense of learned helplessness in its victims (senate report, finding #13).  It should also be noted that:

“The report confirms that the C.I.A. used psychologists from outside the agency to help develop and assess its interrogation techniques. Two of them had experience at the U.S. Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE). “Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator,” the report notes, “nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic.” experience.”

A longer list of shameful elements of the program, which point not only to moral bankruptcy but gross ineptitude, can be found here.

Total domination is an important element of torture.  It is a step further than the control a state may impose on the detained suspect or combatant.  For the tortured person is stripped absolutely of control of his or her own flesh, upon which the state imposes its own narrative.[12]  Since terrorists wear no uniform, may be among populations in sleeper cells, and are capable of killing thousands of civilians and/or military personnel in a matter of minutes, the narrative that coalesces around the GWOT is that the realities of a post-September 11 world highlight the necessity of having recourse to torture.  The ticking-time bomb scenarios feel more plausible, helped along by television shows such as 24 which use the ticking bomb scenario as a plot device and by pundits who use the ticking bomb scenario as a rhetorical bludgeon.  And it seems common sense that terrorists are trained to withstand more polite forms of interrogation. 

Regardless of its efficacy in obtaining real and valuable information, which is by no means a foregone conclusion, torture is meant to allow one to feel secure in the knowledge that the state is willing to do whatever is necessary to protect American lives.[13]  The narrative corresponds with the observations Elaine Scarry has put forward in her study The Body in Pain—that in torture, a fiction of power can be derived from the act.[14]  This is the narrative promulgated by former Bush Administration officials, such as former Vice-President Richard Cheney and former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen, both of whom also argue that the Obama Administration’s discontinuing of the “enhanced” interrogation program is risking American lives.[15]  By the discontinuation of the former administration’s methods, any terrorist attack can now be read as an abdication of duty, regardless of whether torture could have thwarted the attack or not.

The narrative seems to be successful. In addition to the 2009 Pew poll cited above, a poll in 2008 sponsored by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University found that nearly six-in-ten white evangelicals in the South support the use of torture often or sometimes.[16]  The results of the polls are similar, but what was fascinating about the 2008 Mercer poll is that it broke down the population into those who derive their opinion about torture from religious belief or common sense/life experience.  The poll found that “white evangelicals in the South are significantly more likely to rely on life experiences and common sense than Christian teachings or beliefs when thinking about the acceptability of torture.”[17]  Those who rely of common sense and life experience to derive their opinion about torture were significantly more likely to support torture than those who relied on religious beliefs.[18]  Common sense is largely formed by the norms of the society in which one lives; and we live in a society in which consumable media and governmental agencies put forth a narrative that we should be willing to do/allow anything that would guarantee our safety.  We see in our media examples of torture working, regardless of the evidence that says torture produces bad information.  Our fiction of control is comforting.  And our clinging to this fiction has the potential to make us monsters.

In the next post, I will detail some of the connections between the use of torture and sexual violence. 

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[1] "Playboy Journo Bets He Can Endure 15 Seconds Of Waterboarding (VIDEO)." The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/20/playboy-journo-bets-he-ca_n_189280.html (accessed March 18, 2010).

[2] Edward Peters, Torture (New York:  Basil Blackwell, 1985), 148-155, cited in William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 21-22.

[3] Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Reflection on the Problem of “Dirty Hands,”” in Torture: A Collection,  new. ed., ed. Sanford Levinson (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 79.

[4] Mark Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2003, 53.

[5] U.N. General Assembly, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Pt.1, Art. 1, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm [accessed March 24, 2010].

[6] U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A, by John Yoo, Memorandum, August 1 2002.

[7] John T. Parry, “Escalation and Necessity:  Defining Torture at Home and Abroad,” in Torture: A Collection,  new. ed., ed. Sanford Levinson (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 155.  Parry notes that, while coercive interrogation tactics may or may not be torture, they indeed fall under definitions of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

[8] John T. Parry, “Escalation and Necessity:  Defining Torture at Home and Abroad,” in Torture: A Collection,  new. ed., ed. Sanford Levinson (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 152.

[9] Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2.

[10] Rejali notes that waterboarding is not simply a psychological torture but a physical one.  “When one’s head is stuck under water, the painful sensation of near asphyxiation and fiery distension of the bowels is just that…CIA waterboarding is no less a physical torture than the Inquisitional water torture.  Both procedures cause extreme and intense pain, and that is why interrogators, classical and modern, favor it.”  Rejali, 381-382.  In the video of the journalist cited above, the journalist does not mention physical pain, but this is probably due to the fact that he stopped the torture when he could not handle the psychological pressure. 

[11] Parry, 154.

[12] Parry, 154-156.

[13] This view corresponds with what Rejali calls the “national security model.” Rejali, 46.

[14] Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1^st ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), Chapter one. 

[15] See, for instance, Mark Thiessen’s Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Press, 2010), which ably condenses the entire torture narrative into the book’s subtitle.

[16] "New Poll of White Evangelicals Shows Faith, Golden Rule Influence Attitudes on Torture," Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, http://blog.faithinpubliclife.org/upload/2008/09/FPL%20Mercer%20Torture%20Poll%20Memo%20Final-no%20embargo.pdf (accessed September 11, 2008).  The numbers correspond quite well with the later 2009 Pew Poll.

[17] Ibid.

[18] According to the Mercer poll, the number of respondents who supported torture often/sometimes by relying on common sense and/or life experience was twenty-five percentage points higher than those who supported torture often/sometimes relying on religious teachings and/or beliefs.