This is part three of a four-part series.
Part One
Part Two
Part Four
___________________________________________________
“Let me begin by saying that God and
international law share at least one thing in common. Sometimes it is difficult
to find either of them when you need them most. When the Police Man, the first
of the torturers to rape me, had finished his grisly work, he whispered in my
ear, "Your God is dead." At the time, this seemed a reasonable
conclusion. He made no mention of international law, because whatever that was,
it was certainly irrelevant to my situation… I lived in a world created by my
torturers. They had told me, as so many other tortured persons have been told,
"Even if you survive what we have done to you and tell the world, no one
will believe you. No one will care." That is the world I lived in: No one
cared. No law, no God, no justice, no peace, no hope. In one way, it is a world I continue to live
in. I do so not by choice but because of the truth that once tortured, always
tortured.”
- Sr.
Dianna Ortiz[1]
“We can never let the world know what I have
done to you."
–CIA
Interrogators to detainees (Senate
report, p. 11/pdf)
In my last post, I wrote about the role torture plays in
creating a reality. 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.[2]
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.[3] The tactic seems effective given a majority
of individuals recently polled believe that the
treatment amounted to torture and that the torture was justified despite
evidence to the contrary. Torture is an
attempt to assert control and comfort for the government and populace who would
use it. 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.[4] 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. And that which was done during the
running of the worst of the program is retroactively deemed justified.
It is the concept of control and domination that I will
focus on in this post. All Faithful Can is a
blog project that sees its mission as exposing the toxicity of rape
culture—particularly within the church. My
assertion is that the general support or indifference American Christians show
toward torture parallel assumptions that undergird rape culture. This post will as such detail what rape and
torture have in common as well as make the case that detainees in U.S. custody
experienced rape as part of the torture program CIA-funded psychiatrists designed.
Control and
domination: the ends of rape and torture
There is a common myth that rape is about sexual
gratification and attraction. It is not
simply a matter of men being out of control, for most rapes are planned. The fact is that rape has more to do with
control and domination of another person.
Patriarchal beliefs that are thrust upon us from an early age set up the
social hierarchies in which we live. In
general, men are on top of this hierarchy.
As such rape is not only an issue of men “not being able to control
themselves” or seeking sex, but a sense of entitlement to the body of another
person. To the extent that sexual
contact has anything to do rape, it is in the context of the perpetrator’s
desire to control and dominate the body of another person for their own ends
and without the consent of the victim.
Rape is violence, sexualized. It
is the removal of the victim’s agency and bodily autonomy in particularly
intimate ways. It tells the victim they
do not have the right to their own bodies or minds.
Rape is also a violent form of oppression and is a
mechanism by which individuals or groups gain, express and maintain their
dominance and power over others. This is evident when rape is used as a tool of
war, when men are raped in jail, or when rape occurs on the basis of someone's
race, age, ability or sexuality. Rape is about the use and abuse of power to
intimidate, degrade or control others with less status. The fact that women and
children are raped more often than men is a manifestation of lesser power and
inferior status in society. Rape sends a
message to the victim and to others of similar social standing, and that
message is to conform to the reality the dominant group is putting forth or
suffer the consequences.
Likewise, total domination is an important element of
torture. For the tortured person is
stripped absolutely of control of his or her own flesh, upon which the state
imposes its own narrative.[5] Another torture victim also makes these points. Jean Amery was a Jew captured by the Gestapo
in Belgium in the 1940s. He survived
torturous interrogation, and lived to see liberation from Auschwitz. He wrote:
 | |
| At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 27-28. |
The connections between rape and torture are
not new or novel. The connection has
been visible for a long time. The quote
from Dianna Ortiz above shows the connection— torturers rape because rape is a
form of torture. Torturers create a reality in which they maintain control and dominance, to the point that not even God can be found in the torture chamber. Amery again:
 |
| At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 27-28. |
Something we know about both rape and torture is that the event can have lasting effects. Sadly, part of rape culture is the notion that after an appropriate amount of time, one should have gotten over the rape. Similarly, the reputation of "enhanced interrogation techniques" is bolstered by the notion that since they are not scarring, then the damage is minimized. Dianna Ortiz's work suggests otherwise, as does Amery:
 |
| At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 27-28. |
This is also the case with an anonymous detainee who went through the CIA torture program who recently spoke with The Guardian:
Jabuli prefers solitude indoors, having lost all safety once before. When he does go out he seeks crowded public spaces, so there will be witnesses if his tormentors reappear to kidnap him again. Ten years on, time and distance have not healed the damage that comes from torture.
“You live with the fear that the people who tortured you may come back to torture you again,” he said, “regardless of if you are in a safe country.”
Triggers are everywhere, even a decade later. Armored vans on the street make him think of the station where he was tortured. He fears intimacy, because he doesn’t want someone to see him having nightmares, or to watch him wake up crying. He worries he will not be “good enough to have a family”.
More than a decade ago, Jabuli endured seven months in a torture chamber in a central African country he asked the Guardian not to identify. (Jabuli is a pseudonym he recommended.)
He was placed in “stress positions”: his elbows and ankles were bound to each other behind his back as he faced downward, resulting in a pain so consuming that he could barely breathe.Rape and torture feed the rapists' and torturers need for control and dominance (whether as a personal goal or an outcome ordered by the state). Rape and torture both remove the victim's agency and bodily integrity by violation of consent. Rape and torture stay with the victim long after the event, regardless of the invisibility of the trauma.
“We lost hope. We gave everything, every decision, to others, to decide for you. Everything you want, you let the other person decide,” Jabuli said.
And rape and torture is what we paid nearly $81,000,000 for psychologists and doctors to perform on our prisoners.
State Sponsored
Rape
The CIA contracted with two psychologists to develop, operate, and assess its interrogation operations. The psychologists' prior experience was at the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa'ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.
On the CIA's behalf, the contract psychologists developed theories of interrogation based on "learned helplessness," and developed the list of enhanced interrogation techniques that was approved for use against Abu Zubaydah and subsequent CIA detainees. The psychologists personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA's most significant detainees using these techniques. They also evaluated whether detainees' psychological state allowed for the continued use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, including some detainees whom they were themselves interrogating or had interrogated.A couple of phrases are worth pulling out of the text, if for no other reason than to point out the absurdity of the situation. The psychologists prior experience was with the SERE school, which used torture techniques that other governments used in order to elicit false information so that military personnel would know what to expect if they were captured and used for propaganda purposes. Neither knew the culture of the people they would be interrogating, nor had a background in interrogation. Yet they were well paid to provide a product. They sought to prove a hypothesis: that inculcating learned helplessness would leave the detainee complaint and willing to give information. The idea behind our torture program was not to torture while simultaneously asking questions. It was to torture in such a way as to condition detainees into long-lasting compliance. Once again, enhanced interrogation is not lesser torture, or "torture lite"; it is "clean" torture as opposed to "scarring" torture designed to leave no physical marks even as it leaves traumatic stress that will remain with the tortured forever.
And the U.S. torture program included anal rape. Definitions are contested grounds, but to choose a definition in use by part of the U.S. Government, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
Within the report, we are told that in an effort to program the detainees into learned helplessness, "at least five CIA detainees were subjected to "rectal rehydration" or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity (p.11/pdf)." Further, the "Chief of Interrogations also ordered the rectal rehydration of KSM without a determination of medical need, a procedure that the chief of interrogations would later characterize as illustrative of the interrogator's "total control over the detainee (p.108/pdf).'" It is noted that occasionally this was done with the use of excessive force, and in at least one case an effort was made to use the largest possible/available tube to rectally feed a detainee. One is left with the impression that the use of this tube was not due to a medical consideration (n.584, p.126/pdf).
I submit that the absence of consent--and the even lower bar of demonstrable medical necessity-- is enough enough to lead us to say definitively that psychologists and doctors in U.S. Government employ routinely raped some detainees. All of the elements of the the definition of rape are met. This is the program the United States Government claimed was necessary for our safety-- a program based on pain, sexual humiliation, and rape to the service of control and dominance.
(Note: One of the threats CIA interrogators made to detainees was sexual abuse of family members. The claim may seem credible to a detainee given what interrogators, doctors, and psychologists were willing to do to detainees (p.11/pdf.)
[1]
US-born Sister Dianna Ortiz is
the cofounder and executive director of the Torture Abolition and Survivors
Support Coalition International (TASSC), an organization of torture survivors.
In 1989, she was abducted, repeatedly rapes, and tortured by members of the Guatemalan
security forces who took orders from an American they called Alejandro. Sister
Dianna is author of The Blindfold's Eyes:
My Journey from Torture to Truth. Ortiz, Dianna. "Theology,
International Law, and Torture." Theology Today 63, no. 3 (October
2006): 344-348.
[2]
This view corresponds with what Darius Rejali calls the “national security
model.” Darius Rejali Torture and Democracy. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 46.
[3]
Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1st
ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), Chapter one.
[4]
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.
[5]
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
It is expected that you have read the submission guidelines and community norms, which guide our editorial decisions and comment submissions.