pain and interrogation

I hope you can tear yourself away from the Swine Flu sweepstakes. As mentioned last week, I wanted to share some text from Elaine Scarry's book - The Body in Pain. A lot has been written and discussed in the last week regarding the torture memos. Unfortunately the media has a new headline to chase with the Swine outbreak but I think more on the nature and structure of torture fits in quite nicely with our neo-Medieval lives.

The following transcript is from from chapter one of Scarry' s book - basically pages 28 - 38. I've skipped through this so hopefully that doesn't impair your reading or offend the author. My intent is to share passages that have truly spoken to me. My hope is that this will generate discussion among more scholarly peers regarding the subject. And maybe some book sales for Scarry?

Pain and Interrogation:

Torture consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation. The first rarely occurs without the second. As is true with the present period, most historical episodes of torture, such as the Inquisition, have inevitably included the element of interrogation: the pain is traditionally accompanied by the “Question”.

The connection between the physical act and the verbal act, between the body and voice, is often misstated or misunderstood. Although information sought in an interrogation is almost never credited with being a just motive for torture, it is repeatedly credited with being the motive for torture. But for every instance in which someone with critical information is interrogated, there are hundreds interrogated who could know nothing of the remote importance to the stability or self-image of the regime. Just as within a precarious regime, the motive for arrest is often a fiction, and just as the motive for punishing those imprisoned is often a fiction (the men, although locked in their cells, watched and applauded the television report that a military plane had crashed – Chile), so what masquerades as the motive for torture is a fiction.

It is crucial to see that the interrogation does not stand outside an episode of torture as its motive or justification: It is internal to the structure of torture, exists there because of its intimate connections to and interactions with the physical pain.

Intense pain is world –destroying. It is for this reason that while the content of the prisoner’s answer is only sometimes important to the regime, the form of the answer, the fact of his answering, is always crucial.

Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.

“The question” is mistakenly understood to be “the motive”; “the answer” is mistakenly understood to “the betrayal”. The first mistake credits the torturer, providing him with a justification, his cruelty with an explanation. The second discredits the prisoner, making him rather than the torturer, his voice rather than his pain, the cause of his loss of self and world. These two misinterpretations are obviously neither accidental nor unrelated. The one is an absolution of responsibility; the other is a conferring or responsibility; the two together turn the moral reality of torture upside down. Almost anyone looking at the physical act of torture would be immediately appalled and repulsed by the torturers. It is difficult to think of a human situation in which the lines of moral responsibility are more starkly or simply drawn, in which there is more compelling reason to ally one’s sympathies with the one person and to repel the claims of the other. Yet as soon as the focus of the attention shifts to the verbal aspect of torture, those lines have begun to waver and change their shape in the direction of accommodating and crediting the torturers. This inversion, this interruption and redirecting of a basic moral reflex, is indicative of the kind of interactions occurring between body and voice in torture and suggests why the infliction of acute physical pain is inevitably accompanied by the interrogation.

It is only the prisoner’s steadily shrinking ground that wins for the torturer his swelling sense of territory. The question and the answer are a prolonged comparative display, an unfurling of world maps.

This display of worlds can alternately be understood as a display of selves or as a display of voices, for the three are close to being a single phenomenon. The vocabulary of “motive” and “betrayal”, for example, is itself an indication of a perceived difference in selfhood: to credit the torturer with having a motive is, among other things, to credit him with having psychic content, the very thing the prisoner’s confession acknowledges the absence of and which the idiom of “betrayal” accuses him of willfully abandoning. The question and answer also objectify the fact that while the prisoner has almost no voice – his confession is a halfway point in the disintegration of language, an audible objectification of the proximity of silence – the torturer and the regime have doubled their voice since the prisoner is now speaking their words.

The interrogation is, therefore crucial to a regime. Within the physical events of torture, the torturer has nothing: he has only an absence of pain. In order to experience his distance from the prisoner in terms of “having” their physical difference is translated into a verbal difference: the absence of pain is a presence of world; the presence of pain is the absence of world. Across this set of inversions pain becomes power. The direct equation, “the larger the prisoner’s pain, the larger the torturer’s world” is mediated by the middle term, “the prisoner’s absence of world”: the larger the prisoner’s pain (the smaller the prisoner’s world and therefore, by comparison) the larger the torturer’s world. This set of inversions at once objectifies and falsifies the pain, objectifies one crucial aspect of pain in order to falsify all other aspects. The obliteration of the contents of consciousness, the elimination of world ground, which is a condition brought about by the pain and therefore one that once objectified (as it is in confession) should act as a sign of the pain, a call for help, an announcement of a radical occasion for attention and assistance, instead acts to discredit the claims of pain, to repel attention, to ensure that the pain will be unseen and unattended to.

When one human being recognizes the incontestable legitimacy of another human being’s existence, he or she is locating the other’s essential reality in one of two places – either in the complex fact of sentience or in the objects of sentience, in the fact of consciousness or in the objects of consciousness.

A political situation is almost by definition one in which the two locations of selfhood are in a skewed relation to one another or have wholly split apart and have begun to work, or be worked, against one another.

Image: Richard Ross

for Peggy Noonan - a review of Torture Law

I keep meaning to finish a transcription from the excellent book, The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, which has a section about torture and language that I think is quite useful for today. She analyzes the political consequences of deliberately inflicted pain - particularly in the case of torture.

So for now, I'll point to the basic primer generously provided by Phronesisaical:

The United States Constitution: Due process is guaranteed by the 5th Amendment (1791). "[C]ruel and unusual punishment" is outlawed in the 8th Amendment (1791). Torture is prohibited by federal law in Title 18 of the United States Code, Part I, Chapter 113C, § 2340A. Torture:

(a) Offense.— Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life. (b) Jurisdiction.— There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if—

(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or

(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.

Torture is defined in Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C, § 2340. Definitions:

“torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control....

A war crime is defined in Title 18, Part I, Chapter 118, § 2441. War crimes (c):

(c) Definition.— As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct—

(1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party;

(2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907;

(3) which constitutes a grave breach of common Article 3 (as defined in subsection (d)) when committed in the context of and in association with an armed conflict not of an international character; or

(4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians.

(d) Common Article 3 Violations.—
(1) Prohibited conduct.— In subsection (c)(3), the term “grave breach of common Article 3” means any conduct (such conduct constituting a grave breach of common Article 3 of the international conventions done at Geneva August 12, 1949), as follows:

(A) Torture.— The act of a person who commits, or conspires or attempts to commit, an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation, coercion, or any reason based on discrimination of any kind.

(B) Cruel or inhuman treatment.— The act of a person who commits, or conspires or attempts to commit, an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions), including serious physical abuse, upon another within his custody or control...
(D) Murder.— The act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause...
(G) Rape.— The act of a person who forcibly or with coercion or threat of force wrongfully invades, or conspires or attempts to invade, the body of a person by penetrating, however slightly, the anal or genital opening of the victim with any part of the body of the accused, or with any foreign object.
(H) Sexual assault or abuse.— The act of a person who forcibly or with coercion or threat of force engages, or conspires or attempts to engage, in sexual contact with one or more persons, or causes, or conspires or attempts to cause, one or more persons to engage in sexual contact....

Among other instruments and treaties of international law, the United States is party to:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
The Geneva Conventions,
The American Convention on Human Rights (signatory only),
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and
The UN Convention Against Torture.

continue reading ...

GITMO gear for father's day?

You thought the McCain golf pack was enough but why not splurge a little more at the GITMO gift shop? Yes, the Gitmo Naval base actually sells t-shirts, caps and other souvenirs advertising its detainee operations. You may want to buy now since the Supremes may move to close this hallowed institution. Now if I can just locate that Blackwater beer coozy...

via: the Sleuth/WAPO

reproduction of the enemy

Reading accounts of the treatment of Padilla and the psychiatrist’s description of what remains today of the battered spirit of Jose Padilla, it is clear that the Bush Administration has fully availed itself of these concepts. The Jacoby Declaration makes clear that “breaking” the subject is in fact the object of the process. The psychiatrists’ report shows that Padilla was essentially brainwashed. He could not really even mount a defense to the charges against him because he loved George W. Bush and he found it physically impossible to oppose him.

And the charges brought against Padilla are “thought crimes.” He is accused of thinking bad thoughts about America and the Bush Administration. - Scott Horton - Harper's

So the part that almost makes me cry is that this man, who has been treated so abominably, still believes in the integrity of the Office of the President. And that the person sitting in the White House MUST be a person of fairness and justice, and that somehow he must not know what is happening to Mr. Padilla because surely if he did, it would not continue to happen. - Lokywoky - Jesus' General

I have to admit I got emotionally rattled by the piece over on Alternet about the case of Jose Padilla - our fellow citizen and accused "dirty bomber". It reads like a horror film or some black ops scenario dreamed up by James Ellroy. It is dark, dark stuff, complete with cliches - mind altering drugs, years in isolation (yes years), false sounds, and endless other forms of torture for a man who's real crime was a relationship to gang life and filling out an application to "study" terrorism abroad.

Padilla was surely a messed up guy, petty criminal type but the treatment he has received and the ensuing brainwashing and ultimate conviction of conspiracy should give everyone pause. The charges amount to an admission by the government that they don't have real proof of anything - just a gut instinct about what might have happened and who he might have been in contact with. Match that with the new FISA regulations and our evolving environment starts to taste a little bit like the Inquisitions of the past where everyone saw there neighbor as a witch or satanic cohort and were quickly put to torture for their shape shifting associations and coerced into confessions.

The Padilla case is constructed, shaped and vetted by brainwashing. Helmut at Phronesisaical aptly calls it a reproduction of the enemy . Our ability to distinguish between the real and artifice is again severely compromised.

Well said.


image, titled "Solitary Confinement," from wolispace]

The Changeling: Donald Rumsfeld

"The past was not predictable when it started." -- Donald Rumsfeld

Perhaps no one loves a man in uniform more than former Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Providing of course that man is a despotic ruler with an itch for massacre and natural resources to sell. No single figure in the history of the United States govt. or military has been as intimate as often with the world's totalitarian fiends. It is not a stretch to suggest that he also is perhaps the most Machiavellian, the most skillful strategist within the halls of Washington over the last 40 years. His instinct for manipulation and self promotion even muted and immasculated Henry Kissinger at his peak. If you want to understand the murky waters of the national unraveling - not only in Iraq - but within the White House as a branch of government, you need look no further than the career of Mr. Rumsfeld. It really plays out like something written by James Elroy, infused with the doublespeak psychosis of 1984's Oceania.

Tom Dispatch has some required reading on the career of Donald Rumsfeld. It's lengthy but worth every word. It is a fascinating look into the horror show of the neo-con movement. Frankly, it is a monstrous tale full of cynical brilliance, shrewd positioning and immoral acts against the national interests and U.S. citizenry.

Donald Rumsfeld: The Undertaker's Tally (part I)

Donald Rumsfeld: The Undertaker's Tally (part II)

(by Roger Morris)


photo: Richard Avedon