Is Torture Becoming All-American?

Is art imitating life or life imitating art? Torture isn’t just becoming more acceptable in the Bush Administration, it has become more popular in the media. Fox’s Emmy-winning 24 is replete with scenes featuring its hero, Jack Bauer, torturing terrorist suspects. At the same time, public intellectuals from Alan Dershowitz to Charles Krauthammer have defended torture as an interrogation method, calling it necessary in the War on Terror. How has this filtered into public consciousness? A. S. Hamrah writes for the L. A. Times:

When President Bush sought to establish new guidelines on torture this fall, he claimed that any interrogation technique that shocks the conscience would not be allowed. Hollywood filmmakers, always eager to oppose the president, go the other way in a year-end glut of torture movies that display only techniques designed to shock the conscience.

From mainstream actioners such as “Casino Royale” and “Apocalypto” to horror cut-em-ups such as “Saw III” and “Turistas” (itself a retread of 2005’s breakout torture hit “Hostel”), the kind of entertainment referred to as “torture porn” combines the mise-en-scène of Abu Ghraib with screenwriting evocative of reports from Camp X-Ray.

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In the age of Abu Ghraib, the unashamed passion of torture-genre groupies is mainstream and normal. Aintitcool.com commentator “funnyhat,” writing about “See No Evil,” a torture entry from last summer, is confused by anti-torture opprobrium. “Why does everyone call it ‘torture porn’?” funnyhat asks. “It’s entertainment, not a fetish! ‘See No Evil,’ while not the greatest movie, was a great step forward for horror fans who love our torture.”

But in reality, the torture techniques employed by the U. S. government are much less graphic than those featured in horror films. George Monbiot writes in the Guardian in a piece entitled “Torture Is Now Part of the American Soul,”

In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant,” released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk — taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture.” The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

In a widely-reprinted interview on Democracy Now, Dr. Alfred McCoy explains the genesis of the new, media friendly torture tactics developed by the CIA over fifty years ago:

Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn’t take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.

And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.

All of this is now a backdrop to the latest story of torture in U. S. captivity from Iraq:

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

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