Torture and the American character.

Seymour Hersh recently called Donald Rumsfeld a decent, honorable, truthful, and humorous man. The comments were made in an interview about Hersh's article, "The Gray Zone," which implicates the secretary of defense in a systematic policy of using controversial methods for obtaining intelligence from prisoners--virtually all of them Muslim--detained throughout the world in the wars on terrorism and Iraq. Leaving aside Rumsfeld's humor, the veracity of the first three adjectives will be tested over the following months as the investigations, courts martial, and possible trials unfold, and hopefully the secretary's involvement is clarified. Nevertheless, something can be said now about the attitude of Rumsfeld and others toward torture and its effects on the United States' relations with Islam and, indeed, the rest of the world.

As present public discourse on the recent "abuse" scandal unfolds, there are several directions in which the debate might develop. Unfortunately, there is a danger that the issue may settle around individual responsibility. Determining the guilt or innocence of Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez (head of coalition forces in Iraq), Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Meyers, and a host of other high-profile characters--even President Bush himself--creates drama of Shakespearean proportions. Exactly in this milieu of stunning investigation, media circus, and courtroom suspense lies the possibility that a much more trenchant issue will be obscured. In another quarter-century most or all of these major players will be gone from the scene But the United States, one assumes, will go on, the character of which, now as always, will be determining itself.

Certainly there has always been a gap between the ideal and the real--quite possibly such defines the human--and the United States, always priding itself on its humanitarian ideals and defense of human rights, nevertheless has been responsible for suppressing human rights and supporting torture in its pursuit of empire in the past and present. Despite the failures in this gap between the ideal and the real, the ideal remains of ultimate importance to the world, especially at this juncture in determining American character. In fact, the philosophical and cultural implications of torture on the part of the United States become an issue that dwarfs any personal disgrace that might come to a secretary of defense or even, for that matter, a president. Public discourse should, therefore, it should center on the status of torture in military policy. But far more importantly, it should center on the status of torture in the national character.

The present public discourse displays a vast array of attitudes toward torture. In the semi-coherent rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh, the incidents at Abu Ghraib resemble the initiation rites of a fraternity:

   This is no different than what happens at the Skull
   and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's
   lives over it.... You know, these people are
   being fired at every day. I'm talking about people
   having a good time, these people, you ever heard
   of emotional release? You heard of needing to blow
   some steam off?.

One can assume that for Limbaugh the sexual humiliation, intimidation by fierce dogs, hoodings, chainings, beatings, and deaths are nothing to be concerned about and are certainly justified. Such an attitude totally ignores those subjected to torture, who are, in fact, human beings. Behind Limbaugh's outlook lies the dehumanization that is always based upon some chauvinism, this time racism. Such a position justifies torture on the grounds that the subject is subhuman--untermenschlich. Certainly this is the most dangerous attitude because violence, cruelty, and death are always best facilitated and most pervasive when motivated through the dehumanization process. Witness the Holocaust, the genocide of Native Americans, and the treatment of "enemies of the people" anywhere. For this to become the prevalent American attitude is the worst-case scenario in which some fundamentalist-Christian, white supremacist-dominated regime prosecutes a crusade against Islam on religious and racist grounds.

One cannot assume that such can never happen in the United States or that this attitude plays no part in the present issue of the treatment of prisoners in the present wars. As Seymour Hersh pointed out recently, The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, published in 1954, was very popular among military and neoconservative circles leading up to the invasion of Iraq. It is an interesting year, 1954, and the date associates the book with a time in American culture when the great debate was over the appropriateness and even possibility of the social integration of blacks and whites in the United States, purportedly a much more racially insensitive time. Over the years, the book has been denounced by leading cultural anthropologists as naive at best and outright racist at worst, but it played its part in the present issue. Patai's major claims are that force is the only thing that Arabs understand and that shame and humiliation--especially sexual humiliation--are the most profound weaknesses of the Arab world.

Rush Limbaugh may as well have taken Patai as his text when he said:

   ... we hear the most humiliating thing you can do
   is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another.
   Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to
   me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation....
   Maybe the people who executed this
   pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt.
   Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was
   a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to
   kill us--in ways they hold dear.

Despite the ignorance and danger inherent in such stereotypes, the practical implementation of American policy has been based upon a cultural insensitivity that does present itself to the Arab world as force, shame, and humiliation.

And outright racism and religious intolerance does exist among American leaders. In a speech at an Oregon church, some six months after the United States' occupation of Iraq had begun, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone's military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, asserted that the Christian god is more powerful than the Muslim god and associated Islam with Satan. As a senior British officer was quoted in the Daily Telegraph in April:

   My view and the view of the British chain of
   command is that the Americans' use of violence is
   not proportionate and is over-responsive to the
   threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi
   people the way we see them. They view them
   as untermenschen.

This opinion isn't limited to one British officer. Other nations are increasingly uneasy about this racist aspect of the present wars. One might hope that the exposure of such attitudes will engender among American citizens their own sense of shame and humiliation so that torture never becomes an accepted aspect of the American character.

The attitude toward torture that Secretary Rumsfeld seems to champion and that seems most politically safe for the administration is what one would term "legalistic and expedient" At a Defense Department update briefing Rumsfeld declared, "Beyond abuse of prisoners, there are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence toward prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman." Yet, in the same week, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said:

  I'm not a lawyer. My impression is that what has
  been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe
  technically is different from torture.... I don't
  know if it is correct to say what you just said, that
  torture has taken place, or that there's been a
  conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going
  to address the torture word.

Rumsfeld seems to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, "blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman" acts and, on the other, torture. This is legalistic because if the administration can avoid classifying the acts as torture, they figure that they may be able to avoid being held accountable to domestic and international law. It is expedient because, if they can avoid the legal difficulties, they can proceed with their coercive methods of intelligence gathering against their Muslim "enemies."

Rumsfeld's attitude is merely another, somewhat more "polished" aspect of racism and dehumanization. The International Red Cross has found--the source being the US military itself--that between seventy and ninety percent of the detainees held in Iraq are innocent of any acts against the occupying forces. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, these innocent Arabs were swept up by American soldiers occupying their homeland and subjected to "blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman" acts. Although respected by many of the high and powerful in the United States, Rumsfeld takes an attitude that is in no way fundamentally different from Limbaugh's much less legalistic one. Once again, the attitude totally ignores those subjected to torture, who are, in fact, human beings. The Arabs are all the same--a taxicab driver here, a baker there--who become faceless and nameless objects from which American soldiers and "contractors" cruelly "extract actionable intelligence." The dehumanization demonstrated by Rumsfeld's attitude must be considered "blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman" by those who hold human rights and human dignity as prime values. However, Rumsfeld's attitude is much more profound and consequential than Limbaugh's. The inarticulate ranting of a would-be demagogue can be written off as the fanatical expression of the far right fringe that supposedly could never gain power in the United States. As the leader of the strongest military-industrial complex that the world has ever known, however, Rumsfeld has gained power. It would seem that a leader concerned with human rights would be speaking and acting to ensure that the plethora of human rights violations that seem to be reported almost daily are quickly addressed and reversed. Instead, the secretary defends the overall policy with legalistic rhetoric. This is most disturbing for the future. For when the leaders of a country defend torture and dehumanization, those aspects do threaten to become a part of the national character.

Beyond the attitudes toward torture that are based in a dehumanization sanctioned by racism, there is a "reasoned and practical" attitude, frequently expressed in op-ed pages as well as by military and administration figures. This position is born of the fear inspired by the events of September 11, 2001, and the necessity of protecting American troops abroad: if the United States has a "known suspect" in custody and intelligence agencies know there is an "imminent" terrorist threat, then any means are justified to gain the information to prevent death and injuries. At first this may seem to be a reasonable argument: the suffering of one or two "guilty" individuals is justified in the context of saving many innocent individuals. But this is an extremely dangerous attitude. With such a principle, and in the name of "homeland security" prisons across the nation could institute a policy of torture. And from "known suspects" about to perpetrate acts of violence against innocent victims, law enforcement officials could "extract actionable intelligence." The policies developed for use in overseas territories occupied by the United States would be imported into the United States. (One may argue that the euphemistically titled Patriot Acts I and II move in this direction.)

The problem with this attitude is that it violates the most fundamental of American ideals and the very basis of American law. Whoever chooses the "known suspects" would be, here as it is overseas now, nameless and faceless members of the intelligence community. Those who argue that the overseas detainees may be treated differently because they are "enemies" or "foreigners" or argue that the exigencies of "homeland" defense require "special methods," reject the United States' fundamental value that "all men [and women] are created equal" and, therefore, are due the basic human rights of life, liberty, and property as expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the Constitution of the United States of America, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other documents that express the humanism of enlightened thinking. Thus the values that the United States purports to bring to the world become empty values. To give in to such an attitude is precisely the "slippery slope" toward the destruction of what separates a land of liberty from a totalitarian empire. Under such conditions, the American character assumes torture as a matter of course.

Attitudes toward torture, naturally, depend upon a recognition and definition of torture. For instance, Limbaugh and Rumsfeld don't recognize torture as a possibility because they refuse to recognize the existence of the subject of torture. Limbaugh chooses to consider sexual humiliation, hoodings, and threatened electrocution just good old fraternity pranks because he only recognizes the perpetrators as human and denies this to the victims. Rumsfeld can recognize "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman" but he won't "address the torture word" because his legalistic position is only focused upon blunting the repercussions to the perpetrators. He also refuses to recognize the humanity of the victims. What both their positions lack is empathy, a connection with all humans--the idea that "all men [and women] are created equal" Ironically, the denial of torture makes torture more possible. Torture requires two conditions: dehumanization--the refusal of empathy on the part of the torturer--and existential helplessness on the part of the tortured. Limbaugh's and Rumsfeld's attitudes provide examples of the first part of the torture equation; Jean Amery provides the second.

In his essay, "Torture," Amery, the former Auschwitz inmate and victim of torture by the Nazi SS at Breendonk in Belgium, defines torture as a primarily psychological phenomenon. For Amery, existential helplessness disrupts the fundamental relationship between the tortured individual's physical and psychological relationship to the world. In normal social intercourse, the individual can rely on two assumptions: one's body is, for the most part, inviolate, and when the body is violated there is always some recourse to the hope of help. In other words, under normal circumstances one can expect not to be physically attacked, the skin acting as a boundary protecting and defining the individual with a certain psychologically comfortable space. Without such, the individual would live in a constant anxiety of imminent destruction. When one is physically harmed, there is almost always a remedy of some sort. A sick child can expect a mother to help; the wounded on the battlefield can expect a medic. For this, one relies upon the empathy of others. So this relationship to the world is a delicate balance between the threat of harm and the comfort of mutual protection. It is a relationship that develops in the individual from the earliest conscious and subconscious experiences in the world. But the essence of torture is a destruction of this relationship. As Amery says, "The first blow [from the torturer] brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless." Since torture is perpetrated from a position of absolute authority, the hope of help is at an end: no mother, no medic. To the subject, torture is a deeply psychological, negative epiphany, declaring emphatically that human empathy is gone from the world. Amery concludes, "Whoever was tortured, stays tortured." The tortured may get over the burns, the lacerations, and the broken bones but the psychological damage is never overcome because the "naive" or natural belief in that comfortable space of individuality is forever rendered problematic. Thus torture represents a disorienting, radical, absolute rupture from the psychologically comfortable space--that space necessary for one to live without overwhelming anxiety in the world.

In this sense the attitudes of Limbaugh, Rumsfeld, and the "reasoned and practical" are rendered irrelevant to the United States' future relations with the Arab world. How many Arabs have been subjected to existential helplessness in the present wars? Few beyond the Pentagon know, but one does sense that the number isn't small, and one does know that the psychological ramifications are vast. The famous photos from Abu Ghraib--the piles of naked men; American soldiers leering, laughing, and pointing at forced masturbation; the hooded, Christ-like figure ready for electrocution--are vivid and striking images of existential helplessness. The library of beating videos from Guantanamo will eventually add to the collection of American shame.

The reaction to existential helplessness is collective safety and retribution, something that can act as a dynamic conscious and subconscious motivation in a people. The fiercest nation in the world today is, not by accident, Israel. Virtually every Arab in the world, vicariously and with great empathy, can place their head under the hood and feel the clammy nakedness of the cell. And the United States shall reap the fruit of its labors. Regardless of one's attitude toward torture, "Americans" and "torture" have become synonymous among large numbers of the people of the world. No matter how many, no matter what excuses, American soldiers, following the policies of their government, are the perpetrators of the worst psychological crime against humanity, totally devoid of human empathy and against the highest ideals of the republic. Hopefully the present debate over torture won't focus on the almost tragi-comedy of who did what and when but on the status of torture in the American character. For only in this manner can we stop it and ensure that we never again are the perpetrators.

Dr. Milam is a professor of humanities at the University of South Florida and is a past contributor to the Humanist. He can be reached at [e-mail].