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Deconstructing "The Zen" of Torture

By Alexa

On the recent diaries list at Daily Kos yesterday, I happened upon a screed that damn near made me want to unplug my cable, shut down, be a Good Citizen who mindlessly watches Fox News, takes vacations and goes shopping: Transcend The Pain: Techniques for Enduring Torture, Part One.

End of Part One
[If you want links or proof (and do not have experience with torture, as I do) use Google. I am not on staff at DK.]

Theoretical, hypothetical, misguided? Paginos en blanco. A poll which reflects amusement of torture techniques and a virtual dessert bar. Comments about "being tortured with too many torture diaries."

Pendejo, please. You didn't just ask for this. You pleaded.
Let me be very honest and very open about my objections.

Dr. Steven Miles has described the United States as a torture-endangered society; correctly, and for at least 4 years. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton described the predecessors of atrocity-producing situations and psychic numbing. Why do the three conditions matter?

A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds. We posit a secret omnipresent anarchist non-Christian entity against which we put up the people of the true faith,and thats one reason torture is so dangerous to societies, because torturing societies do have these epiphenomenon that spill out into the broader society and result in less discriminating thinking and less understanding. People ask me all the time if I think I'll be killed for doing this work, which to me is an astonishing statement. I dont see a risk in getting killed. What I do see in the question is a direct indication of the degree to which living in a torturing society has damaged our larger civil society.

The lines are ever more blurred. For some, for too many, torture is entertainment in the form of a teevee show like 24 or films such as Saw or Hostel at the local multiplex - examples, all, of gratuitous "entertainment" - extra arterial-spraying blood in 35 mm and choppy (no pun intended) editing, and most pervasive, the psychological shutdown called forced drift, the viewer's effortless ability to dehunanize the torture victims as Other, not human.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney explains in a conversation regarding his film about torture, Taxi to the Dark Side.

Scheer: Now this taxi driver, he was totally innocent?

Gibney: That's one of the things of this story that have always haunted me. There are two things that will always haunt me. One is, this kid, he's a 122-pound kid, he was 22 years old, I believe. He was driving home in his taxi and was picked up by Afghan militia, turned over to American forces. [The Americans were told] that he was responsible for a rocket attack. It turned out that the people who turned him over were the ones who launched the rocket attack. The Americans didn't know it. They tortured him so badly that, they beat him so badly that ultimately he died of his injuries after five days. On the third day, though, they discovered he was innocent and, for another two days, they tormented him until he died. They literally kicked his legs so often that they became pulpified.

Scheer: Even though they knew he was innocent?

Gibney: Even though they know he was innocent. And that was one of the things-.

Scheer: It was that the inner barbarian had been released?

Gibney: I think so. There is kind of a momentum to torture, as later on I discovered in the process of making this film. They have a term, it's called "forced drift," and so when you're interrogating somebody, you're trying to get information out of somebody and they don't give you it, then you ramp it up. Particularly if there are no rules to guide you. And then you go more and more. And the next thing you know, you're starting to brutalize somebody because they're no longer a human being. And the military does understand this, and that's why the military had rules in place, because you want a disciplined unit. You don't want a mob, a lynch mob, in effect. But the Bush administration removed those guidelines. ...

Scheer: And in your movie, you interviewed people who were higher up, but not the highest?

Gibney: We go up the chain of command.

I didn't see anything in prestochango's piece about the need to separate fictional torture from reality. It is imperative that progressives and torture abolitionists use much care and precision in calling war crimes out for what they are, for being as exacting in our speech so as to leave no questions that yes, Donald Rumseld, personally, approved the blueprint and supervised the torture of Mohammed al-Kahtani. Si, mi amigo Valtin finds clear-cut evidence of war crimes through a shocking failure to change a date by the Torturocracy, it's straightup how this maladministration will end their fuckery. Being called out for what they are and what they do and what they've done in uncompromising, honest language is what every torturer or torture apologist hates (and dreads).

Thieme: Steve, aren't we describing war crimes?

Miles: Yes. We are describing war crimes and I think its important to name them for what they are for a couple of reasons. First, when you name it as a war crime, you hint at the reality of the things we have described, the gravity of the harms that have occurred. Second, in describing it as a war crime you also describe accurately the transgressions against a framework of justice and the damage to the civil order that would be avoided by pretending these are not war crimes. I think thats important to do.

To return momentarily to the "Zen" diary, the SERE commando script is unlikely in the extreme as a realistic reaction to torture. That said, I have never been tortured, as the diarist claims to have been.

There is the "happy thoughts" approach, which includes reasonable, thought-based resistance

And this:

This diarist would never ask innocent human beings to drown themselves.  Nevertheless, this is Resisting Torture 101.  No, it isn't impossible to allow them to drown you.  Yes, you can.

I have seen the effects of torture, real torture, not some Wrong Turn at the muvico. (Whatever it does for you, a-HEM.)

I have listened to the cries of the pistol-whipped, the beaten, the bloodied . . . . the post coronado:

One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled with insecticide over the head of the victim.

I have held the hands and hushed the tears and prayed to find attrition - with many other, older and wiser people, to find a way to make it stop, and stop forever. If you think it's so knee-slappingly funny to inflict pain upon a helpless individual, then keep going to the movies, por favor, and keep the fiction out of the reality.

Dispensing "waterboard survival" techniques on a blog? Now that's entertainment. It is all that Dr. Miles said it would be.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on July 08, 2008 (boomark / email).