Historical Amnesia

The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation,and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, lessso.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose thatGuantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would bebeyond the reach of the law -- a place, incidentally, that Washington is usingin violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasonswere, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The sameexpectations held for the Bush administration's "blacksites," or secret prisons, and for extraordinaryrendition, and they were fulfilled.

More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days ofthe conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperialventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the newrepublic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind aswell that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror,subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much asin the case of other great powers.

Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release ofthose Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthrightcritics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used tobe "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have ourleaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for." To say theleast, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.

Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and"what we do" has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguishedscholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realistinternational relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glowof Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the U.S. has a"transcendent purpose": establishing peace and freedom at home andindeed everywhere, since "the arena within which the United States mustdefend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But as a scrupulousscholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radicallyinconsistent with that "transcendent purpose."

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we shouldnot "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality isthe unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence ofhistory as our minds reflect it." What actually happened was merely the"abuse of reality."

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the NewYork Times, columnist Roger Cohen revieweda new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by British journalistGeoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the U.S. is "just one great, butimperfect, country among others." Cohen agrees that the evidence supportsHodgson's judgment, but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson'sfailure to understand that "America was born as an idea, and so it has tocarry that idea forward." The American idea is revealed in the country'sbirth as a "city on a hill," an "inspirational notion" thatresides "deep in the American psyche," and by "the distinctivespirit of American individualism and enterprise" demonstrated in theWestern expansion. Hodgson's error, it seems, is that he is keeping to "thedistortions of the American idea," "the abuse of reality."

Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea" ofAmerica from its earliest days.

"Come Over and Help Us"

The inspirational phrase "city on a hill" was coined by JohnWinthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious futureof a new nation "ordained by God." One year earlier his MassachusettsBay Colony created its GreatSeal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On thatscroll are the words "Come over and help us." The British colonistswere thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of themiserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of "the idea ofAmerica," from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of thepsyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appearin the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savagemurderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as theleader of a "shining city on the hill," while orchestrating some ofthe more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central Americabut elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of "humanitarianintervention," to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonlybeen the case since, the "humanitarian intervention" led to acatastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, GeneralHenry Knox, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in mostpopulous parts of the Union" by means "more destructive to the Indiannatives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."

Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, JohnQuincy Adams deplored the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans,which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty�among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one daybring [it] to judgement." The "merciless and perfidious cruelty"continued until "the West was won." Instead of God's judgment, theheinous sins today bring only praise for the fulfilment of the American"idea."

The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed that "individualismand enterprise," so praised by Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialistenterprises, the cruellest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results werehailed by the respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898.Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record "of conquest,colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19thcentury," and urged that it is "not to be curbed now," as theCubans too were pleading, in the Great Seal's words, "come over and helpus."

Their plea was answered. The U.S. sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba'sliberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained until1959.

The "American idea" was illustrated further by the remarkablecampaign, initiated by the Eisenhower administration virtually at once torestore Cuba to its proper place, after Fidel Castro entered Havana in January1959, finally liberating the island from foreign domination, with enormouspopular support, as Washington ruefully conceded. What followed was economicwarfare with the clearly articulated aim of punishing the Cuban population sothat they would overthrow the disobedient Castro government, invasion, thededication of the Kennedy brothers to bringing "the terrors of theearth" to Cuba (the phrase of historian Arthur Schlesinger in his biographyof Robert Kennedy, who considered that task one of his highest priorities), andother crimes continuing to the present, in defiance of virtually unanimous worldopinion.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico,and Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialismBernard Porter calls "the saltwater fallacy," the idea that conquestonly becomes imperialism when it crosses saltwater. Thus, if the Mississippi hadresembled the Irish Sea, Western expansion would have been imperialism. FromGeorge Washington to Henry Cabot Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had aclearer grasp of just what they were doing.

After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next stepin the mission assigned by Providence was to confer "the blessings ofliberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples" of the Philippines(in the words of the platform of Lodge's Republican party) -- at least those whosurvived the murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and otheratrocities that accompanied it. These fortunate souls were left to the merciesof the U.S.-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model ofcolonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped forsophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence. Similar modelswould be adopted in many other areas where the U.S. imposed brutal NationalGuards and other client forces.

The Torture Paradigm

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA's"torture paradigm," developed at a cost that reached $1 billionannually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question ofTorture. He showshow torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little changein the infamous photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in thetitle of Jennifer Harbury's penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: Truth,Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least,when investigators of the Bush gang's descent into the global sewers lamentthat "in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way."

None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did notintroduce important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture waslargely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly intheir own government-established torture chambers. As AllanNairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageousinvestigations of torture, points out: "What the Obama [ban on torture]ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americanswhile retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done byforeigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces thattorture, but he has chosen not to do so."

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but"merely repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matterof indifference to the victims. "[H]is is a return to the status quoante," writes Nairn, "the torture regime of Ford through Clinton,which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony thanwas produced during the Bush/Cheney years."

Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid "has tendedto flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture theircitizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamentalhuman rights." Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation,and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlatewith a favourable climate for business operations, commonly improved by themurder of labour and peasant organizers and human rights activists and othersuch actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregiousviolation of human rights.

These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was notworth studying because the correlations were so clear.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward --a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by themtend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.

Adopting Bush's Positions

An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA's "tortureparadigm" never violated the 1984 Torture Convention, at least asWashington interpreted it. McCoy points out that the highly sophisticated CIAparadigm developed at enormous cost in the 1950s and 1960s, based on the"KGB's most devastating torture technique," kept primarily to mentaltorture, not crude physical torture, which was considered less effective inturning people into pliant vegetables.

McCoy writes that the Reagan administration then carefully revised theInternational Torture Convention "with four detailed diplomatic'reservations' focused on just one word in the convention's 26-printedpages," the word "mental." He continues: "Theseintricately-constructed diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, asinterpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation andself-inflicted pain -- the very techniques the CIA had refined at such greatcost."

When Clinton sent the UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, heincluded the Reagan reservations. The president and Congress therefore exemptedthe core of the CIA torture paradigm from the U.S. interpretation of the TortureConvention; and those reservations, McCoy observes, were "reproducedverbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UNConvention." That is the "political land mine" that"detonated with such phenomenal force" in the Abu Ghraib scandal andin the shameful Military Commissions Act that was passed with bipartisan supportin 2006.

Bush, of course, went beyond his predecessors in authorizing prima facieviolations of international law, and several of his extremist innovations werestruck down by the Courts. While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms ourunwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantiallyreinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumedienev. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional theBush administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo are not entitled to theright of habeas corpus.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviewsthe aftermath. Seeking to "preserve the power to abduct people fromaround the world" and imprison them without due process, the Bushadministration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base inAfghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basicconstitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- flyyour abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, butfly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicialprocess."

Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that,in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory onthis issue," arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in theworld (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand andthe United Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights ofany kind -- as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo."

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obamaposition and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit asmuch to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The Obama administrationannounced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama's Department ofJustice, Greenwald concludes, "squarely to the Right of an extremelyconservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues ofexecutive power and due-process-less detentions," in radical violation ofObama's campaign promises and earlier stands.

The case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld appears to be following a similartrajectory. The plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials wereresponsible for their torture in Guantanamo, where they were sent after beingcaptured by Uzbeki warlord Rashid Dostum. The plaintiffs claimed that they hadtraveled to Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. Dostum, a notorious thug,was then a leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported byRussia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian states, and the U.S. as itattacked Afghanistan in October 2001.

Dostum turned them over to U.S. custody, allegedly for bounty money. The Bushadministration sought to have the case dismissed. Recently, Obama's Departmentof Justicefiled a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials are notliable for torture and other violations of due process, on the grounds that theCourts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners enjoy.

It is also reported that the Obama administration intends to revivemilitary commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of lawduring the Bush years. There is a reason, accordingto William Glaberson of the New York Times: "Officials who workon the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned thatthey would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects infederal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who weresubjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidencegathered by intelligence agencies." A serious flaw in the criminal justicesystem, it appears.

Creating Terrorists

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective ineliciting information -- the assumption being, apparently, that if it iseffective, then it may be justified.