It is also the kind of horror embedded into the very contemporary history of the United States.
The New York Times recently published an article entitled “How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds,” by Matt Apuzzo, Sheri Fink and James Risen, detailing a number of specific cases in an effort to represent the human rights abuses across the board. The information, according to the Times, is the condensed version of a compilation of cases, court records, military transcripts and medical assessments.
The use of torture, particularly sanctioned torture, by the C.I.A. and U.S. military began in the wake of 9/11, with all the fervency of righteousness. America would right the wrongs committed against it and bring terrorists to justice. Of course, it wasn’t called torture. Yet as the Times article describes, these methods of “enhanced interrogation” often yielded nothing but an irreparable damage of the psyches of its victims.
“At least half of the 39 people who went through the C.I.A.’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ program, which included depriving them of sleep, dousing them with ice water, slamming them into walls and locking them in coffin-like boxes, have since shown psychiatric problems,” Times reports. “Some have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, depression or psychosis.”
The gruesome details do not end with those specific thirty-nine people.
“Hundreds more detainees moved through C.I.A. ‘black sites’ or Guantánamo, where the military inflicted sensory deprivation, isolation, menacing with dogs and other tactics on men who now show serious damage,” the Times writes.
Perhaps it is difficult for some to imagine the prisoners of Guantánamo Bay — or any of the C.I.A’s eight other secret detention centers — as victims of anything but the consequences of their actions. Yet it is no secret that a number of detainees were innocent (their identities mistaken sometimes for someone else’s) or later proved to pose minimal threat. But even if guilt did implicate the rest of them, is that a reason for torture?
Forget for a moment that torture isn’t effective, that it often doesn’t extract any useful information. Forget that it induces people to fabricate details. Forget that by impairing a person’s mental state, the U.S. actually complicates the trial process and hinders the arrival of that justice America claims to long for.
Even when setting aside the practical objections, although whether these should take precedent over the moral ones is another question, the justification for torture collapses. For how could there be any legitimate justification? Ultimately, torture is the destruction of a person’s dignity. Could there ever be a reason for that?
Amongst all this, let us not forget that torture, under both domestic and international law, is a crime. It is a human rights abuse. The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect in 1987. Yet the U.S. has been torturing people since 2001.
What was there to be gained from torture except a manifestation of our own inhumanity? What did we prove to the world by being cruel?
America has long exalted itself as the bastion of democracy, of freedom. We espouse lofty ideals. We speak constantly about our rights, and woe befall anyone who threatens them, especially those protected by the Constitution. Yet, do those rights not extend to others? Does the right not to undergo “cruel and unusual punishment” only apply when Americans are concerned?
America portrays itself as the paradigm of idealism manifested into reality. Our C.I.A. and our military committed human rights abuses, the same abuses we so vehemently oppose in other countries. We are America, still one of the most undeniably powerful nations in the world. Who will hold us accountable if we don’t hold ourselves accountable for our wrongdoings? Who will address our human rights abuses?
We have taken steps, certainly, away from the clandestine horrors of those years. President Obama banned “coercive questioning” by executive order in 2009. Guantanamo’s population is down to 61. Last year (though only last year) the Senate voted explicitly to disallow the use of torture by any government agency. Steps, but baby steps. And ones which Donald Trump, if elected, promises to unravel. Yet they are, simultaneously, ones which we cannot retread backwards.
It is difficult and uncomfortable for us to acknowledge the moral transgressions our government has committed. Yet these are violations we must speak about, which we as a country must attempt to remedy. The Austrian essayist Jean Améry writes, “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.” The international community decided decades ago that torture was a crime. It’s time we lived up to that standard.
