When did torture become acceptable? Over the past few days I have listened with horror the matter-of-fact discussion of the need for the United States to torture, or interrogate using "all appropriate measures," suspected al-Qa'ida operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A headline in this week's New York Post says it all: HE'LL SPILL HIS GUTS, OR ELSE.

Or else, what? According to the World Organization Against Torture suspected al-Qa'ida are "fitted with hoods and gags, bound to stretchers with duct tape for transportation; and then commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep in order to break their resistance." Other tactics include withholding painkillers from injured prisoners. These techniques are described euphemistically as "stress and duress."

One US official who has managed the capture and transfer of accused terrorists told the Washington Post, "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job."

If these techniques should somehow fail to achieve the required results, prisoners can be handed over to security forces in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. The intelligence apparatus in these countries have, no doubt, a more complete understanding of detainees' culture and language, but there is another reason: these countries use torture.

So far, discussion in the media of the morality and utility of torture has been skin-deep at best. That might change today with a report in the Independent that two prisoners being held by the Americans at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan died during interrogation. The cause of death in both cases involved what is described as "blunt force injury" suffered during interrogation.

The Independent piece places the United States "interrogations" at Bagram within the context of other behavior that violates explicit and implicit international law, including the assassination of al-Qa'ida suspects in Yemen and extralegal detention of "enemy combatants" -- neither criminals nor prisoners of war, according the the United States -- at Guantanamo Bay.

The question I end up with is not easy to answer: When US President Bush says "freedom is at stake," what does he mean? Are human rights for everyone, or only for Americans? The American Declaration of Independence states clearly that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." That influential vision, I thought, was for the entire world, not just the United States.

Posted by John at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

Walt Rostow died on February 13th. You might not recognize the name, but Rostow was a leading architect of the American war in Vietnam, one of a small number of political theorists who have a real opportunity to test their ideas in the theatre of foreign affairs.

Rostow was a positivist, believing that all nations travel down a one-way street through periods of development. In his best-known book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) he described five stages: "Traditional Society" becomes "Transitional," during which are created the preconditions for Rostow's version of a revolution, the "Take-Off," followed by the "Drive to Maturity" and Rostow's industrial utopia, the "Age of High Mass-Consumption.".

As National Security Advisor to United States President Lyndon Johnson, Rostow pushed for greater US involvement in Vietnam. Years later he still believed that fighting the Vietnam War delayed a Communist take-over by a long enough period that the rest of Southeast Asia was able to grow economically.

Rostow was also an advocate of another Cold War theoretical staple: Containment and the Domino Theory. If Vietnam were to become Communist, the theory went, it would be more likely for other countries surrounding it would become Communist states. To combat this required a policy of containment.

We still talk in these terms. Some policy makers in the US government believe that by conquering Iraq and creating a democracy of sorts, other Middle East states will tend to become more democratic. However, the actual mechanism of this region-wide transformation is not explained, and strikes me as a cover for simple realpolitik.

John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who knew current US Vice President Dick Cheney from his days as a Wyoming congressman in the 1980s, thinks that preparations for war with Iraq are primarily psychological. Writes Barlow:

[I]t's possible Cheney and company are actually bluffing... If I'm right about this, they have two goals... First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that, they want to convince the Iraqi people that it's safer to attempt his overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American ground troops... Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity than all the other countries on the planet combined...

As always, we'll see over time which theories make the best practice.

Posted by John at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)