Unleashing The Beast

This week we found out that the CIA had destroyed video evidence of torture and the Bush administration is so compromised that it can no longer state unequivocally that it would be against the Geneva Conventions to waterboard American servicemen.

The government argued that they had to destroy the tapes because they could not take the chance of revealing the identities of undercover agents. (An irony if there ever was one considering the Valerie Plame matter.) And then a fresh faced fellow appeared on TV to tell the world that he had been one of the participants. He seemed so young and earnest and said that while he now believed it was wrong, it had been a good thing because it had saved lives, (also debatable.)

But it remains to be seen if he will be representative of his brothers and sisters behind the CIA veil.I wrote some time back about the ramifications for the torturers in this regime quoting liberally from this exceptional article from 2005 by Jason Vest in the National Journal:

"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions." Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- "torture becomes an end unto itself."

[...]

According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the "gloves-off" approach works -- but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn't be emulated today. "I have been privy to some of what's going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, 'The agency deserves every bad thing that's going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'" he said. "In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon -- technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations," he said. "I don't know how much violence was used -- it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.

"But here's the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn't. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that's never been settled, one that crops up and goes away -- do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?

This is an important thing for us to think about. It's not just a matter of abstract morality. It's a practical question of what happens to societies when they let go. It's hard to imagine how something like gay marriage or women's rights could even come close to undermining morality the way it is undermined when a society dives this deeply into sanctioned authoritarian sadism. I wrote in that earlier post:

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo --- you didn't question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it's wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it's immoral --- and, more shockingly, whether it's a positive good. Our country is now openly discussing the efficacy of torture as a method for extracting information.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" he couldn't ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It's not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than "pain equavalent to organ failure." People no longer instinctively recoil at the word --- it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there.

People and societies don't just wake up one morning to find they no longer recognize themselves. It's a process. And we are in the process in this country of "defining deviancy down" in ways I never thought possible. We are legitimizing torture and indefinite detention --- saying that we will only do this to the people who really deserve it. One cannot help but wonder what "really deserves it" will mean in the years to come as we fight our endless war against terror.

Sure, right now it's just a bunch of foreigners and apparently a lot of Americans don't feel foreigners are entitled to basic human rights. They must not be human --- or at least not as human as "we" are. And when you think about it, who knows who "we" are either? Right wingers make millions of dollars writing books about how liberals are godless, death-loving, traitors within. Many people who read those books probably believe these liberals are only one step away from being sub-human too.

But as countless historical examples prove, anyone can be defined as such sub-humans and it often comes around to catch even the people who wrote the original tales of godless, death-loving traitors within. If America continues down this path,losing its decency and conscience, there will someday be a fine, loyal conservative who, for reasons of petty insider warfare or political expediency finds himself in a position like this at the hands of his former comrades.

Once a society unleashes this beast everyone in it is changed and twisted by it --- victim, perpetrator, cheerleader, dissenter and bystander alike.