Appearing on the Daily Show of Oct. 18, John Ashcroft defended the use of “alternative techniques” — i.e., torture — in prisoner interrogations. Very important, he argued, for interrogators to do more than just ask “would you please” of terror suspects. Must get them to divulge the plans for “the next attack.”
The truth about the torture debate is that it’s not about “the next attack.” It’s about the president authorizing brutality toward anyone he sees fit. It’s about setting precedent and creating guidelines for standard operating procedure. These “alternative techniques” give U.S. authorities the ability to torture first and sort it out later. The idea that only proven terrorists are being roughed up is sheer nonsense, contradicted by reams of facts out of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram in Afghanistan and the “black sites” around the world. The “ticking bomb” scenario is trotted out by every torturing regime as false justification for abusive, immoral policies that don’t even produce good anti-terror results.
But that’s where leaders like Ashcroft have taken us. On the Daily he made a joke: “You play louder music here in the studio,” he told Jon Stewart, alluding to the technique of blasting loud music at detainees for hours on end. This caught Stewart off-guard, and he wasn’t able to challenge Ashcroft properly. Disappointing. Because in fact, harsh treatments like cold cell, long time standing, loud music — much belittled by Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and other odious pundits — are described in depth in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. They were among the tortures carried out by the Soviet secret police, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out many times.
Right now I’m reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a gripping fiction account of the Moscow show trials. In the second chapter, the interrogator Ivanov argues with Gletkin, his subordinate, over the efficacy of torture. Gletkin urges Ivanov to get rough with Rubashov, the novel’s protagonist. Ivanov resists. Gletkin recalls his own learning curve with the peasants he used to cross-examine in the provinces. “I held strictly to the regulations; it never even occurred to me that there were other methods….” But Gletkin’s superior is unconvinced. “Ivanov looked up into Gletkin’s expressionless eyes,” Koestler writes.
Our present-day Gletkins need to be called on their specious arguments, for torture is not about keeping us safe. It is about dehumanization, and an extremely slippery slope to barbarism for its own sake.
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