In trying to understand the actions of George W. Bush and his administration it helps to realize that the rich and powerful have similar psychological motivations to us ordinary mortals. Or more specifically for the purposes of this post, the motivations of those who practice torture or order others to practice torture differ little whether they be high government officials of powerful nations, local law enforcement officers, or plain ordinary criminal thugs.
Those motivations, which are all highly related, include: fear; the desire to exercise power over other humans; the need to make the tortured individual admit to a reality held by the torturer; political expediency; and last but not least, the need to “project” the traits of the torturer onto the tortured. The last mentioned trait is especially interesting, and one that I have been aware of since an early age (because my father was a psychologist), but have only been able to understand with increasing clarity by encountering real life examples of it throughout my life. It is this psychological defense mechanism known as “
projection” that accounts for the fact that bullies and torturers have such a pronounced tendency to hysterically rail at what they see as the moral deficiencies of other people, most especially their victims.
My most recent insight into these phenomena came from reading John Grisham’s first work of non-fiction, “
The Innocent Man”. What struck me the most about this book was the similarity between the methods used by some of the Ada County (Oklahoma) police to squeeze confessions out of their victims to the Bush administration’s torture policies. The only substantial difference between the two that I could see was that the methods used by the Ada County police were less extreme, in accordance with their relative lack of power and authority compared to a presidential administration.
Ada County police obtain a confessionIn April 1984 a 24 year old woman student by the name of Denice Haraway was apparently kidnapped at the convenience store where she worked part time, and never heard from again. 6 months later the Ada County police obtained their first clue in the case, when a man came forward to claim that two women had told him that a local man named Tommy Ward had confessed to the murder of Denice Haraway at a party on the night of Denice’s disappearance. The only other evidence against Tommy Ward was that a sketch of a man made by a police artist working with a woman who had seen “two strange acting men who had stopped by {the store where she worked} and spooked her not long before Denice’s disappearance” looked vaguely like him. Nevertheless, the two Ada policemen working on the case were sure that Tommy Ward was the murderer, even after the two women who were alleged to have spoken of Tommy’s confession denied the whole story to the police.
So, they brought Tommy in for an interrogation, at which they repeatedly cursed him, shouted at him, and made numerous threatening gestures. After four hours Tommy asked for a break to go to the restroom and clear his head, but the police denied his request. Grisham describes how they finally cracked the case:
After two hours of non-stop hammering, Tommy finally cracked. The pressure came from fear – Smith and Rogers (the police detectives) were angry and seemed perfectly able and willing to slap him around if not outright shoot him – but also from the horror of wasting away on death row before finally getting executed. And it was obvious to Tommy that he would not be allowed to leave until he gave the cops something. After five hours in the room, he was exhausted, confused, and almost paralyzed with fear. He made a mistake, one that would send him to death row and eventually cost him his freedom for life. Tommy decided to play along…
Actually, the “confession” he made to the police wasn’t quite a confession, since the crime as he described it took place in a dream, rather than in real life. The policemen were unable to find the body where Tommy described it in his dream, so he gave them several other locations to look, but to no avail. So Smith and Rogers decided to wrap up the confession:
Tommy was brain-dead and barely able to mumble. He tried to recite their tale, but kept getting the facts mixed up. Smith and Rogers would stop him, repeat their fiction, and make him start over. Finally, after four rehearsals with little improvement and their star fading fast, the cops decided to turn on the camera. “Do it now”, they said to Tommy. "Do it right, and none of that dream bullshit." “But the story ain’t true”, Tommy said. “Just tell it anyway, the cops insisted, then we’ll help you prove it’s not true. And none of that dream bullshit.”…
At 6:58 p.m. Tommy Ward looked at the camera and stated his name. He had been interrogated for eight and a half hours, and he was physically and emotionally wasted… He told his tale. He, Karl Fontenot, and Odell Titsworth kidnapped Denice Haraway from the store, drove out to the power plant on the west side of town, raped her, killed her… Thirty-one minutes later the video was turned off..
Smith and Rogers used similar methods to get a confession out of Karl Fontenot. They were unable to obtain a confession from Odell Titsworth, who had previously been exposed to similar tactics and knew how to handle them. No problem. The police were satisfied with their two confessions, which were used to send Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot to death row. A few months later Denice’s body was found. The cause of death was determined to be a bullet to the head, in contrast to the stabbing and burning described in the “confessions” of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot. But the police already had their murderers, and the trial was over, so that new evidence was ignored.
Bush administration torture policiesThe widespread use of torture by the Bush administration is
widely documented by multiple sources such as:
Human Rights Watch;
Amnesty International; former Brigadier General
Janis Karpinski in testimony before the InternationalCommission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration; Senator Richard Durbin describing on the Senate floor
eye witness testimony from an FBI agent; Former Muslim Army Chaplain
James Yee; and books written by the
Center for Constitutional Rights,
Seymour Hersh, and
Jimmy Carter. And it is clear that the widespread use of torture is definitely
not the product of “a few bad apples”, but rather is sanctioned at the highest levels of the Bush administration, as demonstrated by a Bush administration
memo saying that the U.S. must treat prisoners humanely “only to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity”, a
memo from Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo to Alberto Gonzalez advising among other things that international bans on torture don’t apply to the President of the United States, and a
signing statement by George Bush himself nullifying a Congressional ban against torture. Moreover, it is also evident that the good majority of torture victims of the Bush Administration are innocent of any wrong doing, as documented, among others, by the
International Red Cross and
Major General Antonio Taguba.
A description of the process which strikes me as very similar to John Grisham’s telling of “The Innocent Man” comes from former U.S. Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis in an
interview with Amy Goodman:
Like, if a prisoner wasn’t cooperating, they could adjust his diet. People were in deep, deep isolation for months there…. Interrogators would also take their clothes and their mattress so they would be cold in their cells if they weren’t cooperating. When the Navy SEALS would interrogate people, they were using ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner and they would take his rectal temperature in order to make sure that he didn’t die…. We would put the prisoner in a shipping container. We would keep him up all night with music and strobe lights, stress positions, and then we would bring in dogs.. The dog would be barking and jumping on the prisoner… They would go out and do a raid and stay in the detainees’ homes, and torture them there… They were far worse than anything that I ever saw in a prison. They were breaking bones. They were smashing people’s feet with the back of an axe head. They burned people… And I would ask the prisoners what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued, while they were handcuffed…
And this is what Lagouranis had to say about the value of these interrogations:
We were frustrated by not getting intel. .. I was still under the impression that we were getting prisoners who had intel to give us, and I still thought that these were bad guys… Later it became clear to me that they were picking up just farmers. Like these guys were totally innocent and that’s why we weren’t getting intel. And it just made what we were doing seem even more cruel… like 98% of these guys had not done anything. I mean, they were picking up people for the stupidest things…. Basically everybody who came to the prison, they determined they were a terrorist, they were guilty, and they would send them to Abu Ghraib. When I would say they were innocent in my interrogation reports, they would send the prisoner up to Abu Ghraib without my interrogation report. I was making an issue about it to the major of the Marines…. But they just wouldn’t listen, you know…. I did more than three hundred interrogations in Iraq, and I’m guessing like twenty people I got any like real intel out of. And when I did it was when I would sort of form a rapport with the person and get them to trust me. Nothing ever came out of the harsh interrogation sessions.
So what was the purpose of all this? Lagouranis continued:
They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of terrorists apprehended… so they could brief that to the general…. They were trying to prove that there were a lot of foreign fighters in Fallujah… Very few of them had foreign I.D.s. There were people working with me who would, in an effort to sort of cook the books, you know…
And Amy Goodman sums up the source of the problem in her book, “
Static – Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back”, first by quoting Lagouranis:
Lagouranis says that responsibility for encouraging and tolerating torture “obviously goes right up to the Pentagon, because they were issuing the interrogation rules of engagement which are not in accordance with the Army field manual and not in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.” Prosecuting the abuse “should have gone all the way up the chain.”
For guidance on how to handle their mission, Lagouranis and his fellow soldiers followed the lead of their commander in chief, George W. Bush: In the absence of real evidence, just fake it…. Donald Rumsfeld had declared that foreign fighters were the cause of Iraq’s problems – so their job was to manufacture some proof.
Links between Bush administration torture policies and prisoner abuse in the U.S.The link between torture of our prisoners of war under the direction of the Bush administration and prisoner abuse in U.S. prisons involves more than a similarity in methods and motivations. Amy Goodman notes in her book that many persons involved in prisoner abuse in the U.S. were sent to Iraq to get involved with the prison system there.
For example, Charles Graner, the notorious U.S. soldier
sentenced to ten years in federal prison for his role in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, had been recently fired from his job in the Pennsylvania prison system following numerous reprimands and suspensions related to acts of violence and sadism towards prisoners, prior to his assignment to Abu Ghraib. And several men who ran prisons that were involved in prisoner abuse scandals under their direction
were sent to Iraq to advise or run the Abu Ghraib prison.
Closing thoughtsWhat is the difference between George W. Bush and his partners in crime, compared to sadistic and abusive prison officials or compared to ordinary violent criminals? The only difference that I can think of is that Bush and his gang are far more dangerous than the others because they have the power to hurt far more people.
I think it’s a terrible shame that over 30% of the American people approve of the job he’s done as president, and undoubtedly many additional people who don’t approve of what he’s done as president nevertheless think that he’s a decent man. I very much hope and believe that some day the American people will be educated enough and smart enough that they will never have to suffer through another presidential administration like this one.
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