"Like a dog!": Humiliation and shame in the war on terror

Alternatives

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 259-283

  Danchev, Alex ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Humiliation; Intelligence; Shame; Terror; Torture; War

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750988478     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540603100302     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Franz Kafka, The Trial [1925], trans. Willa and Edwin Muir.
2. in The Collected Novels of Franz Kafka (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 9. The celebrated opening sentence.
3. The Collected Novels of Franz Kafka Ibid., p. 117.
4. In Agamben's recent work the measures passed in the United States in the wake of 9/11 are explicitly used to illustrate these propositions. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 168-169;
5. Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Athill (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 3-4.
6. See also the sympathetic discussion in Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 60ff.
7. The gulag analogy was made by Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, in a speech at the Foreign Press Association introducing a damning report on the United States, "Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power" (2005): "Guantánamo has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law." The speech is available at http://t2web.amnesty.r3h.net/library/print/ ENGPOL100142005 (accessed July 5, 2005). It was widely reported, and bitterly resented in Washington.
8. Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Settlement" [1919], trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), pp. 169-199.
9. On the "alliance of values" in this context, see Alex Danchev, "'I'm With You,' Tony Blair and the Obligations of Alliance: Anglo-American Relations in Historical Perspective," in Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds., Iraq and the Vietnam Syndrome (New York: New Press, forthcoming).
10. Kafka to Felice, March 25, 1914 and March 3, 1915, in Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1978), pp. 507, 574.
11. Kafka, note 5, p. 169.
12. Perhaps self-servingly, both Lynndie England and Charles Graner, who passed her the leash, are at pains to emphasize the docility of the detainee, See The Abu Ghraib Files" on Salon.com, incorporating new documentary evidence from the US Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigations in 2004-2005, at http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/ (accessed March 24, 2006).
13. Adam Zagorin and Michael Duffy, "Inside the Interrogation of Detainee 063," Time, June 20, 2005. The full interrogation log for the period November 23, 2002 to January 11, 2003 is at http://www.time.com/time/ 2006/log/log.pdf (accessed April 3, 2006).
14. "AR 15-6 Investigation into FBI Allegations of Detainee Abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Detention Facility" (hereafter Schmidt Report), April 1, 2005 (amended June 9, 2005), at http://www.humanrightsfirst. org (accessed March 24, 2006).
15. Interrogators' professional taste in music is best described as eclectic. Al-Qahtani was also treated to "Enter Sandman" by the heavy-metal band Metallica (said to have reduced him to tears because he thought he was hearing the sound of Satan). The rap artist Eminem is another favorite (Slim Shady, Interscope, 1999).
16. Christina Aguilera for her part turns out to be peculiarly appropriate. "I won't let you break me, think what you want/To all my dreamers out there I'm with you/All my underdogs I feel you/Lift your head high and stay strong keep pushin' on" (Stripped, RCA, 2002).
17. Quoted in "Detainee 063." As the Schmidt Report recounts, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the FBI began an internal investigation to determine whether its agents had observed "aggressive treatment" of detainees at Guantánamo during the period September 2001 to July 2004. Of the 493 agents who were contacted by e-mail, 434 responded; 26 of these stated that they had. The allegations were disclosed in December 2004 as a result of releases under the Freedom of Information Act. Typically, it was the disclosure rather than the allegations (or the activities themselves) that prompted the inquiry.
18. George Bush, "Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees," February 7, 2002, in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 134-135. The Third Geneva Convention flatly prohibits "any form of coercion" of POWs in interrogation - the most protective standard of treatment found in international law.
19. "AR 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade" (hereafter Taguba Report), March 2004, Torture Papers, pp. 405-556.
20. Conversation with Seymour Hersh, October 20,2005; "Abu Ghraib Files."
21. Hersh was instrumental in the Taguba Report being made public -like most of the others, it was intended to be an internal inquiry - and the first to underline its severity. See Chain of Command (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 22ff.
22. "It was a kind of 'Animal House' on the night shift," a remark by the former secretary of defense James Schlesinger, chairman of the socalled Independent Panel on DoD Detention Operations, was made at the news conference on the release of their report. Guardian, August 25, 2004.
23. "Specific intent" is one of the most egregious arguments in the notorious "torture memo" from Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, to Alberto R. Gonzales, then counsel to the president, August 1, 2002, "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 USC §§2340- 2340A," Torture Papers, pp. 172-217, esp. 174-175.
24. a memo written "as an immunity, a blank check," as one insider has said. Jane Mayer, "A Deadly Interrogation," New Yorker, November 14, 2005.
25. The torture memo was silently rescinded and replaced by the Office of Legal Counsel in December 2004, shortly before hearings considering Gonzales' confirmation as attorney general. The replacement memo has been described as "the minimum possible retraction" by David Luban, "Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb," in Karen J. Greenberg, ed., The Torture Debate in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 59-62, 72. It is at http://www.usdoj.gov/dagmemo.pdf (accessed April 3, 2006).
26. Schmidt Report, p. 20, noting "inconsistency" in the commander's evidence. These issues are explored with commendable frankness in Schmidt's interview with staff of the Army Inspector General, Lieutenant General Stanley Green, for yet another inquiry. Notwithstanding Schmidt's testimony, Green apparently exonerates Miller. The Green Report is as yet unpublished; it has been leaked to salon.com, at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/14/ rummy/index_np.html (accessed April 18, 2006), together with the interview transcript (hereafter Schmidt interview).
27. The report on DoD interrogation operations by Naval Inspector General Vice Admiral Albert Church, states that such issues were addressed by the independent panel. In fact they were specifically excluded from its terms of reference: "Issues of personal accountability will be resolved through established military justice and administrative procedures, although any information you may develop will be welcome." Secretary of Defense memo, May 12, 2004, Torture Papers, pp. 961-962. Only the Executive Summary of the Church Report has been made public, at http://www.defenselink.mil/news (accessed March 24, 2006);
28. the Schlesinger Report is in Torture Papers, pp. 908-975.
29. These are the "AR 15-6" investigations, governed by "Procedure for Investigating Officers and Boards of Officers," September 30, 1996, at http://www.usma.edu/EO/regspubs/r15_6.pdf (accessed March 24, 2006).
30. In two contentious cases, the investigating officer himself advised the need for a more senior appointment: Furlow begat Schmidt, Fay begat Jones. See "AR 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Prison and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade" (hereafter Fay-Jones Report), August 2004, Torture Papers, pp. 987-1131.
31. On the problematic nature of the investigations in general, see Human Rights First, "Command's Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in US Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan," February 2006, at http://www.humanrightsfirst.org (accessed March 24, 2006).
32. See Alex Danchev, "The Reckoning: Official Inquiries and the Iraq War," Intelligence and National Security 19 (2004): 436-466.
33. Mark Danner makes a similar point about the torture inquiries, Torture and Truth (London: Granta, 2004), p. 40.
34. This was General Bantz Craddock, formerly senior military assistant to the secretary of defense.
35. Agamben, State of Exception, note 2, p. 4.
36. Or a nonperson. The official discourse of the war on terror is hot on nonpersons of various stripes. "In addition to EPWs [Enemy Prisoners of War] and compliant, non-hostile CIs [civilian internees], units . . . were confronted with capturing . . . other classifications of detainees, such as non-state combatants and non-compliant CIs." Quoted in Human Rights First, note 19, p. 104.
37. Human Rights Watch, "Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division," September 2005, at http://www.hrw.org (accessed March 24, 2006);
38. excerpted in "Torture in Iraq," New York Review of Books, November 3, 2005.
39. The Green Report is said to document Rumsfeld's personal interest in the progress of the interrogation; the direct involvement of "SecDef" and his associates (notably the under secretary for intelligence, Stephen Cambone) was confirmed by Schmidt. See Michael Scherer and Mark Benjamin, "What Rumsfeld Knew," at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/14/rummy/ index_np.html (accessed April 15, 2006).
40. See Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 1030. The 1987 version of FM 34-52 is available at http://www.globalsecurity.org; the 1992 version at http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-52.pdf (accessed April 3, 2006). The UCMJ applies to US Forces on active duty, at all times and in all places. Article 93 addresses "Cruelty, Oppression or Maltreatment."
41. The techniques and the rationales are summarized and evaluated in the "Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism," April 6, 2003, Torture Papers, pp. 340-359.
42. Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, a poet, who has written an account of his incarceration, The Broken Chains (forthcoming).
43. Guardian, April 3, 2006.
44. Moazzam Begg's account of a similar experience, Enemy Combatant (London: Free Press, 2006), is very wise on mutual incomprehension.
45. Though Schmidt, for one, had his doubts. "The stuff that he gave us, I don't know that all of it was very factual." Schmidt interview.
46. Church Report, p. 10;
47. Schmidt Report, p. 20;
48. JTF-GTMO, "Information from Guantánamo Detainees," March 4, 2005, at http://www.jtfgtmo.southcom.mil/;
49. Heather MacDonald, "How to Interrogate Terrorists," Torture Debate, p. 92.
50. "Person of the Week: Jose Padilla," Time, June 14, 2002. The Padilla case has been scrupulously examined by Human Rights First, at http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/inthecourts/supreme_court_padilla .htm (accessed April 3, 2006). Those variously identified as "UBL bodyguards" would make a small army.
51. Anonymous Military Intelligence officer, in Jane Mayer, "The Experiment," New Yorker, July 11 and 18, 2005.
52. Hersh, note 15, p. 4;
53. Jane Mayer, "Lost in the Jihad," New Yorker, March 10, 2003.
54. Rohan Gunaratna, in Mayer, New Yorker, ibid.
55. In 1972 Daniel Ellsberg wrote: "There has never been an official of Deputy Assistant Secretary rank or higher (including myself) who could have passed in office a midterm exam in modern Vietnamese history." Papers on the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), p. 28. Could they have done any better in Iraqi history, or culture, or customs?
56. "Detainee 063." One of the claims made for the intelligence obtained from the interrogation of detainees is that The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004)
57. would have been impossible to compile without it; and that, by extension, it forms the basis for our understanding of that event, and the wider phenomenon of Al Qaeda. This seems at once exaggerated and misleading - better understanding surely calls for patient detective work of a rather unassuming kind-though it is true that the commission's reconstruction of the plot itself is underpinned in part by "intelligence reports on interrogations," notably the loquacious KSM. See, e.g., notes to chap. 7, pp. 525-526.
58. The precepts are set out in his "Assessment of DoD Counterterrorism Interrogation and Detention Operations in Iraq" (hereafter Miller Report), September 2003, Torture Papers, pp. 451-459.
59. Statement of Gofer Black, "Joint Investigation into September 11," September 26, 2002, at http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/ 092602black.html (accessed April 6, 2006).
60. He was discussing "choices made for us" in the area of "operational flexibility." Director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (1999-2002), Black is described by Richard Clarke as "a hard-charging, get-it-done kind of CIA officer who had proved himself in the back alleys of unsavory places," Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 205.
61. John Reid, "20th Century Rules, 21st Century Conflict," April 3, 2006, at http://www.mod.uk (accessed April 5, 2006).
62. Reid felt the need to publish a clarification, emphasizing that he was not in favor of "legal exceptionalism." Guardian, April 5, 2006.
63. The theme of British complicity is explored in Alex Danchev, "Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror," British Journal of Politics and International Relations, forthcoming.
64. Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End Of (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2006), p. 26.
65. The names used by prison personnel for the detainees who appear in the iconic photographs, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1211872, 00.html, and exhibited at the International Centre of Photography in New York later in 2004, at http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/ (accessed January 4, 2005).
66. Rory Stewart, "Degrees of Not Knowing," London Review of Books, March 31, 2005.
67. quoting from Jon Lee Anderson, The Fall of Baghdad (Boston: Little, Brown, 2005).
68. Eliot Weinberger, "What I heard about Iraq," London Review of Books, February 3, 2005.
69. quoting Captain Todd Brown, 4th Infantry Division. The account of a pseudonymous interrogator in Afghanistan verges on the same conclusion: Chris Mackey with Greg Miller, The Interrogator's War (London: Murray, 2004), p. 477.
70. An unusually frank assessment by a senior British officer serving with the coalition forces in Baghdad found that the US Army's "cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism." Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, "Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations," Military Review 6 (2005): 3.
71. The director of the School of Advanced Military Studies, who told the Washington Post that the Brigadier was "an insufferable British snob," said his remark had been made in the heat of the moment. The Army Chief of Staff ordered a copy of Aylwin-Foster's critique to be sent to every general in the US Army. Guardian, January 12, 2006;
72. George Packer, The Lesson of Tal Afar," New Yorker, April 10, 2006.
73. JTF-J2 memo, "Request for approval of Counter-Resistance Strategies," October 11, 2002, Torture Papers, pp. 227-228.
74. General Counsel memo, "Counter-Resistance Techniques," November 27, 2002 (approved December 2, 2002), Torture Papers, p. 236.
75. Jane Mayer, The Memo," New Yorker, February 27, 2006. The reference is to a killing spree by US Army soldiers in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, in 1968, during a search-and-destroy mission in a Vietcong stronghold known as "Pinkville." The story was broken by the young Seymour Hersh.
76. Danner, note 20, p. 33. The author of the e-mail was Captain William Ponce. Colonel Steven Boltz was deputy chief of staff for intelligence at coalition headquarters in Baghdad. Ironically, he had been brought up on intelligence shortcomings in Vietnam, emphasized to him by his father. The plaintive call for effective interrogation techniques echoes the JIC's "last call" for any scraps of intelligence on WMD, for the famous British government dossier of September 2002.
77. Miller Report, Torture Papers, p. 451.
78. Colonel Janis Karpinski, ex-commander of the 800th MP Brigade in Iraq, interviewed on "Frontline," August 5, 2005, at http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/karpinski.html (accessed April 12, 2006). Karpinski is bitter, She was reduced in rank and professionally disgraced - scapegoated she says. One Woman's Army (New York: Hyperion, 2005).
79. Detainee statement to CID, on the night of January 20, 2004, "Abu Ghraib Files," chap. 6.
80. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 1086;
81. "Abu Ghraib Files," chap. 8. Sergeant Michael Smith and Sergeant Santos Cardona were eventually brought to trial (separately) in 2006. Smith came first; he was found guilty on most counts, but given a light sentence of six months. The proceedings were followed in detail by Human Rights First, in an illuminating blog, at http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/blog/index.htm (accessed March 24, 2006).
82. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 1088.
83. Christopher Browning's classic study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, Ordinary Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), asks why so many of those men became killers. There is no comparison in the enormity of the crimes; but there is a similar need to explore situation and motivation, conformity and resistance. At Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, of course, there were ordinary women too.
84. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 989.
85. Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, "CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described," November 18, 2005, at http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/ print?id=1322866 (accessed April 5, 2006).
86. "Abu Ghraib Files," chap. 5. The story is told, anonymized, in the Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, pp. 1056-1058;
87. and more fully in Mayer, "Deadly Interrogation." The homicide ruling was made by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
88. This was Corporal Charles Graner, one of the ringleaders in the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, and Specialist Sabrina Harman. The images are in the "Abu Ghraib Files," chap. 5.
89. Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, AR 15-6 investigation interview with Taguba, p. 133, at http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/a53.pdf (accessed March 24, 2006).
90. Jordan himself was one of those chiefly responsible for the lethal anarchy at Abu Ghraib; criminal charges were eventually brought against him in April 2006. His testimony is demonstrably misleading and self-serving, as Taguba pointed out, but this particular exchange has the ring of truth. See Taguba Report, Torture Papers, p. 440;
91. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, pp. 1047-1049.
92. Seamus Heaney, "Anything Can Happen," in his District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), p. 13.
93. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, pp. 1085-1086.
94. Kimbro provided a number of statements to investigators and appeared as a witness at the trial of the Army dog handler Michael Smith. For more of his testimony see Washington Post, June 11, 2004;
95. for his background see Navy Times, May 24, 2004.
96. Taguba Report, Torture Papers, p. 444.
97. In various interviews, Karpinski has emphasized the acute sense of pressure from above, and its disturbing consequences. The issue is aired more fully in the torture inquiries than in the WMD inquiries, though searching analysis is still lacking. See, e.g., Church Report, p. 11;
98. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, pp. 1046, 1049, 1107;
99. Schlesinger Report, Torture Papers, p. 940.
100. See David Omand, "The Ethics of Using Secret Intelligence for Public Security," Cambridge Review of International Affairs, forthcoming;
101. and Paul R. Pillar, "Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006), at http://www.foreignaffairs.org (accessed February 11, 2006).
102. Schmidt Report, p. 13;
103. Working Group Report, Torture Papers, p. 357. Sleep deprivation, "physical training," and face or stomach slap were thought to pose similar problems.
104. The Church Report begins with a brief disquisition on interrogation, and a potted history of policy development.
105. Samuel Beckett, Eh, Joe [1966].
106. in I Can't Go On, I'll Go On (New York: Grove, 1976), p. 584. The "creative" potential of the interrogation is perhaps better suggested in the French, le procès-verbal.
107. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), p. 204 (from Notebook K, 1793-1796). A similar idea surfaces in the so-called Manchester Document, "an official Al Qaeda training manual," on counterinterrogation and other techniques: "The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates. . . . Platonic ideals. . . , nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun." Excerpts, including this one, at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ network/alqaeda/manual.html; the complete text, at http://www.thesmokinggun.com/ archive/jihadmanual.html (accessed April 19, 2006).
108. Human Rights First, note 19, p. 1.
109. Eliot Weinberger, "What I heard about Iraq in 2005," London Review of Books, January 5, 2006.
110. As appears to be the case with the rescue operation to free the British and Canadian peace activists, Norman Kember, James Loney, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, in Baghdad in March 2006.
111. At least one former US Army interrogator has admitted that, despite the use of dogs and other techniques, "I never got intelligence." Anthony Lagouranis, "The Slippery Slope that Leads to Torture," International Herald Tribune, March 1, 2006.
112. "The unknown" is Donald Rumsfeld's contribution to Western thought, Pieces of Intelligence (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 2.
113. See Jean Baudrillard,"Pornography of War," trans. Chris Turner, Cultural Politics 1 (2005): 23-25;
114. and on the reversibility of things, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Oxford: Berg, 2005). Baudrillard is one of the few to stress the theme of humiliation in the war on terrorbeginning with the humiliation of 9/11.
115. Albert Camus, "Preface to Algerian Reports" [1958], trans. Justin O'Brien, Resistance, Rebellion and Death (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961), p. 83.
116. Kafka, note 1, p. 147.
117. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass [1892] (Oxford: World's Classics, 1998), p. 48.
118. Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka" [1934], trans. Harry Zohn, in Michael W. Jennings et al., eds., Selected Writings vol. 11, part 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 808.
119. See also Elias Canetti, trans. Christopher Middleton, Kafka's Other Trial [1969], in Letters to Felice, pp. 64-66.
120. Kafka, note 1, p. 172.