We’ve come to approve of torture by a number of different ways, but perhaps the most insidious is our willingness to look at a distorted picture of it.
For more on pruning back executive power see The Pruning Shears.
Maybe I’m just a slow learner (keep your thoughts to yourself please) but for a long time I didn’t know what the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees” meant. I attribute it to the archaic use of “for” to mean “because of”, as in “for want of a nail the shoe was lost.” Even after I figured that out I didn’t see what was so great about it; there was no easy frame of reference for missing the big picture because of focusing on minutia. Maybe “being penny wise and pound foolish” is a folk wisdom cousin but it didn’t get me any closer. It took the Rodney King police trial to do make me understand it.
I remember being at a friend’s house when I first saw the tape and I literally couldn’t believe my eyes. It illustrated what was happening in that area (and maybe to a certain degree in most urban areas) more than any number of dry statistics. My reaction was “they are mercilessly beating that man, and calling it ‘brutality’ is an understatement.” I suspect most people – even those largely sympathetic to the officers – would admit in their heart of hearts that yes, that’s a bit over the top. Going into the trial the defendants’ lawyers must have known the videotape spoke volumes and had to be neutralized. I wouldn’t have had the first clue how to do that, and the fact that they did is a tribute to their competence.
They figured out that instead of trying to bury it they could just cut it up into dozens of pieces right before the jury. The officers were shown a couple seconds of the tape, then it was stopped. They were asked, what were you thinking then? Why did you do that? What was the intent behind that hit? Roll the tape a couple more seconds. How about that one? Why didn’t you just handcuff him right there? It went on and on and on. The tape was drawn out and divided into discrete moments, each with its own internal logic. It also prevented the accumulated violence from being apparent. At any moment the jury might just see one or two hits, which by itself came across as subduing a grown man resisting arrest. It was an absolutely brilliant courtroom strategy, and while the post-verdict riots forever cast it as being all about race and class I believe the play/pause/explain strategy was instrumental in the result.
The reason I revisit this is because our country is in the process of accepting a comforting lie presented in the same way. The stark truth is that we torture. We engage in behavior that is explicitly against international treaties we signed decades ago and abided by. It is explicitly illegal. Those who used the very same practices against us in World War II were successfully prosecuted for war crimes. It was done during the Inquisition. It is repudiated by our allies and practiced by those we consider lawless. How could such a monstrous thing happen? Play/pause/explain.
When Mike McConnell says “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways…I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning” he is asking us to look at the trees and not the forest. We know waterboarding is torture and we desperately want to believe that our leaders haven’t directed it. We approach our leaders predisposed to believe anything that will put the conscience at ease – we want to believe we’re the good guys. Therefore we are entirely willing to let our leaders play, pause and explain. (Play) waterboarding is really bad (pause) but it can be done lots of different ways and probably some of them aren’t torture and you can bet your bottom dollar that THOSE are the varieties of it we use. He invites us to mentally pause the tape over and over again while he explains the non-torturous nature of each drop of water.
Unfortunately the truth is completely at odds with that picture. We know how the tape looks when we run it uninterrupted from start to finish. We know it explains itself and its face is that of unvarnished evil. We know as we are invited to examine a piece of bark in microscopic detail that we are still in the forest. What will be our excuse?
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This year new sightseeing trips offered tourists: walk in the renovated torture chambers of “Abu Ghraib” near Baghdad, the CIA chambers in the renowned black prisons of Afghanistan or the former U.S. possession “Guantanamo Camp” on the island of Cuba. Enjoy the hot desert air of Iraq, the beautiful mountain range of Kunar province or the sun paradise of Cuba.
New additions to the
Torture is abhorrent. Torture is illegal. Yet torture is inflicted on men, women and children in well over half the countries of the world. Torture is universally condemned. Torture is still used to extract confessions, to interrogate, to punish or to intimidate. In police stataions and prison cells, on city streets and in remote villages, torturers continue to inflict physical agony and mental anguish.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Torture may well be what this era is most remembered for. How shameful.
Thanks for the unique perspective.
Thanks Dan, this helps my understanding. I’m not usually a slow learner, but the question “How can this be?” has haunted me.
Now I’ll be needing help with figuring out “Why?”
Well done! Thank you, Dan.
Y’know, a way of seeing is cultural, a matter of training. Most Americans alive today have been visually trained by the jump cut; we provide the cohesive narrative ourselves.
This narrative is based on what we’ve absorbed as information, what we ‘know’. If what we ‘know’ has its basis in propaganda, then the narrative we form won’t oppose the propaganda (obviously).
The formation of our opinions isn’t accidental. Big media has the tradition & it has the experts.
This is why we often can’t — or won’t — believe our own eyes.