{"id":51383,"date":"2014-12-22T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=51383"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:27:10","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:27:10","slug":"america-nation-of-torturers-stop-saying-this-isnt-who-we-are-heres-the-real-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/12\/america-nation-of-torturers-stop-saying-this-isnt-who-we-are-heres-the-real-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"America, Nation of Torturers: Stop Saying \u201cThis Isn\u2019t Who We Are\u201d \u2014 Here\u2019s the Real Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terrible findings in the torture report “are not who we are,” John Kerry claims. Well, here’s a U.S. history lesson.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>

John Yoo, Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer in “24: Live Another Day,” John Brennan (Credit: AP\/Susan Walsh\/Fox\/Reuters\/Larry Downing\/Photo collage by Salon)<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s comforting for those whose actions are not aligned with their stated values to believe that what one does in real life is not what ultimately defines who one really is. It\u2019s nice to think who we are is determined not by the things we did the day before, but by the stated ideals we hope to aspire to fulfill, starting tomorrow. In a nation-state founded by settler-colonial Protestants, the argument is familiar \u2013 it\u2019s what\u2019s deep down inside that gets one up into heaven, not the good or genocidal nature of what one does down here on Earth \u2013 and as with any half-decent lie, it\u2019s relatable: as fallible human beings, we\u2019d all rather like to believe that we\u2019re not as bad as we are but as good as we say we would like to be.<\/p>\n

While founded on the ethnic cleansing of the continent\u2019s original inhabitants and the enslavement of its African workforce, the news \u2013 or rather, confirmation \u2013 that the CIA employed a revolting range of \u201cenhanced\u201d torture techniques in the wake of 9\/11 is being portrayed by some as a vile exception to the United States\u2019 otherwise exceptional history; a \u201cstain on our values and history,\u201d in the words of Senator Dianne Feinstein, whose committee released the report<\/a> detailing the agency\u2019s use of near-drownings and mock executions and sexual abuse to humiliate and demoralize a foreign \u201cother\u201d under the guise of gathering intelligence. These practices, the terrible things this country has again and again been shown to do, \u201care not who we are,\u201d added<\/a> Secretary of State John Kerry. Indeed, \u201cthe awful facts of this report\u201d do not even \u201crepresent who they are,\u201d he said of those awful people described in that report (\u201cits important that this period not define the intelligence community in anyone\u2019s mind,\u201d he continued).<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the actions that were taken were contrary to our values,\u201d President Barack Obama chimed in, crediting his government with, as always, correcting its own mistakes (\u201cThey aren\u2019t picking up prisoners anymore,\u201d Senator James Risch explained to CNN<\/a>. \u201cWhat they do is when they identify a high-value target, the target is droned.\u201d).<\/p>\n

As a rhetorical ploy, it\u2019s understandable: Saying the United States has always been garbage is not going to be terribly popular in a nation that still fondly refers to a group of sadistic slave-owners as its \u201cfounding fathers\u201d \u2014 so politicians savvy enough to know that openly embracing torture is not a good look for the world\u2019s leading state-sponsor of holier-than-thou rhetoric, appeal to a history and set of values that never was and never were in practice, as a way to give political cover to their middling, public relations-minded critiques of the national-security state\u2019s least defensible excesses. It\u2019s entirely false, this narrative of extreme goodness marked by occasional self-correcting imperfection, but it satisfies our national ego to think the American phoenix rises from a store of ethically traded gold, not a pile of rotting trash.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will likely hear these false appeals to an imaginary history a great deal with the release of the Senate report on CIA torture,\u201d writes Juan Cole<\/a>, a history professor at the University of Michigan. But even historians can fall victim to America\u2019s easier to digest mythology, with Cole proceeding to characterize the ugly truth about the United States \u2013 that it was founded on the \u201cexaltation of \u2018whiteness\u2019 over universal humanity, and preference for property rights over human rights\u201d \u2013 as but a right-wing lie. As he tells it, the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were actually progressives who would almost certainly \u201chave voted to release the report and . . . been completely appalled at its contents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cole follows that assertion up with a list of things that some of these founding fathers said they believed: Jefferson, for instance, argued that the formal abolition of torture in the French legal system was in keeping with \u201cthe progress of philanthropy and civilization.\u201d And the Bill of Rights of course prohibits \u201ccruel and unusual punishment.\u201d But, naggingly, the actual record of those who gave those nice speeches and drafted the Constitution suggests we shouldn\u2019t just believe what they said and wrote down.<\/p>\n

\u201cFascists will argue that the Constitution does not apply to captured foreign prisoners of war, or that the prisoners were not even P.O.W.s, having been captured out of uniform,\u201d writes Cole. \u201cBut focusing on the category of the prisoner is contrary to the spirit of the founding fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Except, it isn\u2019t at all \u2013 and if fascism is denying human rights on the basis of nationality or appearance, than the exalted founders were of course fascists themselves. The same document that ostensibly prohibits torture also defined an African slave as three-fifths of a person \u2013 and even then, only for purposes of bolstering the political power of those who enslaved them: in practice, they were treated as property whose master could torture or murder them with impunity. This is not pedantry: Hundreds of thousands of people were denied their ostensibly inalienable rights because of the color of their skin; nearly four million by the time of the Civil War, or almost half the population of the South.<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, may have agonized over the evil of slavery, usually in private, but then he also reputedly\u00a0raped a 15-year-old he owned<\/a> and, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, paid $70 just so he could have a runaway slave he had already sold off to someone else \u201cseverely flogged in the presence of his old companions<\/a>.\u201d At least once, Jefferson even<\/a> \u201cordered the destruction of all dogs belonging to his slaves,\u201d according to researcher Mary V. Thompson. \u201cAt least one of the condemned dogs was hung as a disciplinary warning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jefferson was a savage white supremacist who in practice if not always in speech believed that people of color (\u201cslaves\u201d and \u201csavages\u201d as they were known then; \u201cthugs\u201d and \u201cterrorists\u201d as they\u2019re often called today) did not deserve all the same rights as wealthy white Americans like him; he could own them, but they could not even own a pet. The sometimes beautiful talk of universal rights popular around the time of the American revolution was ignored in practice; then as now there were giant exceptions for those whom it would be inconvenient to consider fully human.<\/p>\n

Torture has always been commonplace in the United States. As former slave Harriet Ann Jacobs recounted, a wealthy slaveholder who was \u201chighly educated, and styled a perfect gentleman,\u201d tied up a fellow slave to a cotton gin for four days and five nights as punishment for running away; he \u201cwas found partly eaten by rats and vermin,\u201d which had likely \u201cgnawed him before life was extinct.\u201d His body was unceremoniously dumped in a grave. \u201cWomen are considered of no value,\u201d Jacobs recalled \u2013 \u201cThis same master shot a woman through the head\u201d for running away, without harm to his social status (\u201cthe feeling was that the master had a right to do what he pleased with his own property\u201d) \u2013 and any man who resisted a whipping risked being set upon by dogs \u201cto tear his flesh from his bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not say there are no humane slaveholders,\u201d Jacobs concluded her account. \u201cSuch characters do exist . . . . But they are \u2018like angels\u2019 visits \u2013 few and far between.\u2019\u201d And Africans weren\u2019t the only ones denied the rights enjoyed by human property-owning white men.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe kind of warfare the U.S. military practices today in the rest of the world was developed in their irregular counter-insurgency against Native nations, starting in the British colonial period for sure, but developing uniquely and more harshly once the U.S. was independent with a policy of conquering the continent,\u201d said historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. \u201cThe important thing to stress about the use of torture,\u201d she told me, \u201cis that it is unrelated to \u2018getting information.\u2019 Torture is used in counterinsurgency to terrorize a population . . . [it’s] a preventative measure to suppress resistance by terrifying the insurgents, breaking their will to continue.\u201d And America has a long, ignoble history of doing it.<\/p>\n

In her most recent book, An Indigenous Peoples\u2019 History of the United States<\/em><\/a>, notes that British colonists in America organized militias in order to steal land from the less-than-human natives, seeking \u201cto disrupt every aspect of resistance as well as to obtain intelligence\u201d by taking prisoners, \u201cdestroying indigenous villages and fields and intimidating and slaughtering enemy noncombatant populations.\u201d A settler named Hannah Dustin became a folk hero in 17th<\/sup> century America after presenting 10 indigenous scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly, which rewarded her \u201cwith bounties for two men, two women, and six children\u201d (later on, the bounties were eliminated for indigenous children under the age of 10; \u201cvalues\u201d).<\/p>\n

Seeking to expand his young nation-state\u2019s territory, President George Washington concluded that, \u201cNo other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly if possible,\u201d the indigenous population that stood in the white settlers\u2019 way. Andrew Jackson personally waged total war against the men, women and children of the Muskogee Nation before becoming president and ethnically cleansing all native peoples East of the Mississippi; today the guy\u2019s face is on the $20 bill. At Sand Creek, during the presidency of Abe Lincoln, dozens of unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians were massacred. \u201cAll manner of depredations were inflicted on their persons,\u201d recounted<\/a> one eyewitness. \u201cThey were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of renouncing this history, we have chosen to celebrate a mythical, white-washed version of it, with genocide relegated to a footnote. If our leaders were more honest, they\u2019d admit that the CIA\u2019s recently revealed torture isn\u2019t a break from this legacy, but the fruit of it \u2013 the product of decades of dehumanizing counter-insurgency warfare that expanded the USA from 13 colonies on the East Coast to much of North America and, ultimately, a global empire (it\u2019s no coincidence that the code-name for Osama bin Laden was \u201cGeronimo<\/a>,\u201d taken from the famed Apache leader).<\/p>\n

After almost wiping out America\u2019s original inhabitants, the U.S. government went on to declare total war on differently pigmented people around the globe. President Woodrow Wilson re-instituted slavery (or \u201cforced labor<\/a>\u201d) in Haiti after its political class proved insufficiently compliant, his famed commitment to the right of self-determination not extending to those darker than pasty white. In Vietnam, the CIA\u2019s \u201cPhoenix Program\u201d saw those accused of collaborating with the North Vietnamese subjected to \u201cassassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture,\u201d according to<\/a> historian Douglas Valentine. Inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were raped and murdered<\/a>. And today, amid official proclamations that we live in a post-torture age, inmates held in Guantanamo Bay \u2013 many of whom could never even go to a show trial because insofar as there\u2019s any real evidence against them it was gained through torture \u2013 continue to be subjected to torturous force-feedings that have been condemned<\/a> by the United Nations.<\/p>\n

The abuse, exported across Latin America through the torture-training School of the Americas<\/a>, also continues here at home, with tens of thousands of black and brown and poor white US citizens currently languishing in mind-destroying solitary confinement, California\u2019s Pelican Bay State Prison alone holding over 500 people in isolation<\/a> for a decade or more. In Chicago, a cop who electrocuted and otherwise tortured more than 200 people until they confessed to crimes they didn\u2019t do, got off with about 3 years behind bars<\/a> after the evidence of his sadism became too great to ignore; that\u2019s less prison time than if he had been caught with a gram of crack cocaine.<\/p>\n

Pointing all this out \u2013 noting that the U.S. government has rarely lived up to its stated ideals \u2013 is not to engage in mere pedantry, nor is it an attempt to suggest this country is irredeemably evil. This nation was born in genocide and slavery, sure, still it could conceivably change \u2013 but only if, instead of ignoring the institutionalized injustice, we recognizing and call out the systemic cause of the alleged \u201caberrations\u201d our leaders are forced to distance themselves from every 18 months. The problem is not that the tree of liberty has produced a few bad seeds, but that the settler-colonists who planted it on someone else\u2019s land watered it with blood of slaves and native peoples. It\u2019s not George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who are responsible for making America a state that tortures, but George Washington and that other dick Tom Jefferson.<\/p>\n

Avoiding the routine departure from \u201cour values\u201d requires confronting our actual history; it\u2019s the only way to learn from it. Torture and total war are not the work of a few bad people, but the product of a system that from its inception treated human beings as property and the right to property as more important than the rights of women and men \u2013 it\u2019s who we are, and if we want the violence wrought by our system to end, we must honestly address the systemic cause. The paeans to our imagined greatness might be comforting, we should resist the temptation to out-patriot the right or else we\u2019ll end up just like them: doing public relations for the system that allows this evil to keep happening. And if humanity ever does manage to kick the habit of installing the worst among us at the top of hierarchical and unaccountable systems of power, history may very well judge us by our actions, not our pretty words and beautifully articulated aspirations.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Charles Davis is a writer and producer in Los Angeles whose work has been published by outlets including <\/em>Al Jazeera, The New Inquiry and <\/em>Vice. You can read more of his writing\u00a0here<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 salon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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