Creating Reality Through Torture
The permanent danger of torture through human history is that it can be used by the torturers to manufacture or "create" evidence through confession. In fact, this has always been the prime function of torture: not to discover something that the torturers did not know beforehand, but to force a victim to tell the torturers what they were already convinced was true. When neoconservatives, at the peak of their hubris, bragged that they could create reality, they weren't kidding. Torture is the most effective means of creating reality because of this dynamic. What better evidence is there that someone was an al Qaeda member than that he confessed to it? And torture can get victims to confess to anything if they are tormented enough.
The US interrogator told Fouad al-Rabiah: "There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent." This was not a statement from the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, nor archival evidence from one of Stalin's gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than seven years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible. But even worse -- far worse -- is the fact that the Obama administration would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession. To those of us who read that passage and who vowed and make it our vocation to serve and protect the Constitution of the United States, that fact is a gut-punch. For me and my colleagues, it literally took our breath away. It makes one wonder how far down into the abyss we have allowed ourselves to drop. And whether there is the political will to find our way out.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/email-of-the-year-october-2-2009.html
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