Consider ending violence in a nonviolent way
By Kristin Y. Christman
May 29, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - According to President Donald Trump, people who are tortured deserve it. Trump's initial draft executive order in January revealed his passion for reopening U.S. black site prisons, loading Guantanamo with prisoners, and rewriting the Army Field Manual to redefine allowable interrogation techniques.
Sure, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis opposes torture. But multiple CIA agents, military brass, legislators, and citizens have opposed torture for decades. Those with a will for torture find a way.
The Bush administration tortured foreign prisoners using waterboarding, forced feeding, rectal feeding, slamming into concrete walls by the neck, freezing water, stripping, beating, dragging, mock executions, isolation, drug injections, agonizing enclosure in tiny boxes, forced runs while hooded, and harrowing threats to families. Such despicable behavior, hypocritically to preserve American values and safety, makes some Americans want to shred their flags.
Guilt of foreign captives is often unknown. There are no trials. There's not even a clear definition of guilt. Even if guilt were proven, torture is immoral and illegal. The post-9/11 torture program violated the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, and international law.
U.S. torture policy rested partly upon psychologists James Mitchell's and Bruce Jessen's absurd logic that since dogs cease resisting electric shocks when learning resistance is futile, prisoners will release truthful information when tortured. Notice, the poor dogs didn't divulge any information. And given affectionate training, dogs will joyfully cooperate.
In 2002, Mitchell and Jessen implemented torture at a U.S. black site in Thailand run by Gina Haspel, who had the site's videotapes destroyed in 2005 and is now Trump's CIA deputy director. That year, the CIA outsourced almost its entire interrogation program to Mitchell, Jessen, and Associates who developed 20 "enhanced interrogation techniques" for $81.1 million. A sadistic murderer could've done that for free.
What was the excuse for tax-funded depravity? CIA attorney John Rizzo explained, "The government wanted a solution. It wanted a path to get these guys to talk." Rizzo believed that if another attack occurred and he'd failed to force captives to talk, he'd be responsible for thousands of deaths.
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales defended the torture program's "ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists ... to avoid further atrocities against American civilians."
So cruelty is defended in the name of protecting us, as if we're chickens running around, believing the sky will fall if we don't get tough now. But if timely action is critical, doesn't it waste time to quickly go in the wrong direction?
After all, seasoned interrogators know torture is useless. It damages mental clarity, coherence, and recall. In its 2014 report, the Senate Intelligence Committee recognized torture's unquestionable failure as an information-gathering tool: It acquires neither actionable intelligence nor prisoner cooperation. Victims, crying, begging, and whimpering, are rendered "unable to effectively communicate."
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Particularly disgusting is the U.S. double
standard of justice. Presidents George W.
Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump have protected
torture program members from prosecution,
often by invoking the "state secrets
executive privilege." Apparently, torture
folks don't belong on trial. They're above
the law. We're supposed to understand that
they were doing their best, serving our
nation, following orders, pressured,
fearful: good people with noble motives.
Yet when we turn to suspected Mid-Eastern
militants, we're not supposed to consider
their circumstances, motivations, pressures,
or fears. Apparently, they also don't belong
on trial. They're below the law. Nail them
with drones, the extrajudicial killing more
politically palatable than extrajudicial
torture.
Mitchell, Jessen, and Associates face a
lawsuit in court June 26, and Trump is
trying to block federal court access to CIA
testimony on grounds of "national security."
But as long as the U.S. perceives enemies
the way exterminators perceive cockroaches,
national security will be elusive and any
peace will be no more stable than a house of
cards.
Notice that intelligence efforts always
revolve around obtaining Destructive
Intelligence: information for defeating
enemies. No Constructive Intelligence is
sought, nothing to illuminate causes of
violence and cooperative solutions.
Why? Because the CIA, NSA, and Department of
Defense are boxed in by organizational
missions to conquer enemies, missions that
constrict the mind's ability to perceive the
enemy as having any heart or mind worth
caring about.
If we created a U.S. Department of Peace
whose mission was to non-violently address
roots of violence, such a mission would gear
American ingenuity and enthusiasm toward the
bigger picture of conflict resolution and
friendship rather than toward desperate
conclusions that security requires cruelty
toward enemies.
We've got to considerately ask Mid-Eastern
friends and enemies their perspectives on
ISIS, the Taliban, and the U.S., ask their
ideas for creating trust, caring, justice
and peace, for leading meaningful lives,
sharing wealth and power, and resolving
disagreements. Such questions would rapidly
elicit the empowering Constructive
Intelligence needed to activate cooperative
solutions.
But without a caring approach to peace, the
American imagination fails us, imagining
only the bad that may result from refusing
to torture and kill, rather than the good
that will come from non-violently resolving
conflict.
Kristin Christman is author of Taxonomy
of Peace.
https://sites.google.com/site/paradigmforpeace
A previous version of this article was first published in the Albany Times Union.