What Have We Become?
In a recent article in Harper’s Magazine, Luke Mitchell observes that we are still using torture at Guantanamo Bay. Contrary to the notion that Obama’s ascendancy to the White House marked an end to torture, the U.S. government still allows – and even mandates – certain kinds of torture in Gitmo. These practices include prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, and even force feeding. According to Mitchell, right now at least thirty men are being force fed at Guantanamo.
Force feeding is a ghastly act, an act designed not to preserve life but rather to break the human spirit. In many instances feeding tubes are inserted through the nostrils to facilitate delivering “nutrients.” Binyam Mohamed, a British resident recently released from Guantanamo, claims that he has seen detainees beaten into submission by SWAT teams if they refuse to eat the food provided to them. Ahmed Ghapour, an attorney with the human rights group Reprieve, claims that detainees at Guantanamo have at times been forced to eat food laced with laxatives. Artificially amplify the speed with which the human body “processes” food, and voila, the aggregate amount of pain imposed by force feeding is increased. A lovely way to apply Machiavellian teachings to the war on terror, wouldn’t you say?
Mitchell offers a helpful prism through which to refract these facts: While Obama and the Democrats have publicly condemned a “lawless” approach to torture, they have “not rejected torture itself.” But how can this be? Was it not Candidate Obama that promised us, in terms laden with no moral or linguistic ambiguity, that he would put an end to the Reign of Bush, and in doing so dispose with torture as a tool of national security?
To take force feeding as an example, the Obama administration has not publicly defended the practice; it simply refuses to stop it. However, Cynthia Smith, a spokesperson for the Pentagon’s top health official, Dr. Ward Casscells, has publicly claimed that force feeding “saves lives,” suggesting that it would be immoral to “idly watch” detainees permanently damage their own health by allowing them to refuse food. This is a spurious argument. It assumes that detainees are legitimately the charge of the U.S. government, and on the basis of that assumption infers that the U.S. owes these folks certain moral duties. This assumption, of course, is non-sense on stilts from the perspective of a detainee. To someone detained at Guantanamo, the U.S. authorities are adversaries, not caretakers, and the severe restrictions – of mobility, speech and association – imposed on detainees suggest that there is no moral relationship between the U.S. government and Gitmo detainees. The relationship is a purely utilitarian one, in that everything that the U.S. does for and to the detainees is designed to obtain its own objectives. The U.S. acts for itself, not out of any fealty to morality as such.
Force feeding is indeed a ghoulish act, one that conjures (or should) images of third-world dictators putting the fear of God into recalcitrant dissidents through common thuggery. But insofar as force feeding is just one part of a larger suite of torture practices that the U.S government is prepared to endorse and use in the future, we must ask a crucial question: As a psychological matter, what explains the willingness of Americans to accept the insipid view that Obama is entitled to “mull over” what forms of torture will be retained at Gitmo?
Mitchell does not really raise this question directly, but his article does nevertheless suggest an answer. On his view, the Obama administration is only interested in using forms of torture that can be, slowly and over time, justified to the American people and perhaps to the world community. Force feeding is “torture light,” that is, a form of coercion that we can live with, despite the fact that none of us would voluntarily endure it ourselves. It may not be pleasant, but it does not necessarily destroy the human body and does – oh, dear friends this is hard to say with a straight face – “save lives.” On Mitchell’s account, this species of self-deception is precisely why our national conversation about torture in the post-Bush era has placed us in a perpetual state of moral vertigo: We do not like torture, but we are not sure enough that what is happening in Guantanamo Bay really is torture, and so, we are unprepared to demand that Obama close the damn place down.
One cannot deny the explanatory power of Mitchell’s account. He’s surely right that Americans are complacent about Gitmo because we are in a state of collective self-deception. But what, pray tell, explains why we are so eager to dupe ourselves? Psychologically, why are we so spiritually and morally weak that Gitmo’s continued existence seems vaguely disagreeable rather than absolutely inconsistent with our moral and political values?
Perhaps the Bush years reduced us to helpless children, to a people collectively incapable of demanding that our government, which in theory serves our interests and executes our will, put an end to torture. And maybe Obama, a fellow lauded at home and abroad as more a deity than a flesh-and-blood politician, has played up his own world-historical character to such a degree that many of us are loathe to face the dissonance between the man and the myth. We deeply want, in other words, to believe that Obama is a noble saint, not the moral chameleon he so often appears to be these days.
But neither American political life during the Bush years nor our desire to see Obama as a knight in shining armor can absolve us of the conspiracy of moral lethargy that threatens the republic. We can blame no third party or external circumstance for becoming a people too complacent, too busy with our own lives, to demand that our government stop acting like barbarians. It may be that we need special detainment policies for individuals we have verified as terrorists, and it is even possible that we need special places to house these dangerous foes. But it is impossible for the United States to retain its identity as a constitutional republic, a polity inhabited by free and equal people, if we allow torture to continue in Guantanamo Bay. We know this. And now we must choose who we want to be.
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