We Cannot Allow Obama to Be the Torturer-Elect

By Steve Hendricks, AlterNet. Posted January 14, 2009.

Two months ago we denied the presidency to a man who, for a few votes, forsook a long opposition to torture and pledged his America would continue the barbarity. This month we evict from the White House its resident torturer. These are victories worth celebrating, but they are tempered by having elevated to the White House, as we learn weekly that we have, another torturer.

Mr. Obama will probably not, as Mr. Bush has, send men to overseas dungeons to have their fingernails ripped from the flesh, one by one, with pauses only to revive them after they lose consciousness. He probably will not, as Mr. Bush has, cause men to be strapped to water-soaked mattresses with jumper cables clamped to their testicles and electricity shot through them so that they scream until they lose their voices and we our morality. He probably will not, as Mr. Bush has, oversee the beating of innocent men by American guardsmen until their thigh muscles resemble oatmeal and they die slow, horrible deaths. He probably will not, as Mr. Bush has, hold men in desolate Caribbean cages day upon day upon day -- 2,500 hopeless dawns -- with no word from family, hardly any from a lawyer, and no prayer of trial (indeed, of even being charged) until they lose their minds and try to destroy themselves by smashing their heads into concrete walls or strangling themselves with bed sheets. The great likelihood is that Mr. Obama will abandon most of the depravities that our jingoists (still) justify as necessary "so that America might be free."

For this retreat from pure evil, we are grateful. But we should not be content. For Mr. Obama tells us he will continue to torture the men (and in a few cases women, girls, and boys) whose torture Mr. Bush began. Naturally Mr. Obama has not put the matter so baldly. He has sent his advisors -- or allowed them; it is the same -- to tell reporters that he is not at all inclined to prosecute the officials behind our torture programs, not those who created or ran Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib or our European "black sites," not those behind the snatch-and-"render" jobs that damned untried men to foreign torment and, in cases, execution. Indeed, so far is Mr. Obama from prosecuting these criminals that he has asked several to work for him, including CIA torture chiefs Stephen Kappes, who will remain the agency's second-in-command, and John Brennan, who will be promoted to senior White House counterterrorist. The best we can expect of our new president, his dependents say, is that he will ask a commission of politicians to say whether their colleagues erred during the years of American terror.

Mr. Obama's course is not mere head-in-the-sand-ism. It is a continuation of the Bush torture. If we do not see it as such, it is because we misunderstand what torture is. Torture is not, as we think, an immediate, excruciating brutality against a captive body, nor two or two hundred such brutalities -- that is only torture's most visible part. Torture is a war on the soul, a fight to extinguish the will, with the body as the field of battle. In torture a man is so bowed before authority that his humanity -- his personhood, his individuality -- is demolished and the void filled by fear, humiliation, and submission. Always the torturer plies his trade with an eye to the future. His work must outlive the physical insult, must last as long as he holds power, as long as memory, and must ripple across the soul of the proximate victim to the souls of a million others until all believe they are nothing as to the torturer, that their resistance is for naught. This is the end of the state torture chamber, whether conceived in the Reichskanzlei or the White House, whether carried out in Cairo or Guantánamo.

Of torture's persistence the essayist Jean Améry, tortured first by the Gestapo in Belgium and later at Auschwitz, wrote, "Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. … Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world; the abomination of annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again."

Améry struggled three decades against his torture before taking the bottle of sleeping pills from which he never woke. "Torture was for him an interminable death," wrote the Italian master Primo Levi, who, himself a victim of Auschwitz, contended with his torture four decades before throwing himself from a third-floor landing.

This is the essential point of torture: for the tortured, it never ends. To stop the torture of the body but do no more is to break the fever of a cancer patient but let the cancer devour him from within.

Do not read in these words an excuse to do nothing. Do not believe a tortured creature is beyond salvation. She may never again have faith in creation, but her sufferings can be eased, her life in some measure saved, maybe literally. America can help, but it must out with its crime, for the tortured have a vehement need to have known what was done to them, by whom, and why. A repentant nation of torturers, if its repentance be true, must document its crime, apologize for it, and legislate against it. But this is only the beginning of the great work of decades to repair what can be repaired.

See more stories tagged with: torture, abu ghraib, barack obama, george w. bush, guantánamo, john brennan, cia black sites, stephen kappes

Steve Hendricks, author of The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, is writing a book on American terrorism for W. W. Norton. His website is SteveHendricks.org.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Rights and Liberties! Sign up now »