Political Torture in Popular Culture

Alex Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317289388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Political Torture in Popular Culture argues that the literary, filmic, and popular cultural representation of political torture has been one of the defining dimensions of the torture debate that has taken place in the course of the post-9/11 global war on terrorism. The book argues that cultural representations provide a vital arena in which political meaning is generated, negotiated, and contested.

Adams explores whether liberal democracies can ever legitimately perpetrate torture, contrasting assertions that torture can function as a legitimate counterterrorism measure with human rights-based arguments that torture is never morally permissible. He examines the philosophical foundations of pro- and anti-torture positions, looking at their manifestations in a range of literary, filmic and popular cultural texts, and assesses the material effects of these representations. Literary novels, televisual texts, films, and critical theoretical discourse are all covered, focusing on the ways that aesthetic and textual strategies are mobilised to create specific political effects.

This book is the first sustained analysis of the torture debate and the role that cultural narratives and representations play within it. It will be of great use to scholars interested in the emerging canon of post-9/11 cultural texts about torture, as well as scholars and students working in politics, history, geography, human rights, international relations, and terrorism studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and film studies.

I Context

1 The torture debate

DOI: 10.4324/9781315644561-2

Cultural texts are complex and multi-layered, with multiple investments, plural prerogatives, and many potential interpretations, and it is clearly unsustainably reductive to claim that it is only, or even primarily, as ideological artefacts that literary, filmic, and popular cultural productions are meaningful to those who interact with and consume them. Nonetheless, the meanings they construct, negotiate, and amplify are situated, circulated, and received in contexts that are always already political. Texts reflect and narrate political discourse at the same time as they are modified, informed, and refashioned by it. Accordingly, although I do not claim that texts provide direct translations of theory into fiction or that they represent transparent narrative ‘examples’ of philosophical argumentation, I do underline that the cultural productions of the post-9/11 torture debate are located in a specific historical context, and that they interact with and draw upon a range of established cultural, political, and philosophical vocabularies. This chapter has three interrelated tasks, all of which contextualise and clarify these interrelated conceptual vocabularies so that the textual readings articulated in later chapters of this book can make sense. The first task is to offer a clear definition of torture. The first part of this first task is to define the act of torture and to establish the context in which I discuss political torture; the second half of this first task is to establish my anti-torture position. No doubt some readers will object that the fact that I maintain one of the positions that I describe reduces my objectivity. They are right. I make no apology for the fact that this book is written from an anti-torture position, which is both deontological – arguing that torture is always morally wrong and, even when it is less wrong than other actions, is never the right thing to do – and utilitarian – arguing that torture does not have any outcomes that can be described as morally or politically desirable. Refusing to condemn torture does not represent neutrality, as it is not possible to remain agnostic on this issue. I refuse to justify torture, so I am an opponent of it, and in this section of the chapter I outline precisely why. The second task of this chapter is to describe a particular aspect of the political atmosphere in which the post-9/11 torture debate takes place, Islamophobia, in specific detail. No discussion of torture in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) is complete without a focus on the widespread negative representation of Islam. Much of the discourse that justifies torture also demonises Muslims in ways that conflate all Islam with the terrorism perpetrated by a few Muslims, stresses the irreconcilability of Islam with the secular modernity of the West, and dehumanises Muslims so that perpetrating torture on them seems like less of a crime. Much as I resist the justification of torture, I resist this racism. The final, and most theoretically complex, task of this chapter is to discuss the act of representing torture accurately or truthfully. Every text that participates in the torture debate attempts in some way to engage with the notion of the reality of torture, which, many writers and artists claim, is often obfuscated by other participants in the debate in order for certain unsustainable positions to seem credible. The act of articulating the reality of torture, however, is fraught with difficulties, because it is also fairly widely argued that the act of representing torture with any degree of verisimilitude is impossible and that any attempt to do so is always already unethical. This aporia is due to such factors as the resistance to representation that is inherent in the experience of physical pain, and the tendency of narratives and images to dehumanise, reify, and objectify both the subjects and the perpetrators of torture. Such knotty difficulties need not, however, be total obstacles to a clear understanding of torture, and I close this chapter with a discussion of the ways in which writers, artists, and other cultural producers can overcome them.

Torture

The post-9/11 torture debate has in large part been a debate over whether liberal democratic states can ever legitimately torture. This book, therefore, does not attempt to address all political torture: my focus here is an examination of the state violence carried out against captured and vulnerable bodies in the course of conflict, whether in military contexts or against political prisoners. It is perhaps useful to illuminate this with a contrast. Non-state actors, of course, are capable of torture: terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, for example, are notorious and gratuitous war criminals who are known to frequently and openly commit outrageous acts of torture (Campbell, 2006; Cockburn, 2014). There is no debate about whether or not these groups are torturers, and whether this is wrong: of course they are, and of course it is. The torture debate that I address here concerns the relationship of liberal democratic sovereignty to force, questioning specifically whether the violence perpetrated by states – which, as democracies, should hold themselves to higher moral standards than violent guerrilla groups – constitutes torture and whether or not this is acceptable. Specifically, the debate concerns whether torture can ever be a morally and politically legitimate response to the emergencies and moral dilemmas that are forced upon states by terrorist groups. Although it is a wide-ranging debate, with many permutations and subtleties, the remit of this debate is actually quite narrow: do the imperatives of counterterrorism justify the torture of a few as a measure which is intended to increase security for the many? It is also important that the debate occurs in the context of Western ex-colonial powers, such as Britain, France, and the US, because the nature of colonial power raises particular anxieties about the legitimacy of sovereignty and force in non-domestic contexts. In addition, colonial models of sovereignty continue to inform the political constellations that make post-9/11 torture possible, and colonial narratives about counterterrorism and torture inform the ways in which torture is made intelligible; as we will see in Chapter 3, the torture debate has a long and vibrant prehistory. State violence is my focus here, because the torture debate reflects anxieties about the nature of the relationship between the state, force, and legitimacy.

I define torture, broadly, flexibly, and inclusively, as the infliction of violence upon a person who cannot resist. The broadness of this definition reflects two important factors. First, it underlines that torture is fundamentally different from combat, and is defined by the total inequality of power in the relationship: a person is tortured by a person or group exercising total, patient control over them. I return to this in the section on deontological ethics below. Second, I make no prescriptions for the form that the violence takes or for the reasons given by the torturers for their treatment of prisoners, as defining torture in terms of specific techniques can contribute, perhaps counterintuitively, to its justification: stating that only a few forms of violence constitute torture allows us to invent other tortures that fall outside of these parameters and to conclude that, because they do not belong to the prohibited category, they are permissible. In my definition of torture I follow scholars such as Bernhard Schlink, who defines torture as ‘each and every treatment that makes a person the hostage of his or her physical or mental pain’ (Schlink, 2008: 85). As Bob Brecher observes, any definition of torture must remain fluid and adaptable enough to accommodate newly discovered ways of inflicting pain, because ‘what is needed for an act to constitute torture cannot be specified in advance’ (Brecher, 2007: 6). By this, Brecher means that torture cannot be defined through descriptions of acts, which can always be newly devised, but must be defined through their effects, that is, the creation of pain in the body of the person upon whom the violence is perpetrated.

Rather than defining torture through any quantitative threshold – claiming that the pain must achieve a certain severity, or that the act must match a set of limited criteria regarding what specific forms of violence constitute torture – I follow Schlink, Brecher, and others in concluding that the definition of torture in the 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) is satisfactory. UNCAT’s definition of torture is at once a description and a prohibition; it states that ‘any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person’ can constitute torture, and that international law is concerned with such acts when ‘such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity’ (UNCAT, 1984: part 1, article 1). Although it has been argued that this definition is restrictively narrow (Einolf, 2007), I work from this definition of torture because it both retains the focus on the actions of public officials (and therefore the focus on states and the limits of power) and places emphasis on the effect of the action (suffering in the body of the victim) rather than on which acts specifically cause the pain.¹ Fixing a definition based on means, weapons, or techniques invariably leads to innovations in forms of torture, as torturers develop ways of torturing that do not fit such definitions; Aleksandr Solzshenitsyn, for example, concludes his 14-page enumeration of NKVD torture techniques in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago with an admission that the torturer’s creativity in generating new forms of violence outstrips his ability to document them (Solzhenitsyn, 1974: 117). It is also illustrative to distinguish torture from Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (CIDT). CIDT can arise where force could have been used proportionately but was not, but torture by its nature is always a disproportionate use of force. Crucially, the forms of force used can be either CIDT or torture, depending on the situation; it is the situation of mistreatment in detention, that is, the asymmetry of power, that defines torture, rather than the specific acts, which in another context could be relatively innocuous (Nowak and McArthur, 2006).²

Clarity on the point of definition is very important, because one of the central techniques of legitimisation for post-9/11 American torture was its legal redefinition. Bush lawyer Jay Bybee disregarded the definition of torture set out by UNCAT, claiming that it set ‘an absurdly high threshold of suffering’ (Sands, 2009: 90). Bybee’s legal advice concluded that only violence that inflicted pain ‘akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure’ (Bybee, 2002: 172) could be considered torture, and therefore, that because new interrogation protocols in GWOT prisons did not rise to this deliberately unattainable new standard, the activities of US interrogators and military police who mistreated detainees could not be regarded as torture. In conflating murder and torture, Bybee’s goal is to deliberately redefine torture in such a way that it can never be said to appear, or at least so that the Americans who are protected by this legislation can never be guilty of it. Such strategies of disappearance, which are designed to create legal impunity for torturers, must be resisted.

A popular myth about torture requires violence to involve complex apparatus or to be bloody and spectacular in order to ‘qualify’ or ‘count’ as torture. The origin of this misleading myth is beyond the remit of this book, but several sources of popular images of elaborate and pyrotechnic torture are readily identifiable. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1584), for example, is one of the principal sources for a twentieth-century genre of popular histories, such as John Swain’s A History of Torture (1961) or Paul Gregson’s Orgies of Torture and Brutality (1965), which claim to provide historical narratives about torture but which actually anthologise salacious descriptions without providing analysis or commentary: their effect is to popularise the false notions that torture is characteristically medieval, and that violence must be explosive and theatrical to attain the status of torture.³ Horror fiction, of course, exercises a strong influence over the popular imaginary; however, this influence is equivocal (and often debated in impoverished terms), and I will restrict my remarks here to the observation that some texts in this genre represent torture as a spectacular phenomenon, which contributes to the idea that torture is an artisanal, scientific, and technologically sophisticated practice: a rational and systematisable knowledge.⁴ For a more explicitly political example, we could consider the videos of beheadings posted online by jihadist groups such as Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq (Lynch, 2006), or, more recently, by ISIS; one scholar describes such videos as ‘the modern-day version of the spiked head’ and ‘terrorising rituals with theatrical overtones’ (Campbell, 2006: 605–609). Such videos exemplify the deliberate and calculatedly cruel atrocities of the antagonists of the West, and some commentators conclude that in contrast to such barbaric activities the forms of duress employed by democratic states are not torture at all. American ‘shock jock’ Matthew Mancow, for example, remarked: ‘They cut off our heads, we put water on their face’ (Pollyea, 2009). Mancow’s argument that waterboarding – suffocation with water – is not torture relies upon its unspectacular nature: the idea that it is not torture originates in the fact that it does not cause visible harm, unlike beheading, electrotorture, crucifixion, or mutilation, all of which Western commentators can with some justification attribute to their enemies.

The fact, however, is that in addition to beatings and sexual violence, which require no tools at all, a great deal of the forms of torture perpe...