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Sunday, May 30, 2004

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Opinion - News Analysis

That dreaded T-Word

By P. Sainath

"So there were WMDs in Iraq after all. They're called digital cameras."

— Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch.org

The Pentagon and CIA call it "stress and duress." The New York Times leads the media search for softer synonyms. A few samples: `prisoner abuse,' `maltreatment,' `ill-treatment,' `degrading,' `humiliation,' `coercive techniques' and `misconduct'. And yet others in the U.S. media vie to find more names for it. Like `rigorous interrogation.' Or, `pressure tactics.' The rest of us just call it torture.

Images of the brutalities at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq crowd journals that carry the photos of torture but choke on that word. (There are far worse images to follow, promised Donald Rumsfeld. And he has delivered. The latest `cache' of photos is far worse. But he did not use the word torture either, in his remarks at Capitol Hill.)

A check on reports in the mainline U.S. media for a fortnight now would reveal this idea: don't bring in the word `torture' if you can help it. That's not something we want associated with "our boys." Never mind what the photos show. Besides, as President Bush put it, those disgusting things (read torture) are not in the nature of the American people.

The U.S. Army saw the actions of its men in this way: "They were setting the physical and mental conditions for the favourable interrogation of witnesses." That is as cute an account of barbarism as you will ever hear.

In some reports in The New York Times you do find the word `torture.' But these mostly refer to the actions of the fallen Saddam regime. Tinpot dictators "torture." The good guys abuse, degrade or stress. In one report in The New York Times (May 7) I did find a clear use of the word `torture' to describe what the Americans were doing. That was in a quote from an Iraqi settled in the United States. And it was swiftly balanced in the remaining part of the report in many ways.

Tom Friedman (of all people), it must be said, did use the word torture. But in a way that diluted it. Some of the new terms the U.S. media come up with to skirt the issue are novel. Put a man's head in a black bag for 72 hours and The New York Times might call it "sensory deprivation."

The media activist group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting has just challenged the spin in The Times. FAIR points out that for The Times, "Harsh Methods" are not torture. "The (NYT May 13) article," says FAIR " took pains to explain why, according to U.S. officials, such techniques do not constitute torture." It quotes The Times which says: "Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees."

So there you have the word 'torture' used three times in a paragraph by The New York Times. But only to deny it happened. Finally, the NYT ran a piece that mocks American shyness on this score. That, not by a Times writer. Susan Sontag, who doesn't mess around with words, wrote: "There was also the avoidance of the word 'torture.' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of 'abuse,' eventually of 'humiliation' -- that was the most to be admitted".

The U.S. last week freed 315 "uncooperative detainees" from just Abu Ghraib alone. After hurting their rights in every imaginable way — and some not imaginable — it could still find nothing on them. This could mean that thousands, if we count other prisons, are held with no proof of wrongdoing on their part. (And tortured.) But The New York Times seems more focussed on playing down the T-Word. The human rights of Iraqis come a long way down its list of concerns.

"The tactics," says The Times of the atrocities, "simulate torture but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury." How does this apply to, say, rape and sodomy? Both those, as The Washington Post (May 21) records, did happen in Abu Ghraib. The Post report, some 2,000 words in length, uses the term torture in the last sentence. And that is in a quote from one of the victims. It is not part of the report's language. The Post though is well aware that the acts shown in the new pictures it has (May 21) are truly repulsive. So it runs this editor's note with them: `Some images in this gallery may be disturbing because of their violent or graphic nature.'

Violent and savage, yes. Torture? Well, we'd like a better word.

Another strange tactic is to imply that some of these acts are bad because they wound Muslim and Arab sensibilities. A Reuters report, for instance, speaks of the gruesome treatment of Iraqis working for it. That is, Reuters' own staff. The report (Indian Express, May 20) ends on this note: "They said they were forced to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their mouths, particularly humiliating in Arab culture."

Many other western reports have peddled this line. Much of what happened was offensive "in Arab culture" or to "Muslim sensitivities." It's almost as if the problem lies in the culture. Would this treatment have been good fun for people of other backgrounds? In this view, being tortured by a woman, for instance, seems to offend only Muslims. People of other faiths might well have enjoyed it.

Embedded journalism isn't just part of wartime Iraq. The embedded press functions full time within the United States too. There is another word that the U.S. media fights shy of. That's "war crimes" — an apt term to describe what's happening in Iraq. But you won't easily find the embedded media using it. Nor are they likely to remind you that the U.S. bullied the Security Council in June 2003 into giving its troops a year's exemption from the new International War Crimes Tribunal. In short there were always people at the top in the U.S. who knew what they were getting into and who went ahead anyway.

Being shocked by what the Americans have done in Iraq is fine. Being surprised by it is silly. As dumb as it is to pretend that "private contract security guards" are not mercenaries. For that's what the Indian "security personnel" going to Iraq are. Mercenaries. Maybe we could say the U.S. is outsourcing terror. Only there's no protest in the U.S. against this "flight of American jobs."

The media in Europe and the United Kingdom have less qualms in calling torture by its name. Well, mostly, it did not come from "their boys." The BBC still treads carefully. But a section of the press in the U.K. does speak of torture. In the U.S. media, though, the dreaded T-word is reserved for the actions of others. Especially those outside the pale of the `civilized world' that George W. Bush so often speaks of.

It was all stress and duress at Guantanamo. Not torture. Sure, you'll find the term pop up once in a while the same way you'd find it in The New York Times. But it will be some time before — - to borrow another cliché — the media `mainstream' the word.

Torture? That's not what Americans do. You'd think they played tennis with their captives in Vietnam. There, the use of awful and cruel weapons was described just as cutely by Time magazine in 1965. The phrase was "non-lethal gas warfare." (To lesser people, non-lethal and warfare might seem a contradiction in terms.) Maybe the Vietnamese died happy, knowing they were falling to non-lethal weaponry.

Then too, it took months for the truth to surface. For the murders of My Lai to break through the self-censorship of the U.S. media. And My Lai was one, just one, instance amongst hundreds of such atrocities. Gang rape, mutilation, burning people alive, setting dogs on them. It all happened in Vietnam. More recent is the death by suffocation of `suspected Taliban' in Afghanistan. That's what a war of occupation is about. And Iraq is such a war. It transforms even those who might otherwise never have committed such crimes. If anything, this becomes much easier given the media milieu the torturers come from. Does anyone have a count of the Hollywood films that paint Arabs as evil, sub-human and genetically terrorist?

`Torture,' says my (American) dictionary, is `the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge. As a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.' Sounds like the manual for Abu Ghraib. But `harsh methods' seems the preferred term.

Still, for those Americans who prefer not to be lobotomised by their media, there is the alternative press. Here is Mike Whitney in Counterpunch.org on the Iraqi victim who has become the symbol of torture worldwide. We've all seen the photograph. A man with a hood forced over his head. Hooked up to wires, standing on a box, fragile and frightened. Whitney rejects the notion that there is anything un-American about such acts.

"The victim in the picture is obviously engaged in his first seminar in American foreign policy. Other graduates of the program can be found in Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. And in virtually any other region of the world where America's corporate interests require an advanced studies curricula for dissidents."

What do people do when they see non-U.S. media showing, say, slain Iraqi innocents and other horrors? Like torture? Brigadier General Kimmit of the Occupying Forces in Iraq says it's simple. "Change the channel." Stations that show Americans killing or hurting Iraqis "are not legitimate news sources."

The stories presently in the American press have been around a long time in Iraq. The torture and some murders now being reported are months old. Quite a few of the torture victims have been out for half a year, willing to speak of their experiences. Only, the media did not want them. The stories came flooding out when they could no longer be ignored.

Once the photos were out — no thanks to embedded journalism — the damage was done and could not be reversed. As Alexander Cockburn writes: "So there were WMDs in Iraq after all. They're called digital cameras."

Using the dreaded T-Word has frightening implications. Even perhaps legal ones. But the big damage it does is to the images of benevolent empire. That too, amongst those whose consent it requires to succeed.

Jean Paul Sartre got it right more than forty years ago. As he wrote: "In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on." The photos and the torture they establish make self-delusion difficult. It's not a nice mirror to look into. Any more than it is to accept that so many American actions around the world constitute, plain and simple, terrorism. Another dreaded `T-Word.' Meanwhile, whatever else the U.S. media might lack, they are not at a loss for words.

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