The greatest depiction of torture in the English language was published in 1949 by George Orwell. 1984 spoke truth to power in the aftermath of WWII and the novel's power still resonates sixty years later. Two of the major culprits in the CIA-adoption of waterboarding and other "enhanced interroagation techniques" were a pair of psychologists — James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen — who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. George Orwell died in 1950; imagine what his take might have been on torturers who also were followers of Joseph Smith! Thanks to Daniel Born of The Great Books Foundation, we have a hint as to what Orwell might have thought about waterboarders wearing "temple garments." If this is a (fair & balanced) consideration of the connection between torture and cult membership, so be it.
[x The Common Review]
True Confessions
By Daniel Born
Tag Cloud of the following article
His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody.
—George Orwell, 1984
Winston Smith, the central character of George Orwell’s great dystopian novel, is a man who can be broken by pain. In the dark chambers of the Ministry of Love, he endures a grueling regime of beatings and interrogations, plus a variety of other indignities: “They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning.” Only when he confronts the nightmare of Room 101, a rat cage about to be placed over his head, does Winston give up the last token of his humanity, his love for a woman named Julia.
“It was a common punishment in Imperial China,” his torturer O’Brien explains with a professorial drone. As the device is being fitted over Winston’s head, with two enormous, starving rodents eagerly waiting to hurl themselves against his exposed face, Winston’s mind snaps. “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me!” he shouts, in the ultimate act of betrayal. Winston has finally achieved the experience necessary to make him love Big Brother. He finds a way to embrace the political forces that have destroyed his soul.
Does torture work? In this springtime in America, the question grips many minds—not whether “enhanced interrogation,” replete with water boarding, wall slamming, and sleep deprivation, is morally defensible in the framework of the American republic. These practices, we are told, have been abolished by the new administration, and the Justice Department memos that authorized such methods in recent years have now come to light. If former Vice President Dick Cheney has his way, classified government documents should also be made available that, he claims, will prove that enhanced interrogations made the nation safer.
This agenda—does it work?—would make issues of human rights irrelevant, or at best secondary, in a time of peril. In seconding Cheney’s views on the first day of congressional hearings regarding torture, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina made that point emphatically. He observed that such techniques had garnered valuable information from our enemies and that, furthermore, “one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work.” (Indeed, a powerful rhetorical argument that I am tempted to make as well on behalf of gambling, prostitution, and firearms.)
On the brighter side, with congressional investigations now under way, at least specific questions are being raised about the nation’s recent practice of torturing prisoners with a variety of harsh methods—methods developed under the supervision of smart people including lawyers and Ph.D.’s in psychology. Some of us would prefer not to know the details. But we need to know them if we are to think through the question of what it means to be civilized people.
Should it really come as a surprise that so many Americans wonder whether torture works? We are steadily bombarded by a stream of punditry and entertainment that obsessively replays the ticking-bomb scenario, in which torture is administered for the greater good: the extraction of useful information that could conceivably save thousands or millions of lives. So many voices—from special agent Jack Bauer on the Fox network-television program "24" to the Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz—insist that we must make room for torture if we want to remain a free people. Serious debate about whether torture is right or wrong is left to a few brown-rice-munching Unitarians.
This is why Orwell, whose hatred of tyrants was almost matched by his distaste for fashionable progressives, constitutes essential reading. To think about issues of tyranny and freedom in the modern state, and particularly in a modern democracy that still casts itself as a protector of human rights, one must turn to Orwell. No writer has more effectively sliced through the rotten carcass of bad reasoning than St. George, and his classic political allegories, Animal Farm and 1984, hold more political wisdom than any quantity of Justice Department memos can ever hope to match. To reread 1984 is to be struck anew with Orwell’s genius in speaking truth to power, whatever its nationality, pedigree, or ideological flavor.
I would suggest that on the question of torture, 1984 is unambiguous: Yes, torture works—if breaking the human spirit is your goal. And no, torture does not work, at least not if obtaining accurate information is what you’re after.
One of Winston Smith’s cell mates tells his tormentors, “Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don’t care who it is or what you do to them.” Winston amazes himself with the range and variety of lies he is able to concoct while under extreme duress—all desperate fabrications meant to appease his tormentors and stop the pain.
The erasure of history is the primary goal of Big Brother, and Orwell’s novel jackhammers the point home in its final pages. Citizens who remember the historical record pose a real threat to the power of the state, and that is why Winston must be broken of his bad habit of remembering truthfully. For obtaining the truth is not the goal of Big Brother; imposing conformity is.
Democracies, however, do not thrive when history is suppressed. Once again, Orwell’s prescient voice rings out as attention focuses on how our nation’s recent leaders came to legalize so-called enhanced interrogation methods in the past decade. It appears that some historical amnesia went into the making of policy as sincere men and women seeking to serve their country, and reacting to the threat of terrorists genuinely interested in wreaking destruction on us, cast about for tools that might enhance national security.
One tool, the enhanced methods proposed by a very convincing psychologist named James E. Mitchell, was the necessary use of terror in interrogating suspected Al Qaeda terrorists held in custody. According to reports in the New York Times by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, shortly after the president asked the CIA in 2001 to interrogate high-level Al Qaeda suspects, it contacted a unit of the military known as the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. This agency specializes in rehearsing U.S. Army Special Forces personnel and pilots with the kinds of torture and interrogation methods they might face as prisoners of war: a dress rehearsal, if you will, meant to toughen up our boys for the brutal tactics that enemy regimes might put into play. The gambit is rather familiar to aficionados of spy novels. One Hollywood version of such a program was brought to the big screen in "The Bourne Ultimatum," where we discover that CIA operative Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is suffering from amnesia and loss of identity—and that his superiors had subjected him to techniques such as water boarding.
Mitchell was a psychologist with the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. A man who had never conducted actual interviews, the Times story reports, he had “monitored many mock interrogations.” He had worked in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, which had been originally put together in the 1950s as a response to torture methods used regularly against American soldiers captured in the Korean War. Those methods, which included cold and filthy cells, forced standing for hours on end, sleep disruption, and starvation, had a way of eliciting false confessions from American prisoners. Brainwashing, that fearsome specter of cold war conflict, turned out to be the product of some rather crude, banal tactics of inflicting bodily pain. (If my recollection serves me right, similar tactics in Vietnam by communist forces had similar effects on American prisoners of war.)
Somehow, though, Mitchell and another military psychologist, Bruce Jessen, convinced CIA officials that the methods developed in the SERE program, when applied to Al Qaeda operatives, could somehow elicit the truth from terrorist suspects—not the fabrications our own soldiers regularly told when communist captors tortured them. Even more bizarre, the officials who signed off on the SERE methods apparently learned nothing about the history of the program when they were briefed: according to the Times story, they did not learn, for instance, that water boarding originated with the Spanish Inquisition, or that the United States considered it a war crime to be prosecuted after World War II.
The officials also apparently had no idea that numerous other SERE officials had for some time expressed skepticism that harsh interrogation tactics would reap reliable information. These veteran military experts had written internal memoranda stating that such enhanced techniques in fact do not deliver true confessions. The voices of the skeptics, however, did not make it to the policy makers. The cheerleaders for harsher methods carried the day, notwithstanding the evidence.
Like many other writers, I fall prey to a recurrent temptation: I wonder what Orwell would say about all of this. What kind of compass would he set? I have no doubt that compass would be a true one, but what would it be, and specifically what kinds of policies would Orwell recommend? Orwell was no Pollyanna about antidemocratic regimes or movements. At the same time, he understood more than most people the propaganda value of focusing people’s attention on alleged enemies: That is a central theme of 1984. To those who govern, enemies have many uses, among them the manufacture of conformity and consent at home.
He might focus on the paradoxical ironies of the SERE program itself, and ask some hard questions about human nature. Why, I can imagine him asking the eminent psychological authorities Mitchell and Jessen, does water boarding that a communist applies to an American produce false confessions, but water boarding that an American applies to an Al Qaeda operative generate true ones? Might there be some problems with the notion that Americans somehow know how to do it better and get better results because of our innately superior makeup? Yankee know-how would probably take a hit from Curious George, and a man of his authority might get us to ditch, once and for all, silly notions about American exceptionalism.
Or would he focus on the weirdly cultic aspects of the military interrogation complex that gave us this chapter of our history? I believe this is where he would most likely apply the sharp point of his pen, focusing with his darkly comic rage on the pathologies of particular human beings, their weird personal traits and backgrounds.
One of the curious facts about both psychologists who sold the CIA on enhanced interrogation methods is that they were Mormons. The New York Times left that fact out, probably because it would appear irrelevant, or flagrantly prejudiced. But I’m willing to wager that Orwell would not have considered this detail immaterial to the case, especially as I remember his corrosive description, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), of his fellow socialists in Britain. Orwell excoriated the movement, saying it consisted of “vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth control fanatics, and Labor Party backstairs crawlers.” Then he ramped up the bile even more: “If only the sandals and pistachio-colored shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”
This makes me think Orwell would seize on the Mormon connection with some gusto. I’m willing to bet he would say the key to successful interrogation is not an understanding of “learned helplessness,” as masters Mitchell and Jessen told the CIA, or about using the right amount of force when “walling” a prisoner or ramping up the pain in a calculated style or even asking questions in any particular order.
Rather, Orwell might say between drags on his cigarette, it’s all about wearing that special magic underwear that any self-respecting Latter Day Saintly interrogator chooses to put on. The real secret to getting reliable results in Abu Ghraib and Bagram and other sites of special interrogations is the unbleached linen that Joseph Smith prescribes for the elders of the church. Because without that kind of authoritative fabric, prisoners’ confessions are likely to be an unreliable mix of truth and lies.
Listen very carefully: Maybe it wasn’t the rats that got Winston Smith to break down. It was O’Brien’s secret wardrobe. Maybe that’s why it worked. Ω
[Daniel Born is the Vice President for Post-Secondary Programs and Editor of The Common Review at The Great Books Foundation. Born holds a Ph.D. and is a lecturer at Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies. He is the author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel.]
Copyright © 2009 The Great Books Foundation
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