New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

100 The New Imperialists
panel chaired by U.S. Major General George Fay further detailed brutal
incidents in which prisoners were sodomized, subjected to extreme
temperatures, led around on a leash while naked, and had electric shocks
administered to their genitals. Reading through these hundreds of pages
of documentation of beatings and humiliation, it is impossible for the
fair-minded reader not to conclude that a system of brutality and a logic
of torture are at work, in which prisoners are subjected to powerful
sensations of isolation and helplessness (a key function of blindfolds and
hoods). In an effort to break prisoners, military interrogators and guards
assert their utter control over all the rudimentary aspects of life: food,
clothing, sleep, urination, defecation, light, temperature, human contact,
dignity.
Rather than extreme cases or the actions of “bad apples,” these tactics
are part of systematic policy laid out in the C.I.A.’s manual, KUBARK
Counterintelligence Interrogation, first produced in 1963. And that text,
which has been the handbook for U.S. military interrogators for over
forty years, provides the template for the human rights violations
committed at Abu Ghraib. 49 It comes as little surprise, then, when the
American Civil Liberties Union reveals that illegal interrogation methods
were approved by the top U.S. military official in Iraq. 50 The logic of
torture practised by the U.S. military has been captured with remarkable
insight by Elaine Scarry in her monumental work, The Body in Pain.
Torture, notes Scarry, does not only inflict pain, though it certainly does
that. It also establishes a relationship of domination in which the victim
is rendered speechless, reduced to a suffering body pure and simple,
while the torturer appropriates all speech to himself, emerging as a
singular voice of power and authority. “Ultimate domination,” Scarry
claims, “requires that the prisoner’s ground become increasingly physical
and the torturer’s increasingly verbal, that the prisoner become a colossal
body with no voice and the torturer a colossal voice . . . with no body.” 51
This is precisely the logic of torture in which U.S. forces engages –
coupled with sexual humiliation and murder. It is also the reality of
Ignatieff ’s “lesser evil,” though one he refuses even to acknowledge, never
mind defend.
Of course, Ignatieff does not condone torture. But he treats it as
something of an aberration when, as we have seen, it was an utterly
consistent and predictable aspect of established U.S. policy. What kind of
ethics is it that cannot anticipate the highly probable unethical results of