Reviews

On Torture, Thomas C. Hilde, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007),

238 pp., $25 paper.

This edited collection is an excellent andilluminating addition to the literature on thetorture policy of the Bush administrationduring its war on terror. In fifteen succinctessays, the contributors—including ArielDorfman, Darius Rejali, Barbara Ehren-reich, and Tzvetan Todorov—explore thehistory and practice of torture beyond theUnited States and what these non-Americanexamples say about the United States’ role inthis area. The reader is exposed to Colombiaand its drug wars, to the Israeli-Palestinianconflict in Gaza, to the torture chambers andconcentration camps of medieval and NaziEurope, to the secret chambers of Chile, andto the brutal French policies used against theFLN in Algeria. In these essays the authorsconsider ways in which torture at Ameri-can hands, and specifically at Abu Ghraibprison, fits into the patterns of institution-alized abuse that become apparent throughthese comparisons.

The result is startling. Whereas analysisof the Bush policies has seldom venturedoutside a narrow context—contemporary,American, and focused more on thelegal trail than the actual abuses them-selves—these new essays, in widening thescope of the analysis, intensify our sense ofthe level of the wrong that has been commit-ted. Overall, the authors see torture, whichthey all condemn outright, as inevitably partof a larger picture. Torture, they argue, oftenoccurs within a larger context of violence

and instability, where, for example, thereexist war and war crimes, where commu-nities are displaced and forcibly confined,where whole groups are massacred, andwhere individuals disappear, are kept insecret prisons, and sometimes are summar-ily executed. The authors do not necessarilylink these abuses and crimes to the currentU.S. experience, but their discussions pow-erfully suggest that the road that leads totorture has all too often eventually includedother crimes against human rights as well.Torture, these authors argue, is ultimatelya sign of a ‘‘contaminated’’ political as wellas moral context. ‘‘The corruption of thelegal system’’ is one thing, Carlos Castresanawrites, but beyond that, ‘‘Moral complic-ity inexorably expands its stain throughoutall official institutions and society’’ (p. 137).The full set of violations, from illegal arrestand detention to torture, amounts in hismind to nothing less than a ‘‘breach of thesocial contract’’ (p. 142).

In addition to legal and historical anal-yses, editor Thomas Hilde has chosen toinclude a number of essays that concen-trate on the personal aspect of torture—onthe experiences of the tortured and on themind-set of the torturers themselves. Thisfocus on the individual, human experienceof torture is the most unsettling dimensionof the collection. ‘‘Torture is personal,’’writes Adi Ophir (p. 29). It embodies a‘‘relation of intimacy,’’ one protected by the

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perceived needs of the state. ChristopherBritt Arredondo spares his readers nothingin his graphic firsthand depiction of theremoval of a tongue as the final stage of tor-ture. Pilar Calveiro comments on the way inwhich torturers as individuals present them-selves, registering her surprise at the fact thatthe photos from Abu Ghraib include ‘‘theperpetrators, smiling and victorious . . .proud to be torturers’’ (p. 122). Finding thelink between the personal and the political,Barbara Ehrenreich notes that the UnitedStates has essentially created an ‘‘empire ofpain’’ (p. 185).

In this personal dimension, Ehrenreichsuggests, lies the more extensive corrup-tion that state-sanctioned torture signifies.Eduardo Subirats explains that torture is ‘‘aninstrument of spirituality.’’ In fact, he seesit as ‘‘the most privileged spiritual expres-sion’’ of the power of the modern statewhen it manifests a compulsion for dom-inance, corruption, and destruction. ForAriel Dorfman, the institutionalization oftorture presupposes a compromise of theindividual, who willingly refuses to thinkabout the torture being carried out in hisname. ‘‘Torture,’’ he writes, ‘‘requires us tobe deaf and blind and mute’’ (p. 111). Takingthis one step further, Stephanie Athey seestorture in the American context as a ‘‘com-munal fantasy’’ (p. 98) in which those whosupport it are convinced that they will neverbe subject to it. In the eyes of AlphonsoLingis, even the Abu Ghraib photographscould not dislodge this sense of ‘‘intrinsicrighteousness’’ among supporters of torture(p. 108).

Appropriately, several authors focus onthe way in which contorted logic has char-acterized the emergence of torture as a U.S.policy from the fall of 2001 forward, asU.S. government lawyers convinced them-selves that they could change the definition

of torture, thereby changing the law itself.Michael Hatfield points to the government’s‘‘endorsement of torture as the lesser-of-two-evils in its war on terrorism’’ (p. 160). AsHatfield explains, officials and the Americanpublic saw a choice between endangeringnational security and participating in tor-ture, and thereby chose the latter. Hatfieldrefers to the recrafting of the law as pro-viding ‘‘permission to torture,’’ the basis ofa systematic policy rather than a legal briefdesigned to exculpate individuals caught in amoment of passion or even perceived neces-sity (p. 155). For him, the moral implicationsof this are obvious: ‘‘The belief that maim-ing and twisting and breaking human mindsand bodies are supposed to safeguard ourwell-being arises from the darkest depths ofhuman confusion’’ (p. 149). With a tragicsense of just how damaging the removalof long-accepted laws can be, Ophir arguesthat the brutalities that ensue once the lawis lifted or distorted create a ‘‘sphere almostentirely detached from the law and mostlyindifferent to it’’ (p. 36).

The ultimate effect of these essays isto eradicate the sense of American polit-ical or moral exceptionalism by showinghow very little is new here. Acknowledg-ing the photographs of torture at AbuGhraib and the Bush administration’s legalmemos justifying torture as the backdropfor their inquiries, these authors alludein example after example to the way inwhich the American encounter with tor-ture replays other well-known examples ofstate-sponsored abuse. Looking at Algeria,Tzvetan Todorov points out that, accord-ing to those who defended the practice,‘‘torture was the only way to win the war.The Algerian war was not a traditionalwar . . . the enemy did not engage them ona mutually recognized battlefield’’ (p. 19).So, too, as Darius Rejali notes, there is

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little that is novel about ‘‘misrecognition. . . the sociological process in which peoplepass off one kind of situation as another,’’such as denying the degree of brutality usedagainst alleged terrorists (p. 167). Similarly,Rebecca Wittman argues that the claim toimmunity has an eerie echo in the NationalSocialist judiciary’s attempt to ‘‘shape anddistort the public understanding of what thecrime was’’ and to ‘‘normalize the crimesof the vast majority’’ in an effort to claimimmunity for themselves (p. 11). Twistingthe law, dehumanizing the victims, assert-ing that the means justifies the ends, andclaiming immunity from prosecution—allof these, the authors point out, are signsof state-sponsored torture that predated theBush administration’s crafting of its ownlegalized torture policy.

The patterns of torture and torturepolicy are much too familiar. And in thatfamiliarity, the authors collectively sug-gest, lies a further tragedy. Amid all themany generalizations about torture, the

contributors do find ways in which the

American involvement with torture after

9/11 has been unique. The United States,

this volume makes inescapably clear, has left

the world bereft of a symbol of moral excep-

tionalism. ‘‘What is new,’’ writes Thomas

Hilde in his introduction, ‘‘is the overt legal

institutionalization of torture by a state that

traditionally purports to be the opposite of

tyranny’’ (p. 4). Unflinching and unforgiv-

ing, Hilde’s volume impresses the reader not

just with the depravity of the world of tor-

ture that the United States chose to enter but

with the sense that the road back to human

decency will be a difficult one—one framed,

as Dorfman suggests, by the refusal to let

fear justify that which erases our humanity.

—Karen J. Greenberg

The reviewer is Executive Director of the Center on Lawand Security at New York University and author ofThe Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days(2009).

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