First De-Humanization, then Rendition and Torture

By Brigitte L. Nacos 

As TIME magazine reports, the new book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by Stephen Grey reveals details about the CIA’s controversial rendition practices after 9/11. However shocking such accounts may be, the mass-mediated discussion about the interrogation of terrorists and suspected terrorists began after 9/11, intensified after the capture of prominent Al Qaeda members and after the Abu Ghraib revelations. All along, there were voices that suggested a double standard in this particular case: torture or let others do it for you and deny everything. And all along, the media granted access to those who dehumanized the enemy in the war on terrorism. In this climate, it was hardly surprising that torture and extraordinary rendition (meaning to torture abroad in U.S. run facilities or to outsource torture to agents of other countries) became acceptable to legal experts in the administration and to American interrogators and guards in detention facilities. If you want an idea about torture methods that proponents consider "torture lite," take a look a this linked material on the No Quarter site.

In early 2003, after the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), a close associate of Osama bin Laden, Jack Wheeler of the Freedom Research Foundation appeared as a guest on the Fox News Hannity & Colmes program. When Alan Colmes asked, “Tell us what you want to do to this guy," Dr. Wheeler answered, "Whatever is necessary to extract the information that he has out of his brain. And I mean whatever is necessary." Later in the program, the guest said in an exchange with host Sean Hannity, "I don't care what you do to him. This man is a piece of human garbage." Hannity's answer: "Well I agree with that."

Following on the heels of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program in reaction to the news of the brutal beheading of the American Nicholas Berg by his kidnappers in  Iraq, “They’re the ones who are sick. They’re the ones who are perverted. They are the ones who are dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman debris, not the United States of America and not our soldiers and not our prison guards."

Around the same time, a former CIA operative said in a discussion of interrogation methods on the Hannity & Colmes program, “We catch an al Qaeda member, we knows [sic] he’s al Qaeda, his life as he knows it has got to be over. Listen, I lived with these animals. This is a sub-human species of somehow a deviation of the human, of the true human. They care for nothing. They kill everything in their path.All bets are off. This is an animal that’s unlike any we’ve ever faced.”

In an ironic way, the preachers of hate have a great deal in common with terrorists in that both sell the “us” against “them” divide. With respect to terrorists, Ehud Sprinzak has described a process of moral disengagement at the end of which the enemies “are depersonalized and dehumanized. They are derogated to the ranks of subhuman species.. To the extent that the enemy in the “war on terrorism” was perceived by Americans as “garbage,” “debris,” and “subhuman,” this moral disengagement paved the way for the inhumane treatment of detainees.

One American soldier, who had worked at Abu Ghraib prison, for example, testified that on one occasion one of the guards, Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, had pointed at two naked detainees who were forced to masturbate. “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds,” he said

Such efforts to dehumanize prisoners were not limited to the Iraqi prison. The following entry in the interrogation log of Mohammed al-Qahtani, believed to have been the designated 20^th hijacker in the 9-11 terrorist attacks and held in the Guantanamo Bay, reveals that the Al Qaeda member was considered even less than an animal: “Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem [than he] because dogs know right from wrong, and know how to protect innocent people from bad people. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog.”

By allowing some in our midst to de-humanize the other side in the post-9/11 climate of fear and pave the way for the inhuman treatment of detainees, the U.S. lost its moral high ground.

Comments

[Tiffany Jeltema]

It's so easy to dehumanize people who are separated from us in so many ways, geographically, culturally, traditionally, etc. What is so sad to me is that we deny that we are doing it ... I'm not prejudiced; I'm an American and believe in equality and justice for all (who agree, think, look, and act like me anyway).