Unspeak

by Steven Poole

  Furthermore, the President’s memorandum opened with the grandiose statement that what is required is ‘new thinking in the law of war’. Let us dwell on this idea for a moment. First, the phrase appeals to the idea that ‘new thinking’ will always be better than old thinking: a notion whose merit may be tested by comparing the ideas of, for example, contemporary British exfootballer David Icke, who believes that the world is run by a race of alien reptiles (among whose number is film actor and singer Kris Kristofferson), with the ideas of any randomly selected eighteenth-century British philosopher, such as David Hume. Next, the ‘law of war’ is a set of international instruments governing armed conflict, negotiated between the countries of the world. If one party to these agreements, such as the United States, decides unilaterally to indulge in some ‘new thinking’ on the topic, it must mean that it has decided that the old rules no longer apply to it, and that it will henceforth play by some new rules. As an individual, I am not at liberty to perform some new thinking in the law of murder so as to enable me to kill someone with impunity. And so it is with states. In plain language, ‘new thinking in the law of war’ means breaking the law of war. The President thus demonstrated that he should be taken very seriously when he says: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about by international law.’43

  Bush’s February 2002 statement had designated Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners ‘unlawful combatants’: a term that does not appear in the Geneva conventions, but has been customarily used to denote people who are deemed not to be protected by their provisions for prisoners of war. Geneva says that ‘a spy or saboteur’ would fall into this non-PoW category, but must nonetheless be ‘treated with humanity’.44 However, the generalised language of ‘unlawful combatant’ could be seen to apply more widely than desired. For example, since Iraq had been invaded without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, it would be possible to argue that all US forces in that country were ‘unlawful combatants’ themselves. So the administration subsequently described its prisoners by using ‘unlawful combatants’ interchangeably with ‘enemy combatants’ and ‘illegal enemy combatants’. Clearly, the last two phrases do some extra work. By definition, ‘we’ are not ‘enemy’. And like ‘terrorist suspect’, the phrase ‘enemy combatant’ prejudges the question of the subject’s guilt. The prisoner is automatically categorised not just as one of the enemy, but one of the enemy who was fighting at the time of his capture. If we are thus assured of their guilt, we might be less squeamish about whatever interrogation techniques are used on them down at Guantánamo.

  This is how it went, for example, with the writer Christopher Hitchens. In 2001, Hitchens published The Trial of Henry Kissinger, a meticulous examination of the ways in which one US politician flouted international law. As his epigraph, Hitchens quoted approvingly Kurt Vonnegut’s denunciation of Kissinger as a man who ‘made war gladly’. But Hitchens’s respect for the rule of law, and his disapproval of glad warmakers (‘I’m a war president,’ smiled George W. Bush),45 did not long survive the instigation of the ‘war on terror’. In 2005, he wrote a column explaining why the outcry over Guantánamo was unjustified. This article is worth examining in some detail, since it collects in one place a number of characteristic rhetorical strategies employed by uncritical pundits.

  Members of ‘al-Qaida and its surrogate organizations’, Hitchens began by explaining, do not wear uniforms and do not fight on behalf of a recognised authority with which negotiations may be conducted; ‘They are more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers – three categories of people who have in the past been declared outside the protection of any law.’46 Of course, many foolish things had been declared ‘in the past’. In the past, for instance, it was declared by various authorities that accused witches who failed to drown were guilty, that the sun revolved around the earth, and that Jews were subhuman. In 2005, by contrast, it was not difficult to find out that no person on earth was ‘outside the protection’ of such legal instruments as the UN Convention Against Torture or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But why should Hitchens try to insinuate that some people were? We must follow carefully each link in his unspoken chain of logic.

  Hitchens was sure that everyone in Guantánamo deserved to be there. They were, he assumed, all members of Al Qaeda, or ‘foreign sadists taken in arms in Afghanistan’. On what basis he had decided that they were all ‘sadists’, specifically, is an interesting question. Official uses of the term are to be found rather in descriptions of the actions of US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, where General Antonio M. Taguba wrote of ‘numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses’47; while James R. Schlesinger described ‘acts of brutality and purposeless sadism’48 (although it was purposive rather than purposeless, since the ‘abusers’ were responding energetically to a directive to set ‘favorable conditions’ for interviews49).

  Regardless of what secret information Hitchens may have possessed as to the sexual predilections of Taliban soldiers, his larger assumption was that no one imprisoned at Guantánamo was there through accident or error. The administration routinely referred to its prisoners as ‘killers’, ‘terrorists’50, ‘bad people’, and ‘suicide bombers’.51 They were ‘picked up on the battlefield in the war on terrorism’,52 a claim that sounds persuasive – what were they doing on the battlefield if they were innocent? – until you realise that the ‘battlefield’ of the war on terror is planet Earth. General Richard Myers stated that the Guantánamo prisoners were ‘the same folks’ who ‘took four airplanes and drove them into three buildings on September 11th’,53 even though the ‘folks’ who committed those attacks were all quite deceased. Hitchens, it seemed, simply trusted such pronouncements, evincing a degree of faith in the extrajudicial determinations of government that he had not in his previous writings seen fit to extend to any other state. The record in the current matter, however, was not spotless. Among people eventually released from Guantánamo were a fifteen-year-old unemployed Afghan farmer (after fourteen months’ imprisonment),54 shepherds, cobblers, bakers, and taxi drivers. Perhaps perfect accuracy was ensured by the mere passage of time: perhaps, in May 2005, it was simply unthinkable that there could be anyone left in Guantánamo Bay whose guilt was not self-evident.

  Indeed, Hitchens opined: ‘I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion.’ We may be happy that Hitchens considered himself safe to express his own opinion. But he was merely guessing, because any evidence for the guilt of the vast majority of Guantánamo prisoners was kept secret. Often it was kept secret from the accused men themselves, a state of affairs which resulted in the following tribunal scene.

  The Recorder (not a member of the tribunal) read out the allegation that: ‘While living in Bosnia, the detainee associated with a known Al Qaida operative’:

  Detainee: Give me his name.

  Tribunal President: I do not know.

  Detainee: How can I respond to this?

  Tribunal President: Did you know of anybody that was a member of Al Qaida?

  Detainee: No, no.

  Tribunal President: I’m sorry, what was your response?

  Detainee: No.

  Tribunal President: No?

  Detainee: No. This is something the interrogators told me a long while ago. I asked the interrogators to tell me who this person was. Then I could tell you if I might have known this person, but not if this person is a terrorist. Maybe I knew this person as a friend. Maybe it was a person that worked with me. Maybe it was a person that was on my team. But I do not know if this person is Bosnian, Indian or whatever. If you tell me the name, then I can respond and defend myself against this accusation.

  Tribunal President: We are asking you the questions and we need you to respond to what is on the unclassified summary.

  Subsequently, the Recorder read out the allegation that Mustafa Ait Idir had been arrested because of his involvement in a plan to bomb the US Embassy in Sarajevo. The deta
inee asked to see the evidence against him. He said that in the absence of such evidence, ‘to tell me I planned to bomb, I can only tell you that I did not plan’. He continued: ‘I was hoping you have evidence that you can give me. If I was in your place – and I apologise in advance for these words – but if a supervisor came to me and showed me accusations like these, I would take these accusations and I would hit him in the face with them. Sorry about that.’

  The transcript reveals that ‘everyone in the Tribunal room laughs’, after which the Tribunal President said to Mustafa Ait Idir: ‘We had to laugh, but it is okay.’ The detainee continued: ‘Why? Because these are accusations that I can’t even answer. I am not able to answer them. You tell me I am from Al Qaida, but I am not an Al Qaida. I don’t have any proof to give you except ask you to catch Bin Laden and ask him if I am a part of Al Qaida. To tell me what I thought, I’ll just tell you that I did not. I don’t have proof regarding this. What should be done is you should give me evidence regarding these accusations because I am not able to give you any evidence. I can just tell you no, and that is it.’

  On 20 October 2004, the CSRT [Combatant Status Review Tribunal] determined that Mustafa Ait Idir was an ‘enemy combatant’.55

  Laughter in the dark: the ‘enemy combatant’ often found himself in the position, whether in the courtroom or in the torture chamber, of being the only one who didn’t get the joke.

  Let us return to Christopher Hitchens, serenely convinced that Mustafa Ait Idir and everyone else at Guantánamo were bad guys. He wrote: ‘The man whose story of rough interrogation has just been published in Time had planned to board a United Airlines flight and crash it into a skyscraper. I want to know who his friends and contacts were, and so do you, hypocrite lecteur.’56 This referred to the case of ‘Detainee 063’, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who, the Time article in question reported, was ‘believed by many to be the so-called 20th hijacker’.57 Notice how Time’s ‘believed by many’ turned into Hitchens’s bald statement as fact, ‘had planned’. However, since al-Qahtani had actually said he was a follower of Osama bin Laden, the case was a useful one for Hitchens to cite: it could be offered as representative of hundreds of others, such as Idir’s, where there was no evidence of culpability available at all. What is known of the ‘rough interrogation’ – ‘rough’ being another handily vague term, like ‘abuse’ – included enforced sleep deprivation while the prisoner was under medical supervision for severe dehydration. But Hitchens was impatient with such details; he was simply hungry for information about al-Qahtani’s ‘friends and contacts’.

  The flourish of ‘hypocrite lecteur’, reminding the reader that Hitchens had read Baudelaire, could not distract from the crudity of this sentiment. What did ‘I want to know’ mean, precisely? Did it mean: ‘I want to know, and I don’t care how you get the information’? Or did it even mean: ‘I want to know: go ahead and torture him so I can know’? Hitchens elaborated in the next paragraph, with the rhetorical question: ‘Is al-Qaida itself to be considered a “ticking bomb” or not?’ The phrase ‘ticking bomb’ is shorthand for the classic defence of torture. We imagine a hypothetical situation in which a man is captured, and his bomb is set to go off in one hour. In order to save the lives of many who would be blown up, it is considered acceptable to torture the bomber in order to get him to disclose the bomb’s location.

  Hitchens asked whether Al Qaeda should be considered a ‘“ticking bomb” or not?’. Note that the specific phrasing – ‘or not?’ – expresses impatience, entertaining if not positively demanding an answer in the affirmative. In this way, Hitchens was doing something remarkable for a writer who was admired by many for his previous denunciations of human-rights violations in Latin America and elsewhere. It seemed that he was actually justifying torture. Refusing to say so explicitly, however, he resorted to coded language and insinuation: that prisoners were unprotected from any law; that he ‘want[ed] to know’ what they knew; and that they constituted a ‘ticking bomb’. To such degraded, underhand modes of discussion does the use of Unspeak lead.

  One may have more respect for a politician or writer who has the courage to conduct such an argument in clear terms, away from the murky shadow-world of Unspeak. ‘We think we should torture these people,’ such an argument might run, ‘and here is why.’ As it happens, the dividing lines in such arguments are quite clearly drawn: those who propose torture are those with little experience of interrogation who fantasise about ‘ticking bomb’ scenarios; while among those who oppose torture are the majority of military personnel with concrete experiences of interrogation, who tell us simply that torture doesn’t work. Among the latter may be counted Napoleon Bonaparte, a man who knew a thing or two about the exigencies of war. Napoleon wrote in 1798:

  The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognised that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.58

  Napoleon’s opinion is echoed closely in the US Army’s interrogation manual: ‘Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.’59 Individual soldiers concur. Retired Air Force Colonel John Rothrock, who led a combat interrogation team in Vietnam and who questioned captives in numerous real ‘ticking bomb scenarios’, told Anne Applebaum: ‘If I take a Bunsen burner to the guy’s genitals, he’s going to tell you just about anything’, and added that he didn’t know ‘any professional intelligence officers of my generation’ who thought that torture was ‘a good idea’; interrogator Colonel Stuart Herrington, whose experience ranged from Vietnam to Panama and the first Gulf War, added that torture was just ‘not a good way to get information’.60 Meanwhile, the FBI noted in December 2003 that the ‘torture techniques’ used at Guantánamo Bay had resulted in ‘no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date’.61

  George W. Bush had justified the continuing incarceration of suspects at Guantánamo on the grounds that they could provide ‘information that might not only protect us, but protect citizens in Europe’.62 Three weeks later, it became clear that the torture regime had notably failed to avert the London bombings of 7 July 2005. Instead, this event provided Bush with an opportunity to reassure the world that ‘The war on terrorism goes on.’63 In the end, the argument from futility is the most fatal to the pro-torture camp, because a state’s decision to use torture in the first place is always born from impatience, the hope of a shortcut: the desire that things should be resolved, in John Ashcroft’s phrase, ‘quickly and easily’.

  Even if torture does not work, however, we are protected from becoming too upset on behalf of its victims once we have accepted the dehumanisation evident in the language used to talk about them: ‘dogs’, ‘sadists’, ‘killers’, and so forth. The euphemism for the US practice of exporting certain ‘enemy combatants’ to countries where it was known they would be tortured was ‘extraordinary rendition’, a practice described by a former CIA officer as ‘an abomination’.64 Suspects were said to have been ‘rendered’, a verb that is also used in the language of industrial meat-processing. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency: ‘Meat rendering plants process animal byproduct materials for the production of tallow, grease, and high-protein meat and bone meal.’65 In these ‘animal rendering processes’, the ‘raw material’ of animals is converted into useful products. Similarly, suspects who are ‘rendered’ to foreign torturers are pieces of anonymous meat to be converted into useful information by any means necessary. In the view of the renderers, this is their use, not their ‘abuse’. ‘People are fungible,’ Donald Rumsfeld once said of his own solders.66 Fungible means replaceable, or convertible into other currencies. If the human beings of US forces are thus considered in a
purely instrumental way, how much more so are ‘enemy combatants’. The fungibility of a ‘rendered’ person denies his individuality, denies his presumed innocence, in the service of a dark fantasy of transubstantiation in which the flesh is made word.

  The CIA also had an extraordinary name for those prisoners whose existence was officially denied, who were illegally kept off prisoner lists given to the Red Cross. They were called ‘ghost detainees’.67 This did not imagine the men killed at Bagram persisting as phantoms to haunt their tormentors; it was just another way of dehumanising subjects. It worked in the same way as the term ‘debriding’ pictured the guerrillas of Fallujah as necrotic tissue, flesh that was already dead. Manadel al-Jamadi, the man who died after being strung up in a shower room at Abu Ghraib, was one such ‘ghost’.68 But it mattered little what you did to ‘ghost detainees’ – after all, they were not alive to begin with.