by Steven Poole
Though it had been introduced in 2002, the term ‘enemy combatant’ was not formally defined until two years later, in an order of US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: then, it was said to denote ‘an individual who was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. This includes any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces.’69 In Judge Joyce H. Green’s January 2005 opinion regarding the legality of denying hearings to Guantánamo prisoners, she pointed out that the use of the word ‘includes’ in this definition leaves open an unspecified range of other persons who might qualify. Green recounted how, unsatisfied with this definition, she had directly quizzed the government on some hypothetical cases. The response was that the government considered it had the right to imprison indefinitely without trial “‘a little old lady in Switzerland who writes checks to what she thinks is a charity that helps orphans in Afghanistan but [that] really is a front to finance al-Qaeda activities”; “a person who teaches English to the son of an al-Qaeda member”; “and a journalist who knows the location of Osama Bin Laden, but refuses to disclose it to protect her source”’.70 The deliberate abuse of both words in the phrase ‘enemy combatant’ was illuminated for all to see. An elderly woman of charitable sentiments, who was not an ‘enemy’ nor a ‘combatant’, could nonetheless be defined by fiat as an ‘enemy combatant’, and therefore a candidate for torture.
A sophisticated concept
Just like terrorism, torture has the effect of perverting categories. Torture is ‘abuse’, or ‘repetitive administration’, a tedious day at the office; towels and sleeping bags are weapons; little old ladies are ‘combatants’. At Guantánamo Bay, military doctors assisted in ‘coercive interrogations of detainees, including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears’,71 a practice condemned by the Red Cross as a ‘flagrant violation of medical ethics’.72 The Pentagon justified this practice with a claim of ingenious simplicity. According to Dr David Tornberg, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, when a physician assists in interrogation, ‘he’s not functioning as a physician’, and so the obligations of the Hippocratic oath can be jettisoned.73 In other words: if you think that this is an inappropriate thing for doctors to do, we will just say that the doctors are not doctors. And so the problem goes away. Meanwhile, the practice of keeping ‘high-value’ prisoners in ‘sealed white climate-controlled cells’ was named not ‘isolation’ but ‘segregation’, as though the point were merely to prevent prisoners from socialising – perhaps because they would then constitute a ‘nuisance’ – rather than to inflict psychological suffering.74
In a society that authorises routine torture, then, we are in a world beyond the looking glass, where, as Humpty Dumpty said: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’75 US Senator Lindsey Graham, while deploring the violence at Abu Ghraib, claimed that the interrogation system at Guantánamo was ‘a sophisticated concept’,76 which seems to mean: a) that it was admirable; b) that if you disapprove of it, you don’t understand it; and c) that any gap between the official expression of this ‘concept’ and the practice (as authorised by classified memos and documented by the FBI) could be dismissed as ‘abuse’. Or perhaps Graham was hinting that Guantánamo was not what it seemed at all: that it cared nothing about ‘information’, but existed in the realm of theatrical terrorism. On this scheme, the enemies of the US would see TV clips of shackled men in orange jumpsuits and know that the ‘war on terror’ meant business. The Pentagon, meanwhile, insisted that Guantánamo was a ‘professional operation’,77 appealing to the inherent moral good of all bureaucratic organisation. The prisoners there had nothing to complain about, said Vice President Dick Cheney, because they were ‘living in the tropics’.78
Such a world of inverted and abused meanings makes possible the further inference that beating people to death is a necessary device for the promulgation of an ‘ideology of compassion’.79 The ends justify any means. It is no longer a paradox to say that we must torture our way to freedom.
8
Freedom
On the march
The ‘war on terror’ would be depressing if it were only defined negatively, as against something. Can’t it have a positive aspect too? Let us say, then, that it is also a war for freedom. On Memorial Day 2005 in the United States, George W. Bush gave a speech at Arlington National Cemetery. He took advantage of the occasion to drive home the propaganda message:
Because of the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, two terror regimes are gone forever, freedom is on the march, and America is more secure.1
The hastiness of this shorthand, cramming three precision-tooled sound bites into a single sentence when purportedly commemorating soldiers who have died as a result of one’s policies, looks almost insulting. But the catchphrases are useful. We have dealt with ‘terror regimes’; here let us consider ‘Freedom is on the march’. At first blush it looks like an oxymoron. To be ‘on the march’ means to be unfree, insofar as one is subject to military discipline. So freedom is not actually perfectly free. Now, it is true that this apparently contradictory idea has a pedigree. Hegel thought that liberty consisted in one’s right to obey the police.2 (‘Freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are used essentially interchangeably in English,3 and will be so treated in this chapter. French, for example, has only one word: liberté.) Less paradoxically, Rousseau, in The Social Contract, offered the following pert observation:
At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.
It has long been agreed that freedom depends on law. The law demands that in exercising your freedom, you do not unduly reduce that of others. We do not think anyone should be free to murder people. John Locke made the point with aphoristic precision: ‘Where there is no law, there is no freedom.’4 The noted human-rights professor Michael Ignatieff had somehow forgotten this maxim when in 2004 he wrote: ‘Sticking too firmly to the rule of law simply allows terrorists too much leeway to exploit our freedoms.’5 Of course, the ‘freedoms’ he is so concerned to protect from ‘exploitation’ can only be guaranteed by sticking firmly to the rule of law. Ignatieff’s glib claim that one can stick to the law ‘too firmly’ implies greater and lesser degrees of firmness, and so opens up a grey zone of wiggle room in obedience to the law – just the kind of grey zone that the Bush administration enthusiastically exploited to authorise torture. Meanwhile, when Donald Rumsfeld responded facetiously to reports of widespread looting and disorder in Iraq following the 2003 invasion by saying ‘Freedom’s untidy’, he meant not freedom but anarchy.
So freedom depends on law, and law in the end will be enforced, if necessary, through violence. But this is still a long way from the idea that freedom itself could be ‘on the march’. One way in which the idea of being on the march is useful is that it is similar to the concept of a ‘road map’ for peace in Israel/Palestine: one does not claim to be at any specific destination. And so, should a curmudgeon have complained at the time of Bush’s speech that the US was noticeably failing to condemn the violent repression of democratic revolt in Uzbekistan, perhaps because of that country’s oil and gas reserves and its special status as a favoured franchisee for outsourced torture or ‘rendition’, he could have been told that freedom cannot march everywhere at once, but it was on its way there too.
When it got there, what would happen? Would freedom just hold a big party to celebrate itself? One may be forgiven for supposing that to be ‘on the march’ means to be in a belligerent attitude. Metaphoric uses of ‘on the march’, applied to non-human entities, gen
erally have a threatening tone: thus, if the land is drying out, ‘deserts are on the march’; or ants are seen to be ‘on the march’ through the rainforest.6 Things that are ‘on the march’ are on the attack, like Imperial stormtroopers, or Martian tripods. To be ‘on the march’ is to be on the way to battle. Now, the point of battle is to coerce one’s enemy through violent means to do what one wants. So we must picture battalions of the unfree (soldiers, insofar as they are under orders), marching in step so as to curtail the freedom of the commanders of other equally unfree battalions. Out of all this unfreedom we can happily derive an image of overarching freedom by the Rousseauldian method.
One cannot of course be completely confident that Bush and his speechwriters were making ironical reference to a philosopher, long dead, who lived in France. And it happens that there is an alternative explanation for ‘freedom on the march’, one to which you could recruit Rousseau only with the greatest difficulty. The key is provided by Bush’s 2004 Inaugural Address, according to which there is a person known as the ‘Author of Liberty’, who not only invented freedom but controls world affairs: ‘History also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.’7 Interestingly, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reused this phrase in 2005, when she called Thomas Jefferson the ‘author of liberty’ (even though, as a slave-owner, he was ‘imperfect in his beliefs in liberty’).8 This looks like a deliberate ruse, albeit historically dubious, to secularise the notion. For it is clear that when Bush spoke of the ‘Author of Liberty’ he meant the Christian God. The official White House transcript reverently capitalises the words ‘Author of Liberty’; and the phrase is also a deliberate echo of George Washington’s First Inaugural Address, that spoke of God as ‘the Great Author of every public and private good’. Bush had expressed a similar concept when he told the UN in 2001: ‘We’re confident […] that history has an author who fills time and eternity with his purpose.’9 In claiming that God authors not just liberty but history itself, Bush was also casting himself – as an actor in history – as God’s instrument.
If freedom was on the march, and the person who ‘authored’ freedom was God, what Bush seemed to envisage was the global hegemony of a specifically Christian army. This became even clearer in June 2005, when Bush stated: ‘There is no higher calling than service in our Armed Forces.’10 This is explicitly theological language: a ‘higher calling’ is normally understood to be the vocation of priesthood, just as Bush famously said he appealed to a ‘higher father’ than his biological parent in conducting his foreign policy.11 The word ‘crusade’ may have been hastily removed from the President’s public lexicon after he used it in the wake of 9/11, but the concept was going strong.
Freedom had already been declared to be on the march by Bush’s predecessors, but what they meant was different. In 1987, President Reagan announced: ‘America is at peace tonight, and freedom is on the march.’12 In other words, the war machines were, for the time being, silent; only freedom was on the march, and that kind of march could coexist with ‘peace’. Meanwhile, campaigning for the 1992 election, Bill Clinton said: ‘In a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute. It is ill-suited to a new era.’13 Thus freedom’s march was defined in contrast to the operations of ‘pure power polities’. But when George W. Bush dusted off the phrase, he made it new, by using it to equate the march of freedom with two military invasions. ‘Overgrown military establishments,’ George Washington had declared in his Farewell Address, ‘are inauspicious to liberty.’ In the twenty-first century, by contrast, an overgrown military establishment simply was liberty.
Alternatively one could posit that freedom was not quite the same thing as the army, and that it was theoretically able to march by itself, but it needed the help of bombs and bullets to clear for it a route through the thickets of unfreedom. As when Condoleezza Rice declared: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, America must open a path to the march of freedom across the entire world.’14 The metaphor of ‘opening a path’ was reassuring. Like ‘paving the way’, it implied the bringing of order and civilisation to a chaotic world, much as the Roman Empire built excellent roads. Coincidentally, the American missile that killed sixty-two people in a street market in Baghdad in March 2003 was either a ‘Harm’ or a ‘Paveway’.15 It may be hoped that freedom encountered no major obstacles on its subsequent march along the way paved by a laser-guided bomb.
The abuse of the term ‘freedom’ as denoting a military entity was also transferred to the idea of ‘democracy’. Condoleezza Rice said: ‘We know that when democracy is on the march that America is safer, and when democracy is in retreat Americans are more vulnerable.’16 If the only two postures available to democracy are to be either ‘on the march’ or ‘in retreat’, then democracy is an army and nothing else. This sort of image, deliberately conflating war with peace, may be patently absurd, but it is tried and tested. In 1923, Bertrand Russell noted that the First World War had been called a ‘war for democracy’, and diagnosed the rhetoric thus: ‘Its sole purpose is to make the reader feel that the hatred stirred up in him is righteous indignation, and may be indulged with benefit to mankind.’17
Indeed, it was only around this time, following Woodrow Wilson’s famous call to make the world safe for democracy, that the term ‘democracy’ had begun to exude the wholly positive connotations it has for the West today. In 1956, a Unesco commission published the results of its inquiries into the meaning of democracy. It concluded:
[T]he term ‘democracy’ has h[e]ld and still holds a rather exceptional position in political terminologies of very different kinds. It is scarcely possible to discover any large political group in any country where the term is used in a derogatory way – at least officially. […] The occurrence of a word having such a status is almost unique in the history of the human languages. It has most probably never happened before that the same political term, which for a very long time has been used in eulogistic, derogatory and neutral ways, has been almost unanimously accepted as the main political slogan of nearly all political parties.18
For most of the twentieth century, then, it seemed that ‘democracy’ meant all things to all people. It was used simply as a synonym for virtue. Totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union and communist China used it and associated concepts, calling themselves ‘People’s Republics’, as propaganda tools, arguing that only their political systems accorded real power to the people. (It was Stalin who, in a radio broadcast of July 1941, was the first Allied leader to name ‘democracy’ as one of the things for which the Second World War was being fought.)19 However, the stage at which everyone agreed that democracy, whatever it was, was a good thing seemed to have passed by the early years of the twenty-first century. The scholar of Muslim society Gilles Keppel wrote that, as a result of US foreign policy:
[T]oday, the word ‘democracy,’ preceded by the adjective ‘Western,’ has negative connotations for a large swathe of the educated Muslim middle class – although that class was the potential beneficiary of democratization. The Arabic word damakrata, which designates the democratization process, is frequently used pejoratively, signifying a change imposed from without.’20
That the ‘march of freedom’ had caused such a shift in meaning of the term ‘democracy’ among the very people it promised to help must be accounted a serious propaganda failure. By June 2005, such disillusionment with US rhetoric had even begun to take hold among hawks, when Republican congressman Walter Jones, the man responsible for rechristening French fries ‘freedom fries’ after France’s refusal to sign up for an invasion, called for American troops to withdraw from Iraq.21
The etymology of the word ‘democracy’ – from the Greek demos, people, and kratein, to rule – makes it clear that democracy means people governing themselves. The devil is in the detail: how exactly are they to govern themselves? The history of democratic thinking is too vast and subtle a subject to attempt to précis he
re. But it may be said that in part, it is the history of attempts to limit the power of the people. For the people are volatile, whimsical, easily swayed by momentary passions: they cannot be relied upon to make the right decisions. And so it has seemed a good idea to limit the franchise to those of the right sort of qualifications. In the newly wrought American democracy, the right to vote was bought by money: the precepts of the Constitution were such that ‘the only democratic organ it was intended the government should possess was the House, based on a suffrage highly limited by property qualifications’.22 At that time democracy was rather a dirty word: Thomas Jefferson and his allies generally called themselves Republicans, ‘and were only called “democrats” when the Federalists wanted to discredit them’.23 The vote of a black person, notoriously, was considered to be worth only three-fifths of a white vote. Things have improved in that regard, at least. In the bonus second round of voting for the 2000 US Presidential election, the vote of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, like that of each of his benchfellows, was worth the combined votes of about seventeen million ordinary citizens.
In the twentieth century the implication that ‘democracy’ meant power to the people troubled the philosopher F. A. Hayek to such an extent that he recommended changing the word altogether, because it was an example of a lamentable ‘confusion of language’. His argument shows well the extent to which the term ‘democracy’ can be seen to imply a whole unspoken worldview. Hayek distinguished between what he called the ‘opinion’ of the people – their view of general principles – and the ‘will’ of the people – their view on what should actually be done in any concrete situation.24 (Thus our contemporary phrase ‘public opinion’, usually meaning the results of polls on particular matters, would translate into Hayek’s ‘will’.) Hayek then argued that the people’s ‘opinion’ should be sovereign, but their ‘will’ should not ever determine the actions of the state. Therefore, he went so far as to suggest that the term ‘democracy’ itself should be abandoned in favour of ‘demarchy’. The Greek verb kratein meant ‘to rule’ in the finegrained sense of taking actual decisions, which he did not want the people to do; while archein meant to rule in a more general sense of a governing principle.