During the evening another para, whom I did not know, came in on his round. […] He said to me with a big smile: “You know, I was present all the time! My father talked to me about the Communists in the Resistance. They died, but they never talked. That’s very fine!” I looked at this youth with his sympathetic face, who could talk of the sessions of torture I had undergone as if they were a football match that he remembered and could congratulate me without spite as he would a champion athlete.26
The man—note, we are talking mostly about men here, though many women too were the victims of torture in Algeria, as Marnia Lazreg documents27—but here, the man who can resist torture becomes a champion athlete. This theme runs throughout Alleg’s account, and it gives credence to the notion that we are dealing with a form of competition. Again, when Alleg was still being tortured, a young paratrooper praised him. “Why are you so determined not to talk?” he asked. “You have to have courage to hold out like that.” Similarly, when Alleg encountered, later in his captivity, General Massu’s aide de camp, the latter confided in him: “I admire your resistance.”28
His resistance—at least as Alleg recounts it—is admirable. And, quite understandably, Alleg’s courage becomes a part of his own identity. Alleg prides himself on not having divulged the location of his protectors or the identity of other collaborators. Understandably so—I do not intend in any way to minimize or trivialize his courage, and I form no opinion on its veracity. “I was exalted by the fight which I had survived without weakening,” Alleg writes at the end of the book, “and by the thought that I would die as I had always hoped to die, true to my beliefs and to my companions in battle.”29 Alleg went on: “I suddenly felt proud and happy. I hadn’t given in. I was now sure I could stand up to it if they started again, that I could hold out to the end, and that I wouldn’t make their job easier by killing myself.”30
The reader too gets caught up in this pride. The reader respects Alleg because he does not talk. Jean-Paul Sartre captures these feelings well: “Alleg has saved us from despair and shame because he is the victim himself and because he has conquered torture. […] Because of him we regain a little of our pride: we are proud that he is French.” Or, as Sartre writes at the end of his preface, buying into the heroic storyline, “Alleg is the only really tough one, the only one who is really strong.”31 Notice, again, the masculinity.
The execution of the men, at the end of Alleg’s book, was male martyrdom, martyrdom that called forth the voices of women from “the women’s section of the prison.”32 The voices of the women singing—the women singing about men:
Out of our struggle
Rise the voices of free men:
They claim independence
For our country.
I give you everything I love,
I give you my life,
O my country… O my country.33
Sartre betrays this, perhaps unintentionally. Alleg, he writes, “paid the highest price for the simple right to remain a man among men.”34
Masculinity permeates these exchanges—and it permeates terror. The torture of men, as we see here. But even more, the rape and sexual humiliation of women. Marnia Lazreg meticulously documents that “rape by troops was systematic in rural villages and scattered hamlets [in Algeria] where the population was defenseless.” Rape not only pervaded the military occupation, it also saturated the very language of military discourse, with constant references to “psychological rape,” “inviolate regions,” and “penetrating” areas.35
There is a distinct machismo to being a torturer—it goes with all the winning, dominating, mastering of the other. And there is a masculinity to withstanding it. More generally, most terror contains a gendered or sexual dimension. When the tormentor is a woman, as in the case of Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib, the degradation and humiliation has a distinct sexualizing element. As Lazreg writes, “Torture is sexual in nature… Toying with a person’s sexual identity, violating her most private domain by compelling her to act out the pornographic desires of the torturer is physical and mental torture.”36 Torture is often explicitly sexualized, especially but not only in the cases of the legion of women who have been victims of torture across the globe—in Argentina during the dictatorship, in Rwanda during the genocide, in Algeria and Vietnam. Rape and sexual abuse of women and men form integral components of torture—again, predominantly in a masculinist fashion.
This dimension resonates when one reads about the young men of ISIS who envisage what awaits them in their martyrdom, or the new bands of anti-ISIS mercenaries in Syria—or when one recalls President George W. Bush, in his flight jacket, pretending to be a war hero on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring “mission accomplished.” Ideals of masculinity permeate those moments. “The American idea of masculinity,” James Baldwin writes in his essay “Here Be Dragons:” “There are few things under heaven more difficult to understand or, when I was younger, to forgive.”37 This idea of masculinity somehow seduces the masses and ultimately empowers brutality.
James Baldwin located the root of much harm, including racism and homophobia, in our ideals of masculinity themselves. In Baldwin’s words, “The American ideal of masculinity […] has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white.”38 The ideal of masculinity, Baldwin asserted, served simultaneously to reify the distinctions between black and white, man and woman, gay and straight, and at the same time fuel the fear, or even “terror” in his words—as well as the desire—for the other.
Baldwin put his finger on the uncanny relationship between racism and masculinity, helping us see well how the masculinity of terror nourished other forms of domination. For example, the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo simultaneously racialized the Muslim minority. There and elsewhere in the war on terrorism, the victims of torture have practically all been Muslims, and in part, this has transformed the suspected active minority into all Muslims—in addition, that is, to Mexican Americans and African American and Hispanic communities especially in neighborhoods like Baltimore or Ferguson or Oakland. As the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre notes in the case of Algeria, terror there was “demanded by racial hatred.”39
In the aftermath of 9/11, the use of torture served to dehumanize men and women along distinct racial and ethnic lines—lines that blurred color, ethnicity, religion into the dark-skin of Middle Eastern Muslims.40 This has long been one of torture’s functions: to racialize its victims. It was certainly the case during the Holocaust, as it was during American slavery. The Nazi concentration camp functioned—in part only, of course, it did so much other evil work—to degrade the Jew, the gypsy, the homosexual, the disabled. It served to debase, to exclude from humanity, those whom it confined and ultimately murdered. In a similar way, the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere against Muslims suspected of being enemies served to racialize and dehumanize them.
The philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers to the Nazi treatment of Jews as “bare life.” This notion, discussed earlier, captures well this dimension of dehumanization and degradation: the concentration camp inmates were reduced to nothing more than mere existence. All of their humanity was stamped out, annihilated. This is precisely what terror does: it denies humanity. One need only read Agamben’s wrenching account of one of the first Nazi human experiments, on a young Jewish woman, thirty-seven years of age, who unwillingly became a “VP,” a Versuchsperson, a human guinea pig, tested for the effect of high-altitude pressure.41 That is, surely, bare life. We witness there the sovereign right to kill in its most pristine form.
In a frightening twist that could hardly have been anticipated, the iconic figure of bare life, for Agamben, was “the Muslim,” der Muselmann. Not the Muslim believer, not the person of Muslim faith. Agamben was referring to the Jew in the concentration camp “for whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic.” “Hence,”
Agamben adds, “the ironical name given to him.” The Muslim was the figure that Primo Levi famously described for us. The Muslim no longer even belonged to his own community, to the community of Jews. He had become withdrawn from everything. “Mute and absolutely alone, he has passed into another world without memory and without grief.”42
Tragically, Agamben’s paradigm of bare life—the figure of homo sacer, the one who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed”43—is not exceptional, but rather captures our present reality too well. Looking back today at the images of Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib or other detention facilities in Iraq, those prisoners too are no more than bare life. Without question, terror served to racialize and dehumanize these men and women. Part of the use of terror, of its deployment, is precisely to turn the active minority into mere animals in the eyes of the general population.44
Terror works in other ways as well, and many other historical episodes could shed light on the complex functioning of terror today—of what Adriana Cavarero refers to as “horrorism.”45 Terror, for instance, operates to control and manage one’s comrades. It can serve to keep the counterrevolutionary minority in check. The willingness to engage in extreme forms of brutality, in senseless violence, in irrational excess signals one’s own ruthlessness to one’s peers or inferiors. It can frighten and discipline both inferiors and superiors. It demonstrates one’s willingness to be cruel—which can be productive, in fact necessary, to a counterinsurgency. The excesses of the guillotine, for instance, served to discipline the ranks of the revolutionary committees during The Terror. The use of terror by Cardinal Richelieu and Chancelier Séguier to suppress the 1639 uprisings of the Nu-pieds peasants in Normandy served to rein in the Normand bourgeoisie and parliamentarians.46 The brutal repression of the prison riots at Attica in 1971 served to reassert Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s control—as well as to tar the prisoners and racialize them, as Heather Ann Thompson shows in her brilliant account of the repression of the uprising, Blood in the Water.47 Violence and terror can also produce fraternity, as Jean-Paul Sartre would remind us—what he called “a bond of immanence through positive reciprocities.”48
In the end, terroristic methods do not just extract information, nor do they simply eliminate insurgents or win hearts and minds—they do much more work. They make counterinsurgency a powerful governing paradigm. And, as we will see in the next part, they help break down the boundaries between the foreign and the domestic.
“The Grand Inquisitor” is Dostoyevsky’s sketch of a poem presented by Ivan Karamazov to his brother, Alyosha. It recounts the fictitious return of Christ at a difficult time in history—during the Spanish Inquisition.
In Ivan’s poem, Christ comes face to face with the Grand Inquisitor, who had replaced Christ’s word with terror—the terror of the Inquisition. The challenge, the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, was to govern ordinary, weak men. And to succeed, he explains, the Grand Inquisitor had to rework and improve Christ’s message. He had to harness its power in order to win over the passive masses.
Ivan’s story captures a moral and political evolution. In the words of the Grand Inquisitor, speaking to Christ at the height of the Inquisition:
We corrected and improved Thy teaching and based it upon ‘Miracle, Mystery, and Authority.’ And men rejoiced at finding themselves led once more like a herd of cattle, and at finding their hearts at last delivered of the terrible burden laid upon them by Thee, which caused them so much suffering. Tell me, were we right in doing as we did? Did not we show our great love for humanity, by realizing in such a humble spirit its helplessness, by so mercifully lightening its great burden, and by permitting and remitting for its weak nature every sin, provided it be committed with our authorization?49
And the Grand Inquisitor asks Christ, “For what, then, hast Thou come again to trouble us in our work?”
In the Grand Inquisitor’s account, Christ’s teaching proved inadequate to the Church’s task. What the Church needed was authority and mastery. And in order to achieve mastery over the people, the Inquisitor had to reverse Christ’s message: “We took Rome from him and the glaive of Caesar, and declared ourselves alone the kings of this earth, its sole kings,” the Grand Inquisitor declared. The Inquisitor achieved mastery by placing evil above good, authority above compassion, Caesar above Christ.
That reversal ultimately produced a new truth: Christ’s method—courageous freedom for the chosen few—could never succeed as a style of governing. No, not for the “weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious,” as the Grand Inquisitor would say.
Even Christ understood this well, and ultimately forgives the Grand Inquisitor: “Suddenly He rises; slowly and silently approaching the Inquisitor. He bends towards him and softly kisses the bloodless, four-score and-ten-year-old lips. That is all the answer. The Grand Inquisitor shudders. There is a convulsive twitch at the corner of his mouth.”
It is all understood. Everyone knows that mastery is the most important thing to achieve. And at the end of the parable, the Grand Inquisitor “goes to the door, opens it, and addressing Him, ‘Go,’ he says, ‘go, and return no more… do not come again… never, never!’ and—lets Him out into the dark night.”
“The prisoner vanishes.” Christ departs once again.
Post 9/11, in our new era of counterinsurgency warfare, I fear, we would not have opened the door. No, today, many, too many, would have tortured Christ more and better. Today, it seems, we would have terrorized Christ to death, once again.
PART III
THE DOMESTICATION OF COUNTERINSURGENCY
Once counterinsurgency warfare has taken hold in foreign affairs, it is but a small step to extend its logic to one’s own citizens. Barely noticeable, the strategies are first applied in the same field of battle, but this time to different targets. The line between foreign combatant and suspect citizen begins to fade. Boundaries and borders become porous. Gradually we start to target our own in those foreign lands.
The year 2013 marked the first use of a targeted drone strike to assassinate a US citizen abroad. The target was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and raised in Nebraska, Minnesota, and Yemen. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Colorado State University, and did his graduate studies at San Diego State and George Washington Universities, before returning to Yemen in 2004. He became an imam there, and started posting videos of himself preaching radical sermons on the Internet. At that point, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen residing in Yemen, was marked for death.1
His assassination was planned for several years by the Obama administration. As early as July 2010, David Barron, at the time an attorney at the Office of Legal Counsel and now a federal judge, wrote a forty-one-page legal memorandum detailing the legal justifications for killing a US citizen abroad. Barron concluded that the use of legal force was acceptable where, in his words, “the target’s activities pose a ‘continued and imminent threat of violence or death’ to US persons” and high-level intelligence officers have determined that “a capture operation would be infeasible.”2 Academics and civil-liberties advocates criticized the rationale for being too vague and for failing to set standards for what is imminent or infeasible, threatening to create a dangerously broad justification for extrajudicial killing of American citizens. National security leaders, on the other hand, defended drone strikes on our citizens abroad in situations limited to those described in Barron’s memorandum, under a wartime emergency justification.3
In March 2012, President Obama’s attorney general officially declared that US citizens abroad “may be killed by US forces, but are still protected under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause” and that “it would be lawful to target a US citizen if the individual poses an imminent threat, capture is not feasible, and the operation were executed in observance of the applicable laws of war.”4 By 2013, Anwar al-Awlaki was dead, the victim of a targeted assassination against an American citizen abroad—without ever having been charged, tried, convicted, or sen
tenced to death.
In addition to al-Awlaki, nine other American citizens were killed by United States drone strikes between 2001 and 2015—although, according to official sources, they were not explicitly designated as assassination targets.5 In 2002, American citizen Kemal Darwish was killed in the first American drone strike in Yemen. In 2013, the US Justice Department confirmed, along with the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, the purportedly inadvertent killing of three other American citizens. The same strike that killed al-Awlaki killed another US citizen named Samir Khan, who was suspected of being an Al Qaeda militant. Al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was coincidentally killed in another drone strike the month after his father was assassinated. Jude Kenan Mohammad, another American suspected of recruiting for Al Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan in 2011. A CIA drone strike on the Pakistani border of Afghanistan in January 2015 killed an American hostage, Warren Weinstein, and a suspected American Al Qaeda militant named Ahmed Farouq. Within a week of that strike, another strike in the same region killed Adam Gadahn, an American citizen who was suspected of running Al Qaeda’s propaganda department. Although Farouq and Gadahn were allegedly high-ranking members of Al Qaeda, according to the New York Times, “there had never been a Justice Department determination that they could be marked for death.”6 Administration officials claim that all of these victims were simply in “the wrong place at the wrong time” despite the fact that they were terrorist suspects.
The United States has also targeted nationals of allied countries. On November 12, 2015, the US military sent an MQ-9 Reaper drone and killed Mohammed Emwazi, a British citizen. Emwazi grew up in London and was a naturalized British citizen. He was detained by British authorities in 2010 and barred from leaving the United Kingdom, but eventually got to Syria and purportedly joined the Islamic state. Prime Minister David Cameron described the strike as a “combined effort” between US and British forces, and defended it as “an act of self-defense” and “the right thing to do.”7 On October 16, 2015, a US airstrike targeted German hip-hop artist Denis Cuspert in Syria. Early claims that he had been killed later proved false, but US officials acknowledged that Cuspert, who left Germany to join ISIS in 2012, was the target of the attack. Cuspert converted to Islam around 2007 and began going by the name Abu Malik in 2011, using his social media platforms to disseminate Islamic devotional music (nasheeds) and rap videos purportedly to recruit young Western Muslims. Cuspert was labeled a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” by the Department of State on February 9, 2015. In confirming the targeted airstrike, Department of Defense spokeswoman Elissa Smith said that Cuspert’s death would “contribute to our efforts to stop foreign fighter recruitment.”8
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