1 1 THE UNITED STATES IS ADDICTED TO TORTURE. Not only does this savage addiction run through its history like an overheated electric current, but it has become intensified as part of a broader national psychosis of fear, war, and violence. A post-9/11 obsession with security and revenge has buttressed a militarized culture in which violence becomes the first principle, an essential need, whether in the guise of a national sport, mode of entertainment, or celebrated ideal.
Foreign and domestic violence now mediate everyday relations and America’s connection to the larger world. As such, terror, fear, war, and torture become normalized, and the work of dehumanization takes its toll on the American public as more and more people not only become numb to the horror of torture but begin to live in a state of moral stupor, a coma that relegates morality to the dustbin of history. How else to explain recent polls indicating that 58 percent of the American public believe that torture under certain circumstances can be justified and that 59 percent think that the CIA’s brutal torture methods produced crucial information that helped prevent future attacks?1 There is more at stake here than manufactured ignorance and an unconscionable flight from the truth. There is also a dangerous escape from justice, morality, and the most basic principles central to a democratic society. The celebration of brutality, spectacles of violence, and the affirmation of torture suggest that in a market-driven society with its unchecked individualism, sheer social Darwinism, and refusal to think about social costs or, for that matter, any notion of the public good, nurturing an addiction to cruelty, violence, and torture becomes only too easy. In the age of disposability and despicable gaps in wealth, income, and power, modern terror becomes normalized and points to the onslaught of a mode of totalitarianism that is more than an ephemeral moment in history. Violence is no longer marginal to American life; it is the foundation that now drives it. As Lawrence Wittner recently observed:
When it comes to violence and preparations for violence, the United States is, indeed, No. 1. In 2013, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. government accounted for 37 percent of world military expenditures, putting it far ahead of all other nations. (The two closest competitors, China and Russia, accounted for 11 percent and 5 percent respectively.) From 2004 to 2013, the United States was also the No. 1 weapons exporter in the world. Moreover, given the U.S. government’s almost continuous series of wars and acts of military intervention since 1941, it seems likely that it surpasses all rivals when it comes to international violence.2
With the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on Torture in December 2014, it became clear that the United States, in the aftermath of the loathsome terrorist attack of 9/11, has entered into a new and barbarous stage in its history, one in which acts of violence and moral depravity were not only embraced but celebrated.3 Certainly, this is not to suggest that the United States had not engaged in criminal and lawless acts historically or committed acts of brutality that would rightly be labeled acts of torture. That much about our history is clear: indiscriminate violence and torture practiced through and with the right-wing Latin American dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil in the 1970s; the willful murder and torture of civilians in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and, of more recent memory, the torture and prisoner abuse at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The United States is no stranger to torture, nor is it free of complicity in aiding other countries notorious for their abuses of human rights. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have reminded us: among “35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States.”4
In fact, the United States has a long record of inflicting torture on others, both at home and abroad, although it has never admitted to such acts. Instead, the official response has been to deny this history or do everything to hide such monstrous acts from public view through government censorship, appealing to the state secrecy privilege, or deploying a language that buries narratives of extraordinary cruelty in harmless sounding euphemisms. For example, the benign-sounding CIA “Phoenix Program” in South Vietnam resulted in the deaths of over 21,000 Vietnamese.5 As Carl Boggs argues, the acts of U.S. barbarism in Vietnam appeared both unrestrained and never-ending, with routinized brutality such as throwing people out of planes jokingly labeled as “flying lessons” or “half a helicopter ride,”6 while tying a field telephone wire around a man’s testicles and ringing it up was a practice horrifyingly called “the Bell Telephone Hour.”7 Officially sanctioned torture has never been discussed as a legitimate concern; but, as indicated by a few well-documented accounts, it seems to be as American as apple pie.8
Torture for the United States is also part of a long history of domestic terrorism, as was evident in the attempts on the part of the FBI, working under a secret program called COINTELPRO, to assassinate those considered domestic and foreign enemies.9 COINTELPRO was about more than spying; it was a legally sanctioned machinery of violence and assassination.10 In one of the most notorious cases, the FBI worked with the Chicago police to set up the conditions for the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two members of the Black Panther Party. Noam Chomsky has compared COINTELPRO, which went on from the 1950s to the 1970s, to Wilson’s Red Scare, while further asserting that COINTELPRO was “the worst systematic and extended violation of basic civil rights by the federal government.”11 What characterized these programs of domestic terrorism was that they were all shrouded in secrecy, yet allegedly were conducted in the name of national security and democratic rights.
Torture has also had a long-standing domestic presence as part of the brutalized practices that have shaped American chattel slavery through to its most recent “peculiar institution,” the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex.12 The racial disparities in American prisons and criminal justice system register the profound injustice of racial discrimination as well as a sordid expression of racist violence. As the novelist Ishmael Reed contends, this is a prison system “that is rotten to the core . . . where torture and rape are regular occurrences and where in some states the conditions are worse than at Gitmo. California prison hospitals are so bad that they have been declared unconstitutional and a form of torture.”13
One of the more recently publicized cases of prison torture involved the arrest of a former Chicago police commander, Jon Burge, who was charged with regularly torturing African American men “in order to force them to falsely confess to crimes they did not commit.”14 According to attorney Taylor Flint, “from 1972 to 1991, Burge led a group of white Chicago detectives who tortured over 100 African American men at station-houses on Chicago’s South and West Sides [routinely using] electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags and typewriter covers to obtain confessions from their victims.”15 One report claims that many of these men were beaten with telephone books and that “cattle prods were used to administer electric shocks to victims’ genitals. They were suffocated, beaten, and burned, and had guns forced into their mouths. They faced mock executions with shotguns. . . . One tactic used was known as ‘the Vietnam treatment,’ presumably started by Burge, a Vietnam veteran.”16 The filmmaker Deborah Davis has documented a number of incidents in the 1990s of unmistakable torture within the American prison system and has argued that many of the sadistic practices she witnessed being used against prisoners were essentially exported to Abu Ghraib.
After 9/11, the United States slipped into a moral coma as President Bush and Vice President Cheney worked tirelessly to ensure that the United States would not be constrained by international prohibitions against cruel and inhumane treatment. Their crusade against terror turned torture, as Mark Danner argues, into “a marker of political commitment,” while their actions resulted in the construction of a vast secret and illegal apparatus of violence in which, under the cover of national security, alleged “terrorists” could be arrested and held without charges, made to disappear into secret CIA “black sites,” become ghost detainees removed from any vestige of legality, or be secretly abducted and sent to other countries to be tortured. As Jane Mayer puts it:
Simply by designating the suspects “enemy combatants,” the President could suspend the ancient writ of habeas corpus that guarantees a person the right to challenge his imprisonment in front of a fair and independent authority. Once in U.S. custody, the President’s lawyers said, these suspects could be held incommunicado, hidden from their families and international monitors such as the Red Cross, and subjected to unending abuse, so long as it didn’t meet the lawyer’s own definition of torture. And they could be held for the duration of the war against terrorism, a struggle in which victory had never been clearly defined.17
The maiming and breaking of bodies and the forms of unimaginable pain inflicted by the Bush administration on so-called enemy combatants were no longer seen as violations of either international human rights or a constitutional commitment to democratic ideals. The war on terror had now reduced governance in the United States to a legalized apparatus of terror that mimicked the very violence it was meant to combat. In the aftermath of 9/11, under the leadership of Bush and his neoconservative band of merry criminal advisors, justice took a leave of absence and the “gloves came off.” As Mark Danner states, “The United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practised it.”18 But it did more. Under the Bush-Cheney reign of power, torture was embraced in unprecedented ways through a no-holds-barred approach to war that suggested the administration’s need to exhibit a kind of ethical and psychic hardening—a hyper-masculine emotional callousness that expressed itself in a warped militaristic mindset. State secrecy and war crimes became the only tributes now paid to democracy. The latter is particularly evident in Cheney’s morally irresponsible, if not depraved, response to the Report on Torture in which he stated: “I think that what needed to be done was done. I think we were perfectly justified in doing it and I’d do it again in a minute.”19 Cheney went so far on NBC’s Meet the Press as to deny that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture. In Cheney’s dark world, there are no mistakes so long as the ends justify the means: “Asked again whether he was satisfied with a program that erroneously locked up detainees, [Cheney] replied, ‘I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.’”20 This barbarous sanctioning of human suffering is reminiscent of statements provided by other war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Pol Pot who also denied that their actions were a violation of human rights. Hopefully, Cheney’s admission that he engineered the CIA to torture people will one day require justification in a court of law in which he is charged as a war criminal.21
As Frank Rich has argued and the Report on Torture confirms, “Torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels . . . psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and . . . in the assessment of reliable sources like the FBI director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.”22 When the Torture Memos of 2002 and 2005 implicating the Bush-Cheney regime were eventually made public by the Obama administration, they revealed that the United States had been turned into a globalized torture state.23 Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan went so far as to claim that “if you want to know how democracies die, read these memos.”24 The memos, written by government lawyers John Yoo, Steven Bradbury, and Jay Bybee, advised the CIA under the Bush administration to use barbaric interrogation techniques on al Qaeda detainees held at Guantánamo and other secret detention centers around the world. They offered detailed instructions on how to implement ten techniques prohibited in the Army Field Manual, including facial slaps, “use of a plastic neck collar to slam suspects into a specially built wall,”25 sleep deprivation, cramped confinement in small boxes, use of insects in confined boxes, stress positions, and waterboarding. All of these examples of physical and mental torment have been documented in the Senate report. In fact, the report claims that the most recent disclosures about torture used by the CIA demonstrate such practices were even more brutal and less effective than previously reported.
Waterboarding, which has been condemned by democracies all over the world, consists of the individual being “bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual’s feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner [and] produces the perception of ‘suffocation and incipient panic.’”26 The highly detailed, amoral nature in which these abuses were first defined and endorsed by lawyers from the Office of Legal Council (OLC) was not only chilling but also reminiscent of the harsh and ethically depraved instrumentalism used by those technicians of death in criminal states such as Emperor Hirohito’s imperialist Japan and Nazi Germany. Andy Worthington’s analysis suggests that there is more than a hint of brutalization and dehumanization in the language used by the OLC’s Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury’s memo, which recommended
“nudity, dietary manipulation and sleep deprivation”—now revealed explicitly as not just keeping a prisoner awake, but hanging him, naked except for a diaper, by a chain attached to shackles around his wrists—essentially, techniques that produce insignificant and transient discomfort. We are, for example, breezily told that caloric intake “will always be set at or above 1,000 kcal/day,” and are encouraged to compare this enforced starvation with “several commercial weight-loss programs in the United States which involve similar or even greater reductions in calorific intake” . . . and when it comes to waterboarding, Bradbury clinically confirms that it can be used 12 times a day over five days in a period of a month—a total of 60 times for a technique that is so horrible that one application is supposed to have even the most hardened terrorist literally gagging to tell all.27
The New York Times claimed in an editorial that “to read the . . . four memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.”28 The editorial was particularly incensed over a passage written by Jay Bybee, who was then an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration. As the Times then pointed out, Bybee “wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.”29 Bybee’s memo is particularly disturbing, even repugnant, in its disregard for human rights, human dignity, and democratic values, not only describing how the mechanics of waterboarding should be implemented but also providing detailed instructions for introducing insects into confined boxes that held suspected terrorist prisoners. In light of mounting criticism, Bybee both defended his support of such severe interrogation tactics and further argued that “the memorandums represented ‘a good faith analysis of the law’ that properly defined the thin line between harsh treatment and torture.”30 Indeed, it seems that Bybee should have looked carefully at the following judgment pronounced by the American court in Nuremberg to the lawyers and jurists who rewrote the law for the Nazi regime: “You destroyed law and justice in Germany utilizing the empty forms of the legal process.”31
As brutal as the reasoning revealed in the memos proved to be, the Senate Report on Torture documents even further revelations regarding millions of dollars spent on black sites, the amateurish qualifications of those who conducted interrogations, the complicity of unqualified psychologists who milked the government for $81 million to develop torture techniques, and the endless lies produced by both the CIA and the Bush-Cheney administration regarding everything from the use of secret prisons established all over the world to the false claims that the use of torture was responsible for providing information that led to the finding and killing of Osama Bin Laden by members of the Navy SEALs.32 The report also stated that far more people were waterboarded than was first disclosed and that the sessions amounted to extreme acts of cruelty. Some members of the CIA choked up over the cruel nature of the interrogations and sent memos to Langley calling their legality into question, but were told by higher officials to continue with the practice. In fact, the interrogations were considered so inhumane and cruel by some CIA officers that they threatened to transfer to other departments if the brutal interrogations continued.
The United States was condemned around the globe for its support of torture and it was hoped that such extensive condemnation would take place once again in light of the Senate report. Fortunately, when President Obama came to office, he outlawed the most egregious acts practiced by the professional torturers of the Bush-Cheney regime. Yet undercurrents of authoritarianism die hard in the circles of unaccountable power. The Senate report made clear that the CIA engaged in lies, distortions, and horrendous violations of human rights, including waterboarding and other sordid practices. The report also revealed that the CIA used monstrous methods such as forced rectal feeding, dragging hooded detainees “up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched,” and threatening to kill or rape family members of the prisoners. But, in spite of the appalling evidence presented by the report, members of the old Bush crowd—including former vice president Cheney, former CIA directors George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, and a number of prominent Republican Party politicians—are still defending the use of torture or, as they euphemistically contend, “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
The psychopathic undercurrent and the authoritarian impulse of such reactions finds its most instructive expression in former Bush communications chief Nicolle Wallace, who, while appearing on the Morning Joe show, protested in response to the revelations of the Senate report: “I don’t care what we did.” Yet, as Elias Isquith, a writer for Salon.com, contends, “Grotesque as that was, though, the really scary part was [Wallace’s implication that] waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and sexual assault is part of what makes America ‘great.’”33 Wallace’s comments are more than morally repugnant; they embody the stance of so many other war criminals who either have been indifferent to the massive suffering and deaths they caused or actually took pride in their actions. They are the bureaucrats whose thoughtlessness and moral depravity Hannah Arendt identified as the rear guard of totalitarianism.
Illegal legalities, moral depravity, and mad violence are presented to the public wrapped in a whitewashed logic of such subterfuge that it rivals Orwellian doublethink. The rhetorical gymnastics used by the torture squad are designed to make the American public believe that if you refer to torture by some seemingly innocuous name, then the pain and suffering it causes will suddenly disappear.34 The latter represents not just the discourse of magical thinking, but a refusal to recognize that “if cruelty is the worst thing that humans do to each other, torture [is] the most extreme expression of human cruelty.”35 These apostles of torture are politicians who thrive in some sick zone of political and social abandonment, and who unapologetically further acts of barbarism, fear, willful lies, and moral depravity. They are the new totalitarians who hate democracy, embrace a punishing state, and believe that politics is primarily an extension of war. They are the thoughtless gangsters reminiscent of the monsters who made fascism possible at another time in history. For them, torture is an instrument of fear; one sordid strategy and element in a global war that attempts to expand U.S. power and put into play a vast legal and repressive apparatus that expands the field of violence and the technologies, knowledge, and institutions central to fighting what they wish to be an all-encompassing war on terror. Americans now live under a government in which the doctrine of permanent warfare is legitimated through a state of emergency deeply rooted in a mass psychology of violence and culture of cruelty that are essential to transforming a government of laws into a regime of lawlessness.
Once the authoritarian side of political governance takes hold, it is hard to eradicate. Power is addictive, especially when it is reckless, and offers personal rewards for those politicians who follow the corporate script and stand to benefit from human misery. Witness the number of Republicans who still defend the practice of torture and deny the legitimacy of the Senate report. Ignoring that torture is an exercise of power based on willed amorality, they duplicitously attack the Senate report not for its content, but because they believe its release will anger the alleged enemies of the United States—as if that hasn’t already been done by demonizing their religion, encircling them with nuclear weapons, bombing them alongside civilians in indiscriminate drone attacks, torturing them, and otherwise threatening or killing them through a range of savage military practices and diplomatic acts. Or they argue, somewhat more ingenuously, that the Senate report will embarrass the Bush-Cheney administration. As is well-known, the Obama administration has done nothing to address or bring to justice those indicted by the report.
Civility has not been the strong point of a Republican Party that is overtly racist, hates immigrants, shuts down the government, and twists logic in order to claim itself to be a victim of hate, all the while catering to every whim of the financial elite. Through such talking heads as Nicolle Wallace, the United States doesn’t just alienate its enemies, it actively creates them by spreading hatred and lies. Principles are not being defended in these arguments—only the kind of raw, naked power that has come to mark authoritarian regimes. It gets worse. The defenders of the globalized torture state are neither deranged nor even confused; on the contrary, they are decisive and deliberate in their allegiance to capital and the corporate machinery of social, cultural, and political violence that will provide them with lucrative jobs once they finish the bidding of defense contractors and other proponents of the finance and warfare state.
To his credit, Republican Senator John McCain, himself a victim of torture during the Vietnam War, broke with the moral dinosaurs in his party and defended the release of the Senate report, insisting that the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush-Cheney years “stained our national honor, did much harm, and little practical good.” Most of his colleagues disagree and are now arguing that in spite of the evidence, torture produced actionable intelligence and helped to save lives, a claim the Senate report strongly negates. Once again, pragmatism trumps the levers of justice, and the principles of human rights as moral considerations give way to a kind of ghastly death-embracing dance with a debased instrumental rationality.
Not only has the United States lost its moral compass, it has degenerated into a state of political darkness reminiscent of dictatorships that maimed human bodies and inflicted unspeakable acts of violence on the innocent while embracing a mad utilitarianism in order to remove themselves from any sense of justice, compassion, and reason. This is the formative culture not simply of a society that is dehumanizing and ethically lost, but one that produces a society in alignment with the savage ethos and beliefs of an updated totalitarianism. The Senate report has brought one of the darkest sides of humanity to light, and it has sparked a predictable outrage and weak public condemnation. But, thus far, little has been said about either the conditions that made this journey to the dark side possible, or what moral, political, and educational absences had to occur in the collective psyche of both the American public and the U.S. government that not only allowed torture to happen but actually sanctioned its use? What made it so easy for the barbarians not only to implement acts of torture but to openly defend such practices as a legitimate government policy?
With the release of the Senate report, the supine American press finally has to acknowledge that the United States had joined with other totalitarian countries of the past in committing atrocities completely alien to any functioning democracy. America is no longer even a weak democracy. The lie is now more visible than ever. Nonetheless, the usual crowd of politicians, pundits, and mainstream media not only has little to say about the history of torture committed by the United States at home and abroad, but also about its own silence when it comes face to face with this dark side of American history. The possibility of a politically and morally charged critique has turned into a cowardly and evasive debate around questions such as: Does torture prevent terrorist acts from taking place? Is waterboarding really an act of torture? Is torture justified in the face of extremist attacks on the United States? Is the CIA being scapegoated for actions promoted by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration? And so it goes. These are the wrong questions and reveal the toxic complicity the mainstream press has had all along with these anti-democratic practices. War crimes should not be debated; they should be condemned without qualification.
In an incredible act of bad faith, those responsible for state-sanctioned acts of torture are now interviewed by the mainstream media and presented, if not outright described, as reasonable men with honorable intentions. Rather than being condemned as agents of a totalitarian state and as war criminals who should be prosecuted, those who gave the orders to torture as well as those who carried out such inhuman practices are treated as one side of a debate team, anxious to get the real story out in order to provide the other side of the narrative. The appeal to balance offered by the mainstream media and others is more than a self-glorifying ritual that takes flight from naming the violence and barbarism imposed by states that practice torture; it also hides the voices, thus further dehumanizing those who are the victims of torture. If torture kidnaps, hides, and maims the bodies of those it savagely violates, the apologists for torture willfully erase the voices and humanity of those victims who have been dehumanized. As Glenn Greenwald makes clear:
Ever since the torture report was released last week, U.S. television outlets have endlessly featured American torturers and torture proponents. But there was one group that was almost never heard from: the victims of their torture, not even the ones recognized by the U.S. Government itself as innocent, not even the family members of the ones they tortured to death. They don’t show all sides. They systematically and quite deliberately exclude the victims of the very policies of the U.S. Government they pretend to cover. And they do that because including those victims would be too informative. . . . At the very least, it would make it impossible for many people to deny to themselves the utter savagery and sadism carried out in their names. Keeping those victims silenced and invisible is the biggest favor the U.S. television media could do for the government over which they claim to act as watchdogs. So that’s what they do: dutifully, eagerly and with very rare exception.36
There is more than a hint of moral depravity here; there is also what I have called elsewhere the violence of organized forgetting.37 Discussions of torture should never involve a cowardly appeal to balance. The only reasonable approach any democracy can take toward torture is both to condemn it and to prosecute those responsible for it as well as those who practice it. In this case, that would include the highest elected officials such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, members of the CIA, the subcontractors who tortured, and all those who engaged in despicable acts designed to create physical torment and mental anguish for other human beings—whether this involved hanging people upside down, raping them rectally, subjecting them to freezing temperatures while chained to a floor, or any number of horrific treatments—all the while looking askance, even when torture ended in murder.
For a society to regard torture as a reasonable practice worthy of informed debate reveals a death-dealing virus deeply embedded in the American social and political psyche, partly produced by those commanding cultural apparatuses that believe the only value that matters is rooted in acts of commerce and the accumulation of capital at any cost—and that willingly glean massive profits from the carcinogenic culture of the mainstream media that sell pervasive spectacles of violence and the unchecked militarism of American society as entertainment. Ideas matter, education matters, morality matters, and justice matters in a democracy. People who hold power in America should be held accountable for what actions they take and what actions they permit, especially when they violate any and every standard of human rights and decency.
Maybe it is time to treat the Senate Report on Torture as just one register of a series of crimes being committed under the regime of a savage neoliberalism. After all, an economic policy that views ethics as a liability, disdains the public good, and enshrines self-interest as the highest of virtues provides a petri dish not just for testing a range of state-sanctioned torture methods abroad, but also for the growth of lawless and cruel policies at home. Maybe it’s time to connect the dots between the government’s use of waterboarding and a history that includes the killing of Black Panther Fred Hampton by the Chicago police, the illegal existence of COINTELPRO, the savage brutality of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam,38 the rise of the post-Orwellian surveillance state, the militarization of the local police, the transformation of underserved American cities into war zones, the creation of Obama’s kill list, the use of drones that indiscriminately execute people, and the latest killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and others at the hands of a militarized police force that now acts with impunity.39 And most of all, the savage system of organized torture that made the nation’s economic dominance possible in the first place—slavery.
Is it not reasonable to argue that the lawlessness that creates the torture state and provides immunity for killer cops also provides protection for those in the government and the CIA who extended the tentacles of the globalized torture state? Is it too far-fetched to argue that Eric Garner’s utterance “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” is a reminder of the many foreign nationals under the control of the torture state who might have uttered the same words as they were being tortured? Connect these dots and there is more at play here than retreat into a facile high moralism that condemns torture as a “stain on our values.” Instead, what becomes evident is that the United States engaging in torture has become symptomatic of something much larger than an errant plunge into immorality and lawlessness. What begins to be revealed is a more systemic entrenchment in what Robert Jay Lifton has described as “a death-saturated age”40 in which matters of violence, survival, and trauma inescapably bear down on daily experience while pushing the United States into the dark recesses of a new authoritarianism. The mad and naked horror of torture has now become standardized, a kind of mad common sense, rather than thought to be unimaginable, just as radical evil fails to provoke moral outrage and degenerates into the fog of everyday banality. The Senate report reveals only one moment in an endless upsurge of lawlessness that has come to characterize the United States’ long, slow plunge into totalitarianism. How else to explain a paper written and published by a West Point professor, William Bradford, who argues that lawful targets in the war on terror should include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews. . . . Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are—at least in theory—targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ non-prohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.”41 The killing of dissidents is what the war on terror morphs into when its most vile impulses are presented as reasonable policy measures. Americans now inhabit a society in which the delete button holds sway and the ethical imagination withers. And what is being erased is not only any vestige of a sense of commitment, but also public and historical memory and the foundations of any viable notion of justice, equality, and accountability. That is a story that also needs to be told.
This book is about another kind of torture, one that is more capacious and seemingly more abstract but just as deadly in its destruction of human life, justice, and democracy. This is a mode of torture that resembles the “mind virus” mentioned in the Senate report, one that induces fear, paralysis, and produces the toxic formative culture that characterizes the reign of neoliberalism. Isolation, privatization, and the cold logic of instrumental rationality have created a new kind of social formation and social order in which it becomes difficult to form communal bonds, deep connections, a sense of intimacy, and long-term commitments. Neoliberalism has created a society of monsters for whom pain and suffering are viewed as entertainment or deserving of scorn; warfare is a permanent state of existence; torture becomes a matter of expediency; and militarism is celebrated as the most powerful mediator of human relationships.
Under the reign of neoliberalism, politics has taken an exit from ethics, and thus interventions in the world are now divorced from any consideration of their social costs. This is the ideological metrics of political zombies. The key word here is atomization, and it is the curse of both neoliberal societies and democracy itself. A radical democracy demands a notion of educated hope capable of energizing a generation of young people and others who connect the torture state to the violence and criminality of an economic system that celebrates its own depravities. It demands a social movement unwilling to accept temporary technological fixes or cheap reforms. It demands a new politics for which the word revolution means going to the root of the problem and addressing it nonviolently, with dignity, civic courage, and the refusal to accept a future that will only mimic the present. The return of torture should provoke discussion and thought beyond matters of state policy and spectacles of violence: it should bring to mind the moral paralysis and deadening legacy of a dark period in American history; it should serve as a point of identification for all victims of neoliberal tyranny and the extreme terror it perpetrates across the globe; and it should be utterly condemned as a war crime and challenged in all of its dreadful registers.