Noam Chomsky: Torture memos and historical amnesia
The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so. For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law - a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites", or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.
Creating terrorists
There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane delivering aid to US-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the US, as they did. Instead, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small matter for a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the global superpower.
By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then US ambassador in Honduras (later appointed as the first Director of National Intelligence, essentially counter-terrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur), they should have done the same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what their victims should have done to former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further "ticking bomb" attacks.
***
Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.
Creating terrorists
There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane delivering aid to US-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the US, as they did. Instead, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small matter for a tiny, impoverished country under terrorist attack by the global superpower.
By the same standards, if the Nicaraguans had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then US ambassador in Honduras (later appointed as the first Director of National Intelligence, essentially counter-terrorism czar, without eliciting a murmur), they should have done the same. Cuba would have been justified in acting similarly, had the Castro government been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what their victims should have done to former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda in the dust, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further "ticking bomb" attacks.
***
Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.
posted by temporal at 5/20/2009
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