Torture and Terror

There was a time when Americans worried—and protested—what was known as the “Imperial Presidency.” Those were the bad old days of the Vietnam War. The specter seemed to have lifted with the end of the Southeast Asian conflict and the waning of the Cold War, but to hear these authors tell their stories, the excesses they describe amount to imperial behavior—and are not bounded by the Cold War or even the “war on terror” which began with the attacks of September 11, 2001. By these lights, imperial presidents never gave up the ghost, and 9/11 has led to a further acceleration of questionable activities and accretion of power within the U.S. executive branch. For the sake of the Republic, these disturbing trends need to be examined.

Let’s start with chapter before verse. Alfred W. McCoy (author of Policing America’s Empire, 2009) here offers an overview of torture and its effects, and he also studies the evolution of the techniques of torture in U.S. practice. On the first point, the analysis goes beyond the observation that torture dehumanizes the individual to observe that both victim and torturer are impacted: the victim by personality suppression, the oppressor by a sense of empowerment. McCoy uses his extensive research in the Philippines to bring the argument full circle, maintaining that empowered torturers impact the state by bringing pressure on it—up to and including coups d’etat—to ensure they have impunity for their deeds. Perpetrators initially insist that torture is merely the resort of a few bad apples, next they invoke national security as justification, and finally they appeal for national unity as a reason to ignore misdeeds. If these arguments fail, extra-legal methods follow.

The Philippine case is a stark one, in which a certain cohort of officers conducted a series of coups between 1986 and 1989, and one member of the group, an architect of the torture program, ended up as a powerful figure in the Philippine Senate. The author makes lesser references to torturers’ impact on the state in Latin America (primarily Argentina) and Africa. He could have done more with Algeria, where French officers who tortured indeed participated in a coup against the French state and some then joined in a secret army organization that fought their own government for the purpose of extending the counterinsurgency war. The Algerian case also has something to say about impunity, the other end of McCoy’s arc of evolution. In France, the sense of responsibility and guilt for torture preoccupied the society. Preemptive pardons from the National Assembly and even the French presidency did not make the issue go away. As recently as the last decade, fifty years after their misdeeds in Algeria, torturers were still being hauled before the court of public opinion, if not criminally charged. The rise of Human Rights as a formal international norm poses a major obstacle to the “torture system,” if it can be called that. McCoy argues that Human Rights has retarded impunity but feels it has a limited scope and reach. This, however, represents a moving target. The growing list of national and international criminal prosecutions of former torturers—from Argentina, Chile, Peru, El Salvador, Rwanda, and elsewhere—suggests that the power of Human Rights’ norms is increasing. The torturers are still ahead but, as the Algerian case illustrates, society has reached the point where torturers cannot expect perpetual immunity.

The book outlines the development by the United States of a practice of psychological torture, which McCoy postulates as the most significant advance in these infernal techniques in centuries. Initiated by the Central Intelligence Agency, abetted by real scientific research, codified in a CIA manual, and further evolved since, this history is among the most interesting aspects of Torture and...