Understanding Torture: Law, Violence, and Political Identity

Chapter Six. U.S. Torture at Home and Abroad

chapter six  U.S. Torture at Home and Abroad This chapter surveys instances in which of‹cials in the United States have engaged in torture or similar conduct. In each instance, allegations of misconduct have been publicized widely and substantiated to some degree. Yet each time, the allegations have also been denied, minimized, or explained away. Torture and other mistreatment in the Philippines and Vietnam have been characterized as anomalous responses to worse atrocities committed against U.S. forces. After World War II, of‹cials created special categories to describe prisoners who were held outside the protections of the laws of war, and they developed new techniques of coercion. In Vietnam and Latin America, abuses were easily portrayed as the excesses of local of‹cials over whom U.S. forces lacked control—and so, again, as anomalous or simply unrelated to U.S. law and practice. With police and prison practices, abuse is often explained as a reasonable or understandable —even if unfortunate and sometimes illegal—response to the pressures of controlling violent people. Finally, immigration is often insulated within the sovereign power to control borders and, by extension, the bodies of people moving across them. In describing these events, my goal is to reveal the ways in which the use of torture and other violence provides precedents for and pre‹gures the debate over the use of torture in the war on terror. Further, my juxtaposition of imperial and domestic violence should underscore the ambiguities of state violence, the way in which torture sits on a continuum with other forms of state violence, and the links between detention and violence. Most important, I hope to display some of the commonalities between police and military violence against populations inside or outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. In each case, for example, authorities de‹ne the victims of torture as in some way deviant, inferior, violent, or undesirable . The same is true for the war on terror, whether the United States acts inside or outside its formal borders. 135 Torture and Foreign Policy  This section provides a brief overview of ways U.S. of‹cials have used torture as a tool of conquest or foreign policy, beginning with the PhilippineAmerican War. My choice of these episodes re›ects my desire to focus on the period of time in which the United States has been an imperial power, and the Philippines provide a good starting point. Of course—to take two examples—the treatment of Native Americans and African Americans throughout U.S. history could provide additional episodes of state violence deployed to create and sustain a national identity. Torture, corporal punishment , population control or concentration, mass or reprisal killing, and summary execution come up again and again in accounts of slavery and the displacement of Native Americans, and they return in the examples I discuss here. The treatment of Native Americans in particular—linked as it is to decades of military con›ict—may even have provided a template for the operations of U.S. forces in other countries, especially when counterinsurgency tactics became the chosen means of engagement.1 The Philippines Beginning in 1896, Filipino revolutionaries sought independence from Spain, and they proclaimed a republic in 1899. At the same time, however, Spain was losing the Spanish-American War, and it ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898. Hostilities between U.S. and Filipino forces broke out in 1899, and the McKinley administration moved quickly to assert control over its new colony. By the end of 1902, the Philippine-American War was largely over. Before hostilities broke out, U.S. of‹cials and newspapers sometimes portrayed Filipino forces in positive terms, at least by comparison to the Spanish forces who were the common enemy. During that period, Filipino leaders worked to establish a government that could claim sovereignty over the country, and some U.S. of‹cials concluded that the people of the Philippines were“capable of self government.”2 Those conclusions changed as the United States sought to assert sovereignty over the islands. Of‹cials and journalists began to portray Filipinos as uncivilized and “absolutely un‹t for self-government.”3 They also depicted Filipino forces as brutal, with the result that the Philippines became de‹ned as a torture nation peopled by “bandits” who employed guerilla tactics and attacked unoffending victims (usually U.S. soldiers).4 Soldiers on the ground tended to agree with this characterization of their enemy: at best, the natives were...