Washblog

In the fall of 1984, I was touring Spain and Morocco, trading off traveling companions as I went. By the time I reached the Atlas mountains, I was keeping company with an unsavory Australian named Leslie and his teenage Moroccan "guide" Sameer. As I learned over time, Sameer was doing more than just "guiding" Leslie, and when the two had a falling out and Sameer took off with a hundred dollar bill of Leslie's, he heartlessly reported him to the local police. In no time they arrested Sameer on a road outside of town, and Leslie and I were detained for the better part of a day while they questioned him. I say questioned with a certain irony because what they did to him had little to do with questions and answers. If the policemen had actually been interested in Sameer's other crimes, they wouldn't have rendered him inarticulate with pain. The beatings were not about information; they were about power.

One of the stranger things about reading the journal was realizing that, for part of the time, they'd beaten him in front of us. I remembered how they'd beaten him intermittently for hours in a locked room, but I completely forgot that, when we first arrived, they'd hit him, kneed him in the ass, kicked him, and made him sit on the floor in the corner. Then they beat him all over again with a hard, black pole. All these years I'd assumed they'd beaten him with that pole in the locked room, out of sight. What I'd forgotten was that I'd seen it myself.

I'd also forgotten how the policemen had yelled at Leslie for trusting Sameer in the first place and had yelled at me for not taking off after Sameer when he'd disappeared. I'd remembered how, at one point, they'd forced Sameer to read passages from his diary, but I'd forgotten that they'd made him read it in front of us. I'd remembered how frightened I'd been that Sameer's diary would implicate us in some way, but I'd forgotten that the diary recorded merely the barest facts of his journey.

I'm leaving out much of the context and many of the details concerning that horrid day. I find it bitterly painful to read my recollections of sharing simple meals with Sameer, swimming with him in Agadir, teasing him. And I'm horrified by the anger I felt toward him after we were released--as if Sameer had been responsible for putting me through having watched him get pummeled so badly that all he could do was sob "Leslie, Leslie" over and over.

The journal entry is dated November 6, 1984. Almost twenty years later, I found myself discussing the now infamous Alberto Gonzales torture memo with a group of seniors at the Northwest School. I'd taken over the contemporary issues course from a teacher who was out with surgery, and the continuing revelations about the Bush administration's torture policies were still very much in the news. My students and I closely read Gonzales' memo of January 25, 2002, in which he refers to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete." I was particularly interested in a passage in which our future Attorney General said, "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians." [my emphasis] I asked my students what they thought Gonzales had in mind when he wrote about obtaining information quickly. To a person they surmised he meant torture.

The students and I didn't get into what methods the Bush administration was considering in 2002, nor whether such methods really had anything to do with extracting useful information. I've read Jean Améry's account of having been tortured by the Nazis and Henri Alleg's account of having been tortured by the French, and I note that neither of them offered anything in the way of information to their tormentors. Perhaps Jean Améry would have had he been able to speak or remain conscious after they'd dislocated his shoulders. But as Elaine Scarry demonstrates in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, torturers make a mockery of questions and answers because torture isn't about revealing secrets. It's about the delusional attempt to legitimize illegitimate power. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, the Bush administration wants to torture not because it will yield vital information for the so-called "War on Terror," but because it wants to demonstrate that it can.

We Americans, in effect, became witnesses to torture when the news media began showing us those photographs of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A natural response, over time, would be for us to lapse into silence--as if that silence could absolve us of guilt and wash the memory clean. But part of what we'll become, as a nation, will derive from how we react to what we've seen. The Bush administration still brazenly justifies its international archipelago of secret prisons, and fresh accounts of abuse still reach us from the torture chambers of Guantanamo. Whether we choose to remember this history or not, we'll be a people who lived under a rank despot, and what, in the end, we've done with that sad fact will affect us for generations.

I realize there are Democrats who, after recent election victories, would have us move on to the issues of the middle class. I, too, feel the disgrace of our health care and public education systems. At the same time, I can't let go of the thought that, even as I write this and even as you read it, there may be some human being locked away in a secret prison who's getting "water-boarded" at the behest of the leader of the free world. History is merciless in its judgment, and our distant descendents will look back on us with cold clarity. They will see in us what we are loathe to see in ourselves: that we are suffering what we have allowed ourselves to become. I know--the hard way--that the only way to relieve ourselves of what we have witnessed is to speak of it, and speak of it again.

Crossposted at Dkos, Never in Our Names, and The English Teacher.