Psyche, Science, and Society

Guantanamo detention as slavery

April 27th, 2007

David Bromwich on Huffington Post understands what Guantanamo is all about, the assertion of absolute power [Slavery in Guantanamo]:

Torture and slavery have something in common. They are expressions of a power that admits no restraint on itself. They issue from the instinct for domination, hardened by a savage self-protectiveness. Yet a slave might always assert his freedom by choosing to die. This last resort has been denied to the Guantanamo prisoners. If they refuse to eat, they are force-fed intravenously. We keep them alive, and starve them of justice, and kill them by inches. Is this done to prevent their becoming martyrs? But they are already martyrs from the terms of their imprisonment. The force-feeding is really the last refinement of state coercion and cruelty.

The problem of Guantanamo is a problem for American society at large. How many fine careers, in how many professions, have been advanced by warm compliance with the new license regarding torture? Think of the authors of the “torture memos,” John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and others. Think of John Roberts, whose opinion against the prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, when Roberts sat on the D.C. circuit court of appeals, came seasonably less than a week before his nomination to the supreme court. Or think of the stars and writers of the series 24, which insinuates at once the glamour and the dark necessity of torture.

“Our children,” someone said, “are less likely to be hurt by repeal of habeas corpus than they are by a terrorist bomb.” This was a muttered comment (nothing more) by a liberal and an opponent of the Iraq war. Yet it revealed a psychological process — the rationalization by which we barter liberty in order to maintain a vague conceit of security. Better to keep up the arbitrary imprisonment of a few hundred persons, who neither look nor think like us, than to diminish the muffled impression of safety. The train of thought is a sedative; it adds to the gentle suffocation of American freedom under the consensus of fear; but there is anyway this much justice in the tangle of self-deception and cynicism that holds us captive: we cannot possibly break free of it without also freeing others.

There is yet another aspect of Guantanamo. It is a laboratory for the destruction of the human soul, a place where techniques for humanicide can be investigated and refined. Psychology is a critical component of this experimental facility. No wonder the American Psychological Association is so determined to protect the participation of psychologists in this inhuman laboratory. After all, if certain elements of our society have their way, torturer (aka “interrogator” or “grand inquisitor”) may be one of the few growth professions should Americans rebel against the loss of other jobs and the decline of the “American way of life.”

Entry Filed under: APA, Culture, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Law, Psychology, Rights and Liberties, Torture, War Crimes