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Topic 2 - Torture and state terror – Readings Green and Ward – State Crime - Chapter 8 Torture is more prevalent under authoritarian regimes e.g. Saudi, Iraq and China but the US, UK have also been identified as torturing nations. The majority of torture victims are criminal suspects from the poorest and most marginalised sections of society and the majority of torturers are police officers. Despite its illegality and clear condemnation in international and national law, criminology has largely ignored the crime of torture. Torture is a behaviour that is perceived as deviant by the international community and by certain domestic audiences. Defining torture Definition is adopted from the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Stover and Nightingale – the purpose of torture is to break the will of the victim and ultimately destroy his or her humanity. It is a process between torturer and prisoner and torturing regime and its internal enemies. The victim is denied the possibility of agency at the hands of the torturer. Three main points of contention arising out of attempts to define torture: (i) the degree which all forms of state-inflicted pain might to some extent satisfy the definition of torture (capital punishment), (ii) problems with limiting the torturer’s identity to that of a public official when militias and paramilitary forces have been proved perpetrators of torture, and (iii) the extent to which acts of terror initiated against women and children in the domestic sphere should be understood as torture. A definition of torture cannot usefully encompass all forms of human pain and suffering inflicted by the state. The UN Convention has come under criticism for failing to acknowledge torture that is inflicted by non-state entities such as paramilitary organisations, terrorist groups and militias. Many non-state entities have fundamental links to repressive states (e.g. the Taliban) and can be understood as extra-state functionaries. If the state perpetrates or tacitly condones the terror, there can be no escape. The most common form of torture is beating. The re-emergence of modern torture Edward Peters - The re-emergence of torture is linked to the development of political police in the 20th^ century e.g. the rise of fascism in Europe. Kirchheimer writing about Nazi Germany stated that the powerful made the law and legal practice an instrument of ruthless domination and oppression in the interest of those who control the main economic and political levers of social power. Colonialism also contributed to the re-appearance of torture because colonial administrators and police learned
such practices from the populations they governed and the circumstance within which they governed led to the abuse of authority that included torture. Torture is most likely to occur when there are: economic crises, political violence, significant cultural change, societal chaos and social disorganisation and the imposition of authoritarian rule. Explaining torture States torture because it is an effective means to extract confessions as well as to silence the opposition. Arendt argues that torture in modern society arises when public democratic life is overwhelmed by the force of bureaucratic structures which are in conflict with the forces of democracy. In these situations, people’s behaviour is no longer determined by the rule of law but by the rules and restrictions imposed by the needs of the bureaucracy. A major critique of this analysis is that is posits a misleading relationship between public and administrative life. Rejali identifies three different kinds of instrumentalist rationality (ways of treating people as objects): treating people as a means to an end e.g. torturing people for information, torturing as part of a policy of deterrence, and interacting with people as opponents to be strategically defeated. Torture is used to get the enemy to talk, therefore it can be argued that it is justifiable in order to protect the lives and integrity of legitimate citizens. Elaine Scarry argues that the physical and mental pain inflicted by torture are inseparable and work to cause the disintegration of the victim’s world. Torture however is the imposition of silence through violence. Douglas Johnson develops this further arguing that torture is also about the elimination of oppositional leadership e.g. the FLN in Algeria or the ANC during the Apartheid regime. Torture deprives a community of its leaders as well as spreading fear and political paralysis. Chomsky – torture needs to be understood as part of a process of control through terror. Only states have the physical resources and the monopoly of violence required for systematic terror of this kind. Torturers must have a particular discipline to keep their captives in pain and useful for political purposes. However, torture complexes encourage indiscipline and this creates a problem for states that torture. Guards and other bureaucrats stop doing their jobs in order to exploit opportunities for making private profits and engaging in personal pleasures. Torture is globalized. The United States Army School of the Americas played a pivotal role in the training of Latin American torturers. Political economy and the role of US and EU foreign policy
Hypocrisy is a central feature of foreign policy and practice. The US and other western countries employ a double discourse around torture. These governments are also involved in the trade of instruments of torture and in the training expertise they offer authoritarian regimes. In Israeli torture camps, a US company supplied the handcuffs used in torture techniques and in Israel, leg-irons, shackles and handcuffs were supplied by well- known British and US companies. The legal responsibility of a country involved in the manufacture and/or export of torture devices and technologies ends at the border of the importing state and governments are able to alternate between facilitation of torture abroad and condemnation of governments on whose territory torture takes place. Torturing states and international law There are no exceptions from the protection from torture, it retains the highest the highest degree of protection afforded by international human rights and international humanitarian law. Despite the high moral commitments, they remain in practice politically bankrupt. Martha K Huggins - Torture 101: Lessons from the Brazilian case Conditions that established foundation for systematic state-sanctioned torture Ten conditions that laid a foundation for systemic state-sanctioned torture by the US: -‘torture’ is mislabelled/avoided by perpetrators and responsible officials – investigations into Brazilian torture showed that the perpetrators did not use torture to characterise their behaviour. Violent interactions are not static, violence produces more and usually more serious forms of violence. -ideologies of ‘national security’ abound – where good nations are threatened by ‘evil-doers’ and anyone can be an enemy, there can be no restrictions on interrogation. Fear grants legitimacy to torture. -ad-hoc legalism – the Bush administration in 2002 declared that Guantanamo detainees were not covered by the US constitution or by international law and so have no protection against torture. The US claims to accept the Geneva accord and the UN convention except when it does not. This flexible standard makes prisoners vulnerable to torture, especially when the definition of torture shifts according to national, international and local political pressures. A torture-enabling culture is created and legitimized when lawyers advising the Executive explain how to skirt international and national laws against torture. -torture is systemic, not the work of a few bad apples – such violence is persistent and widespread, supported by legal and ideological frameworks, incorporated into an official agency with its multiple and intersecting divisions of labour, nurtured and protected by secrecy and enabled by an absence of any official action against it. Torturers function under an explicit chain of command. Their actions are encouraged by reward for coercing prisoner testimony. -multiple actors – systemic torture is fostered and perpetuated by actors and organisations inside and outside the local torture environment. The Abu Ghraib
torturers could not have done so without a range of facilitators who provided organisational, technical, legal and financial support for the violence e.g. nurses, doctors, translators, heads of state, ambassadors, lawyers, chiefs of departments etc. Facilitators may even be more essential to the long-term stability and protection of a torture system than its more visible direct perpetrators. -division of labour and diffusion of responsibility – an important difference between the police who became torturers and those who did not was membership in an elite and/or physically separate and insular police operations or intelligence unit. A person could not torture routinely unless associated with an interrogation squad. The ultimate responsibility for torture rests on the structure and functioning of such specialised units which is a product of those who knowingly create these unites and place certain kinds of people in them. The assembly-line structure of torture systems keeps torture perpetrators from having to recognise the meaning and consequences of their particular role in violence. Focussing on the bad applies ultimately protects the facilitators who can then devise new ways of getting around national and international laws against torture. -competition rages – as military and civilian intelligence agencies and their agents vie for the best information from/about terrorists, torture often results. What furthers an operative’s career is capturing the most important subversives or obtaining the highest quality information. Competition within US intelligence organisations is further exacerbated where interrogation is outsourced to private corporations. If interrogation produces abundant information (accurate or not) another government contract is likely to follow. The contract employee is relatively unconstrained in how he fulfils his contract, as long as the contractual needs are met. -evidence of torture is ignored, hidden, denied and lied about – many torture regimes use press censorship, eliminate congress and popular elections and shut down the judiciary to avoid public knowledge of government-sponsored torture. -insularity and secrecy hide torture – where actors are answerable only to each other and to the immediate superiors who directly and indirectly permit torture, taking picture is low-risk. Darkness and masks or hoods dehumanize victims and provide anonymity to tortures which facilitates their carrying out torture. By making victims invisible, the torturer has transformed them into non-human material to be worked on. -impunity is widespread – torture becomes systemic when those involved are not punished. Conclusion Four factors distinguish the US from other terror systems: free media, congressional scrutiny, a relatively non-partisan judiciary, and national and international non- governmental legal and human rights organisations. Elaine Scarry (1985) The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power Torture is a process which not only converts but announces the conversion of every conceivable aspect of the event and the environment into an agent of pain. There are three sequential steps involved in torture: (i) pain is inflicted on a person in ever- intensifying ways, (ii) the pain continually amplified within the person’s body is also
A useful framework for analysing state crime is one based on three types of catalysts for action: motivation, opportunity structures and social control. Organisations tend to be dominated by instrumental rationality, adopting what they perceive as efficient means to achieve organisational goals. Motivation – States are more likely to use terror against internal challengers, the greater the threat the challengers pose, the more support the challengers have, if they use terror themselves and if they are socially marginal rather than having links to the elite. A strong commitment to ideological goals is another important motivational factor. Opportunity structures – these are defined by the relative availability and attractiveness of legitimate and illegitimate means for an institution to achieve its goals. Brockett – the use of repression by states is determined by the resources available for repression and the resources available to resolve conflict by other means. Gurr – weak states are relatively likely to resort to violent means of control. Weak states are those that have limited capacities to maintain order or respond to the demands of their citizens by legitimate means. When violent means have been used successfully on one occasion, they will tend to appear more attractive on future occasions. Regimes that have come to power through violence are likely to see violence as an appropriate means to retain power. Social control – the pervasive fear induced by state terror can itself be a very effective means of social control, including control over the agents of terror themselves. Forms of social control that may help restrain state terror include moral norms proscribing violence and cruelty, national and international law, domestic and transnational civil society and pressures from other states. But their effectiveness is diminished by forms of social stratification and ethnic division that impede the development of empathy between oppressors and their victims. Regimes of terror often operate in states where civil society is historically weak. Paradoxes of irrationality Some states however pursue goals that are unrealistic. Where terror is used to promote unrealistic goals, it may prevent officials form assessing prospects of success realistically or from reporting failures or the reasons for them. Where failures are acknowledged, they can only be blamed on sabotage, which must be countered by greater use of terror. Terror can also be seen as a response that is symbolically appropriate or achieves expressive purposes e.g. destruction of the Sikh Golden Temple in 1984 by Indian forces. Regimes may react rationally to their perceptions of threat, but those perceptions may be grossly distorted. Muir’s paradox of irrationality - it may be rational for an organisation to have some of its members hold and act upon irrational beliefs making terror all the more effective. Random violence of the state must therefore reflect a hidden rationality.
Paradox of paranoia – if regimes calculate the effects of their actions in cost-benefit terms, it may be organisationally rational to adopt a ‘paranoid’ overestimate of the threat their opponents pose. Costs include moral costs and the psychic distress experience by perpetrators. People who believe they are fighting for survival often feel free to disregard the conventions of war. Terror can be seen as an attempt to harness irrational and expressive behaviour in pursuit of rational ends, or to harness rational behaviour in pursuit of irrational ends. In Argentina, elements of the military manufactured enemy activity needed to justify repression. But terror and paranoia once unleashed are difficult to control, soldiers in Argentina’s dirty war killed each other in quarrels over loot and the deaths were attributed to guerrillas. The dynamics of clandestine terrorism Modern states cannot torture and murder openly, but their acts of torture and murder must be made known in order to be effective as terror. The most important method adopted to achieve this are disappearances and death squads. Disappearances – ‘enforced disappearance’ is applied to acts of arrest, detention or abduction that are followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or give information on the fate or whereabouts of the victim (ICC Statute, Art 7(2)(i)). The denial of disappearances is intended to deceive international audiences, but its effects on the local population is to enforce complicity or acquiescence. The torture and murder of the disappeared achieves its effect through the absence of direct public witness. Death squads – Campbell - clandestine and usually irregular organisations, often paramilitary in nature, which carry out extrajudicial execution and other violent acts against clearly defined individuals or groups of people. They generally operate with the support/acquiescence of the state or some section of the state. They tend to target specific individuals whose elimination is seen as desirable. Green and Ward – State Crime – Chapter 11 – The political economy of state crime States – institutions which exert a monopoly/near monopoly of coercive force and the extraction of revenue in some substantial tract of territory. There are three categories: -capitalist states – these can be subdivided into the advanced industrialised democracies and the developing or transitional states. -state-capitalist states – the state owns and controls the means of production -predatory states – the state elite rules essentially for its own benefit rather than for that of any class outside itself. The elite do not directly control the means of production but enrich themselves primarily by extortion. Some have the legal trappings of statehood but control only limited areas within their territory, others are not legally recognised as states but in fact control substantial territory. In transitional countries, transnational financial institutions and global powers play a greater role in the genesis of state crime.
Weak states faced with a desperate economic position abandon may of the conventional activities of government. The colonial legacy of these states plays a significant role in their criminal nature. The former colonies acquired their military and policing structures from the colonial powers and were able to maintain them through alliances. State crime and global political economy While there has been an unprecedented growth of global finance capital flows, the growing networks of trade have not been distributed evenly across the planet. Regionalisation and marginalisation have taken place. FDI has favoured those developing countries with relatively skilled and well-paid labour force. The war or terror became a strategic device through which the US is enforcing its hegemony through a series of military incursions in some of the world’s most unstable regions. The continued marginalisation of much of the developing world creates a crisis of political legitimacy and instability for struggling states. The informal elite networks of global governance (the WB, IMF, WTO, G7) play a central political role in linking the developed world with the underdeveloped albeit in a grossly uneven manner. World Bank loans have been accompanied by a set of political conditions relating to good governance and human rights and after 2001, by US-driven security agendas. The imposition of austerity packages underpinning these conditions and agendas directly violate human rights e.g. cuts to health and educational expenditures. As an inevitable consequence, they undermine state legitimacy and lead to increased authoritarianism and further violations of human rights. Hegemony – the dissemination and acceptance as an unchallengeable ‘common sense’ of a set of ideas that make the ruling institutions of global society appear to serve universal interests, when in fact they’re serving the interests of the economically powerful. Noam Chomsky – International Terrorism: image and reality The US and Israel saw Israel’s oppression of the Palestine as necessary to maintain order but saw any moves by Palestine’s against Israel as terrorism. The concepts of terrorism and retaliation are supple instruments, readily adapted to the needs of the moment. J Schirmer – The Guatemalan Military Project (1998) – Chapter 2 – Anatomy of counterinsurgency I After the 1982 coup, the Guatemalan army combined civil-military activity on the effort toward providing food and shelter to the survivors.
