Goya asks why Torture? We have to ask the same question today…
Going to see the Goya exhibit at the MFA yesterday was a humbling experience, exploding any lingering conceit I might have about human progress. I was hammered by Goya’s images from the dark side, his reaction to terrible acts of war. In particular I was struck by the 1810 etching (shown above) of torture, the one Goya entitled “Why.”
The etching shook me to my soul; it was traumatic. It hit home with me, resonating with a statement by psychoanalyst, Robert Stolorow:“Trauma destroys time.”1 As a baby boomer, I know a little about that.
The extended reverie of my childhood years, growing up as a teenager in an affluent and — what I believed was — just society where people were innocent until proven guilty, was exploded by my tour in Vietnam where, during the years of our involvement, over one million civilians were butchered in My Lai massacres, burned alive in napalm, vaporized by B-52 carpet bombing, or flattened in free fire zones like popup figures shot in an arcade.
Standing with Goya, shellshocked, together we can only stammer Why? Since then, we had to endure more obscene excesses during our “wars of choice” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again we have to question why. This time there is still a slim hope for at least some small redress.
The question before us now is why our government failed to bring to justice a single person for torturing terrorism suspects. Remember, this was no rogue operation but an official government program conceived and carried out after the attacks on 911 and approved by the highest leadership in Washington.
The recently released 524-page Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any last doubts about the unspeakableness and criminal nature of what was done:
In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding”, sleep deprivation lasting almost a week and threats to the families of the detainees, they summarize what we already knew: scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten.2
As Goya asked then, so I ask now: Why? Nothing useful was gained.
As The Guardian recently pointed out: “The Senate report squarely rebuts CIA claims that the use of such methods generated intelligence that prevented further terrorist attacks and therefore saved lives…investigators had not found a single case where that was true. Detainees who underwent torture either disclosed nothing, or supplied fabricated information, or revealed information that had been already been discovered through traditional, non-violent interrogation techniques.3”
Shamefully, a large number to those tortured were innocent, only guilty of being in the wrong place and the wrong time. In addition, US military authorities in Iraq deliberately imprisoned innocent female relatives of insurgency suspects as part of an effort to coerce the wanted men to turn themselves in.4
Where is our shame?
Even Vice President Dick Cheney recently admitted for the first time that some of the men and boys detained as terrorism suspects were in fact innocent. Nevertheless, Cheney expresses no remorse as shown in the following exchange with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press:
“When Todd pointed out that ’25 percent of the detainees turned out to be innocent’ and asked if he was ‘okay with that margin of error,’Cheney shot back that he has “no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”5
But what was Cheney’s objective? The Senate report has documented, once again, torture doesn’t work: it does not extract reliable or useful information.
Again with Goya we incredulously ask why?
Pope Francis recently pointed us toward the right answer when he announced his 15-point catalog of spiritual diseases: One of the diseases is “Existential Schizophrenia: the sickness of those who live a double life; it is the fruit of the hypocrisy typical of the mediocre and a symptom of progressive spiritual emptiness.”6
To my ears, that it sounds like an apt description of Dick Cheney,Washington DC, and the spell that greed and materialism has cast over America’s soul.
XXX
Footnotes:
1 Stolorow, Robert D. Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections: 23 (p. 17). Kindle Edition.
Originally published at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com on December 24, 2014.
