Eminent Monsters

Last night I attended a screening of the documentary Eminent Monsters: A Manual for Modern Torture. This is a horrifying account of how various western psychologists devised the “mind-control” techniques of MKUltra, and how those techniques were then deployed against the “Hooded Men” in the UK, and revived yet again in America’s torture of prisoners at Guantanamo.

I’ve been writing about torture for 16 years. My initial attempt to grapple with the issue was, I realize now, emotional and ignorant. What I’ve learned since then is that the impulse to torture is a product of emotional urges: the rush of utter dominance over another human being; the satisfaction of instilling fear into a population; the comfort of a talisman. It’s also an outstanding way to produce false confessions. And because we humans are so superbly designed to provide intellectual rationalizations for actions that are in fact driven by emotion, we invent fantasy scenarios like “ticking time bombs” to explain actions we could never honestly justify.

Consider these quotes:

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality.

  —Reinhold Neibuhr

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence—and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.

  —Gloria Steinem

What makes torture eternally tempting isn’t that it “works.” It’s that humans are drawn to it for emotional reasons, and are extraordinarily adept at rationalizing.

(For more, consider the long and horrifying history of unwitting human experimentation in America. This isn’t a topic on any school curriculum I’m aware of. Which in one sense is unsurprising, because what society wants to look in the mirror and see something so hideous staring back? But which in another sense is both tragic and dangerous, because to pretend that atrocities are a product of culture and not of human nature—that is, to pretend that we good people could of course could never do such things—is the best way to guarantee their return.)

Which is why President Reagan’s signing of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment—and the Senate’s ratification, which by Article VI of the Constitution made the UNCAT the law of the land in America—was such a remarkable achievement. The treaty is a triumph of logic and morality over powerful and ever-present base emotional impulses. It’s also why the bipartisan conversion of torture from a crime to be prosecuted to a policy choice to be argued about is such a setback.

In the face of that setback, I fear our last line of defense against a torture recrudescence is to try to raise consciousness by telling the truth about torture. Eminent Monsters is a worthy contribution in that fight.