As expected, at this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 “interrogation program” and Haspel’s own role in the program and its aftermath took center stage. Haspel sought to cast the program and its brutal techniques—many of which have since been outlawed—as an aberrant episode in the agency’s history, and vowed that under her leadership “C.I.A. will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.” Just as Haspel aimed to position that use of torture as an outlier in the history of the C.I.A., so too did the hearings propagate an understanding of the brutality of those years as a brief deviation from the long history of moral leadership demonstrated by the United States. Indeed, the majority of Americans would likely share such sentiment: we do not torture.
And yet.
In Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, forthcoming this fall, decorated American historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows that alongside the long American lineage of denouncing torture there’s an equally enduring culture of both embracing and excusing barbarism. Brundage revisits a series of moments and practices—from the initial contact of Europeans with North America, to the early American republic, to slavery, to the American imperial project, to local law enforcement’s embrace of “the third degree,” through the Cold War, and up to the present—to demonstrate that behavior considered to have been torturous in its own time has been far more prevalent in U.S. history than we acknowledge. By threading this past into a cohesive story of debate and dismissal, Brundage reveals the ways in which the mythos of American exceptionalism has underwritten the narrative so evident this week on Capitol Hill.
The passages below come from the introduction to Civilizing Torture.
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In April 1858 Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular American magazines of the day, published a gruesome article entitled “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” Accompanied by graphic illustrations, the article dwelled on the so-called “water cure,” a punishment during which an inmate was stripped and seated in a stall with his feet and arms fastened in stocks and his head extended up into a tank that fit snugly around his neck. The prisoner’s head was drenched with freezing cold water that cascaded down from a height of a foot or more for several minutes at a time. The tank that encircled the prisoner’s neck emptied slowly, inducing a sensation of drowning while the prisoner struggled to keep his mouth and nose above the pool of draining water.
Thirty years later an investigation of practices at Elmira Reformatory, the most acclaimed American penal institution of the day, revealed that staff there continued to douse prisoners with cold water, in addition to confining them in darkened cells for weeks on end, shackling and hoisting them until their toes barely touched the floor, and “paddling” them with specially made boards. In 1899 American soldiers occupying the Philippines after the Spanish-American War sent home letters boasting of their routine application of a variant of the “water cure” to coerce information from Filipino guerrillas. To apply the “cure,” soldiers pinned their victim to the ground by his legs and arms and partially raised his head “so as to make pouring in the water an easier matter.” If he refused to keep his mouth open, his tormentors pinched his nose closed and used a rifle barrel or bamboo stick to pry his jaws apart. Then they poured water into his overextended mouth until he looked like “a pregnant woman.” According to witnesses, a few applications of the “water cure” usually elicited a flood of information.
A century later, the outlines of the “enhanced interrogation” methods adopted by the Central Intelligence Agency and military interrogators during the “War on Terror” became public. Americans learned that between 2003 and 2006 at least eighty-nine Middle Eastern detainees in CIA custody had been slapped, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, stuffed into coffins, and threatened with violent death. The most severe method was “waterboarding,” a modern-day variant of the technique applied a century and a half earlier in American prisons. Waterboarding entailed pouring water over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized detainee, which produced an acute sensation of drowning. One detainee endured more than 180 waterboarding sessions.
Torture in the United States has been in plain sight, at least for those who have looked for it. To acknowledge this history of torture in the United States is not to suggest that it is equivalent to that of societies in which state-sponsored torture and terror has been endemic, such as Germany during the Nazi regime, Argentina during its “dirty war,” Guatemala during the late twentieth century, or Zimbabwe since its independence. Only some Americans have been vulnerable to being subjected to torture while most have been able to live in denial or ignorance of the practice of torture taking place in the nation.
The “American tradition” in this book’s subtitle is not a particular method of tormenting the body. It refers instead to the debates that Americans have waged regarding torture. Like a minuet in which the dancers change fashions over time yet the steps remain the same, these debates have unfolded in predictable fashion. When Americans have debated torture they invariably have invoked the nation’s utopian ambitions to serve as the exemplar of modern democratic civilization. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have boasted that the United States is a unique nation with uniquely humane laws and principles.
The roots of this certainty in American exceptionalism may be traced to the earliest days of the European conquest of North America. Champions of European ambitions there were insistent that they were transplanting the rule of law and civilization to a continent gripped by the savage and cruel violence of Indians. In order for civilization to survive and thrive in North America, savagery had to be eradicated. Thus, torture and violence of the New World became a mirror in which Europeans looked most often for confirmation of their righteousness and civility and less often for evidence of their regression. Europeans excused their complicity in the cycle of violence by insisting that their violence was retaliatory and necessary for the creation and preservation of civilization. In time, the generation of colonists who waged the American War of Independence and presided over the young republic would congratulate themselves for consigning torture and other relics of savagery to a past that no longer retained a hold over the new nation. Henceforth torture would be synonymous with tyrants and savages. Where torture persisted in the New World and beyond, it did so only because American institutions and civilization had yet to fulfill their destiny.
Undergirding this presumption of American exceptionalism is a widely held conviction that the nation’s founders bequeathed a constitution that codified the Enlightenment principle that rational laws, rather than superstition or tradition, would secure the greatest justice and best government. Enshrined in the nation’s constitution is a prohibition of torture and “cruel and unusual punishments.” Americans during the nineteenth century heaped scorn on autocratic regimes elsewhere in the world for their fealty to inhumane traditions, including torture. During the past century Americans found further confirmation of the singular virtues of their institutions and principles as Fascist and Communist regimes in Europe, Russia, and Asia employed torture as an essential tool of statecraft. Both defenders and opponents of torture have staked out their positions confident that they were citizens of a modern, civilized nation that was, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, mankind’s best hope.
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The choreography of participants in debates regarding American torture follows a strikingly consistent pattern, reflecting the imperative for defenders and opponents alike to square themselves with the nation’s professed principles and with the dictates of modern civilization. When accusations of torture are first broached, implicated officials are certain to issue categorical denials of any systematic and inhumane violence. Intentional violations of sacred American principles are unthinkable, as Secretary of War Elihu Root implied in 1901 when he vouched that the occupation of the Philippines had been conducted “with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare” and “with self-restraint, and with humanity never surpassed.” Such categorical denials prompt opponents of the controversial practices to ferret out more evidence of wrongdoing, which in turn goads apologists to concede that a few lamentable transgressions may have occurred even if their incidence and character were grossly exaggerated by critics. A prominent national spokesman for police superintendents adopted this stance in 1910 in response to quiet grumblings about cruel police interrogation techniques; he assured Americans that “rough usage” of suspected criminals had once occurred but “such procedure does not obtain at large nowadays.”
Defenders of controversial practices are also likely to dismiss the victims of alleged torture as neither credible nor deserving of sympathy. Torture victims invariably are portrayed as loathsome, depraved, and violent. The lawyer representing a Chicago policeman accused of torturing scores of suspects during the 1980s, for example, exemplified this response when he denounced his client’s accusers as “the scum of the earth” while lauding his client for decorated service in the military and police. Anyone who takes up the defense of odious criminals, groups, or enemies of the nation risks guilt by association. When unassailable evidence surfaced in 1969 that American troops had committed torture, rape, and other atrocities in Vietnam, Governor Ronald Reagan of California raged that the exaggerated attention on atrocities gave “comfort and aid to our enemies.”
These denunciations of alleged torture victims and their champions are often accompanied by claims that the controversial practices are justifiable and effective in the specific circumstances in which they are used. Without the judicious application of stern measures, the argument goes, American civilization will succumb to attacks by vicious enemies unrestrained by respect for our civilization and institutions. Thus at the outset of the “War Against Terrorism,” while President Bush warned the nation that it would wage “a war unlike any other,” Vice President Dick Cheney explained, “it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically to achieve our objectives.” The “enhanced interrogation” methods that the administration subsequently adopted were wholly consistent with its stance that the president had a carte blanche to respond to the extraordinary provocation of the terrorist attacks of September 2001.
In this and other instances, opponents are likely to counter that stern measures are at once counterproductive and immoral. Equally important, the nation’s principles should not be bent to circumstances. Any concession to expediency risks undermining institutions and principles that are themselves the nation’s greatest protection. Senator John McCain made precisely this argument in 2014 when he denounced the interrogation methods employed in Guantanamo and Iraq, and pledged that all Americans “are obliged by history, by our nation’s highest ideals and the many terrible sacrifices made to protect them, by our respect for human dignity to make clear we need not risk our national honor to prevail in this or any war. We need only remember in the worst of times, through the chaos and terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.”
When the offending practices are halted either because the circumstances that gave rise to them ease or the controversy that they aroused prompts it, the substance of debate shifts to the significance that should be attached to the practices. Defenders of them are sure to insist that they were effective and therefore no handwringing over them is warranted. And in those instances of exceptional violations carried out by a “few bad apples,” it is counterproductive to assign broader responsibility or to implicate the larger cause with which they were associated. In 1903, for instance, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge batted away demands for further congressional investigations of American atrocities in the Philippines by disparaging the accusations as hackneyed and baseless persecutions of soldiers in harm’s way while defending the nation’s interests.
A common thread in these rival perspectives is the presumption that Americans should exist in a state of national innocence, with torture held at an arm’s length. Americans have been at best complacent and at worst willful in presuming that torture is something that other people do elsewhere.
