Torture, for Democracy’s Sake

EVEN TO the casual observer of international events, the Bush Administration has adopted a decidedly defensive, albeit aggressive, foreign policy stance against terrorism since the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Since then, conservative sympathizers within the mainstream media have successfully disseminated a clear distinction between “extremist” and “moderate” Islam. However, many Muslims within or beyond the borders of the United States are not convinced of this distinction.

For this reason, conservative sympathizers (such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times), scratch their heads, as to be perplexed: why is this so? Besides, Muslims should know that there are “extremists” within its midst. Why hasn’t this distinction been filtered into the minds of ordinary Muslims, so that “moderate” Muslims may once again voice their opposition to “extremist” interpretations of Islam, gain control of the “true” Islam and help defeat “extremist” Islam?

Most Muslims don’t disagree that some of us harbor extremist ideologies against Western culture and seek to annihilate all Western governments through violent means, with the aim of establishing a central Islamic State. Most Muslims do agree on one single point, though: that the Bush Administration, in its rush to democratize much of the Middle East, beginning with Iraq, is actually complicit in marketing torture. The President defends himself and his Administration against criticism, saying again and again that “…we don’t do torture…”. But at the present time many Muslims have been captured oversees, brought to Guantano Bay as “enemy combatants” and are languishing there for years without an expressed right to demand, through lawyers, why they are being confined there. They have, at present, no rights. These facts raise the suspicion, among most Muslims, that any interrogative method used against these defenseless Muslims, for the expressed purpose of gaining useful intelligence and to strengthen U.S. national security, may border on torture, or worse. And what of those Muslims who are captured on suspicion of terrorism and that have been handed over to foreign governments, through “extraordinary rendition”, and are known to employ torture with the expressed aim of, you guessed it, to help the United States with valuable intelligence to defend itself? Who knows what are happening in those foreign jails? But alas! History is repeating itself. Just over five decades ago the French Armed Forces, an organ of the French State, in its expressed zeal to colonize Algeria, in northern Africa, engaged in torture during the Algerian war of Independence against French colonialism. And alas! Muslims comprised the majority of the population at that time. Many Muslims were tortured and killed.

There is a much-celebrated case of a French-Algerian journalist at the time; his name is Henri Alleg, a sympathizer for Algerian nationalism. He was summarily arrested by France’s 10th Paratrooper Division on suspicion of undermining the power of the French State. He underwent one month of torture in Algeria, even though no charge was filed against him. His torture treatment included a regimen of electric shocks, burning, forced swallowing of water to simulate drowning (now known as waterboarding), and being hung from various limbs.

Frantz Fanon, the caribbean-born psychiatrist, in his classic epic The Wretched of the Earth, chronicled concretely cases of torture his patients, both French torturers and torture victims, told him. He was then head of a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, when the Algerian war of Independence broke out. His patients told him about the psychological effects of colonialism, where, in its zeal to colonize Algeria, the French State embraced and practiced torture on the Algerian population, most of whom were Muslim and Arab. James Heartfield remarked that France achieved its humanity, by dehumanizing the Arab. Jean-Paul Satre, the French philosopher that wrote the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, realized that his country’s profound allegiance to universal humanism, a pre-cursor to the U.S. Bill of Rights, is an abstract assumption, a cover for actual terror on the ground.

The Bush Administration, and other successive Administrations after it, must come to grips with one issue: in its zeal to democratize the Muslim world, it is instead contradicting its own democratic principles and will, in the future, succumb to an embarassing image that it desperately seeks to avoid: a sponsor of torture.

The writer is a recent revert to Islam, based in New York and can be reached at e-mail: drummondhugh@verizon.net