TheMillerCircle.org

History repeats itself by cyclical behavior alternating with a sandwich of amnesia in between: our use of torture has followed this pattern. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover established the Wickersham Commission to address a major social problem of criminal activity that had accelerated during the prohibition era and seemed to be responsible for the perception of many, that American society was unraveling, fed by a rising tide of criminal behavior in our cities, and promoted by the unlimited resources acquired through  the then illegal sale and distribution of alcohol. Chair George Wickersham assembled a panel of experts to carry out a scientific study, whose purpose was to examine the roots of crime and address the new cultural challenges that law enforcement faced during the prohibition era. While many expected and hoped that the Commission would recommend repeal of the Volstead act (which initiated prohibition of alcohol), the Commission’s recommendations were just the opposite: they favored new legislation and additional resources to make prohibition more effective and more rigorously enforced. Although these recommendations  have long been forgotten, wiped out by the demands of the Great Depression and the elimination of prohibition in 1933, one feature of the commission had a lasting impact on our culture until the events of 9/11. It was eighty years ago that the Wickersham Commission confronted and helped to do away with the torture techniques that were revived and applied anew in the post 9/11 era. The similarity between then and now is quite surprising in both scope and detail.

Peter Lee has written an excellent article on the history of the Wickersham Commission in a recent issue of “CounterPunch.” As part of the Commission’s purview, Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, and member of the Commission, assigned Zechariah Chafee of Harvard University, the task of analyzing the impact of coercive interrogation techniques as tools to combat the rising tide of crime during prohibition. Chafee was one of the era’s most ardent defenders of civil rights and free speech. He was for example, opposed to the WW I sedition laws passed during Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency (applied to those who opposed America’s entry into WW I), and he was later attacked by McCarthy for his support of civil liberties.  The major question addressed by Chafee’s task force was the nature of coercive techniques practiced by the nation’s law enforcement community. What they uncovered was a set of abuses that ran the complete gamut of those we have heard about in the revelations of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other secret detainee centers throughout the world. The transgressions against humane practices of interrogation were understandably more evident in the south at the time of the Chafee report, where blacks often faced a completely corrupt and racist law enforcement and judiciary system, against which they could seldom win a case. Yet, in one  case, Brown vs Mississippi, it was determined that defendants were compelled by torture to tailor their confessions to match the evidence relevant to the case, which was often created after their arrest to match the circumstances.  This case was cited in the 1960s in the Supreme Court Maranda ruling which forbid any testimony to be used against a defendant that had not been given a warning about their right to remain silent as well as providing access to an attorney. But the list of methods used by our law enforcement centers in the 1920s did not stop with pre-Maranda failures. What the Wickersham report uncovered was that the same litany of torture methods used in the post-9/11 era, including the rounding up of suspects in mass, environmental manipulation with extremes of heat and cold, the use of bright flashing lights, painfully loud sounds, the application of electrical shock applied to the extremities and the genitalia, drugs  and yes, waterboarding. Today we use the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe the Cheney torture list, while in the 1920s, the same methods were described as the “third degree.” But, the torture methods used then and now were almost exactly the same. The “first degree” was the actual incarceration itself, while the “second degree” was the complete isolation of the suspect from any outside contacts, including family members, and instructing the suspects that they had lost all rights related to the constitution. The “third degree” was the application of torture itself.

The Wickersham report provided in-depth analysis of why torture techniques were counter-productive by revealing the corrosive influence in the “third degree” treatment of suspects. First, false confessions had a negative impact on police efficiency by creating problems for the prosecution and leading to a culture of police brutality, hardening of prisoner attitudes and the lowering of esteem by which the public views the police. While these methods might have been reduced beginning in the 1930s as a result of the Wickersham report, the police have re-introduced many of these methods, including the rounding up of large numbers of citizens (which  we witnessed at the Republican Convention here in St. Paul last year), random, unprovoked beatings and arrests and false charges against some that were eventually dropped after many months.  Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and several of her colleagues were arrested while serving normal press-related functions at the the convention. Numerous “Homeland Security” cars dotted the scene at the convention center and their officials helped direct and coordinate the St. Paul and Minneapolis police departments. All of these new methods, that violate our constitutional rights for public assembly and protest, are given sanction under the anti-terrorism laws provided through the Patriot Act. If the government now claims an assembly could be related to terrorism, down comes the hammer. The Patriot Act has clearly spread into our domestic life, where law-abiding citizens, intent on exercising their constitutions rights, can be viewed as terrorist threats and treated accordingly.

The Wickersham report clearly established how police brutality got people to confess to just about anything in order to stop the beatings or waterboarding. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been charged as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times and after initially claiming he did not know where Osama Bin Laden was hiding, the torture methods used on him brought specific suggestions as to his whereabouts. He sent teams on wild goose chaises to avoid the torture. The Wickersham report also concluded that torture methods were dangerous to the organization that used them. In effect the use of torture not only brutalized the police, but it made them lazy and reduced their zealous drive for finding evidence and approaching cases with objectivity: “if you use your fists, you are less likely to use your wits.” Although law enforcement agencies claimed that tough methods were needed to get information, the Wickersham report pointed out that Chicago was a city where police brutality was highly developed and their police had a much higher incidence of criminal behavior. In contrast, Boston was cited as a city that had no third degree routines and was comparatively free from police brutality and criminal behavior.

While the Wickersham report led to a reduction in police brutality, the culture of the post-9/11 world has reinstated these methods and tried to justify them under the new rubric of anti-terrorism, with the new name “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And some of these methods are beginning to spread from the military to local police force behavior. We are one step away from reaching a new threshold for antiterrorist behavior with the new threats of domestic terrorism that are now making headlines. We see Dick Cheney on the news frequently where one of his routines is to admonish the Obama administration for  abandoning the torture methods that, according to him,  produced valuable information and kept the American people safe. His incessant incantations appear to have had  some influence with the American public: in a recent AP poll cited by Lee, 52 per cent of Americans believe that torture is sometimes justified. That number is up from 38% in a poll done in 2005.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for  Colin Powell, when he was secretary of state during GW Bush’s first term, investigated two different periods of the Bush administration. He concluded that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public, in the spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors and everyone else involved in administering ‘the Cheney methods of interrogation’ all shut down their torture operations. The reason for this rapid elimination of the Cheney Torture Code was that people were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued. So Wilkerson stated (From Peter Lee’s article) “What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009.” Obviously this statement does not apply to the many individuals who were tortured after being whisked off to the detention centers of other countries, i.e., rendition.  So,  if we are to believe the fanaticism of Cheney on the use of torture, as he routinely admonishes the Obama administration for not torturing and therefore endangering the American public, then we need to ask why he allowed the American people to be endangered by terrorism for not using torture during the last four years of his vice-presidency, or presidency? Clearly the Bush administration did not think that highly of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to apply them after the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public. Why do you suppose we don’t have a single mainstream journalist appear during one of Cheney’s rants and ask him the simple question: if you thought torture was so important for American safety from terrorism, why did you stop using it during the last four years of the Cheney/Bush presidency? You can read the Wickersham reports here.

RFM