Event Title
The malleability of the masculine: The science of torture and American manhood in post 9/11 USA
Start Date
27-6-2010 10:45 AM
End Date
27-6-2010 11:45 AM
Description
This presentation is part of the Sex and Gender: Military Contexts track.
After 9/11/2001, programs of torture designed, coached, and monitored by military and private sector psychologists were mainstreamed in U.S. military and CIA practices. These programs had been under development for a period of forty years, in different forms, and used in various U.S. sponsored training programs and conflicts around the globe, as well as in the training of U.S. military personnel to resist torture in the event of capture. This paper poses three questions about the science of torture and its relation to the model of American manhood that was already prevalent, but became absolutely dominant on the U.S. cultural scene immediately after the attacks of 9/11/2001. First, how do the techniques of torture which came to characterize the CIA’s secret treatment of American detainees (and spread to the military as well), reflect a certain dominant conception of American manhood? Second, how do the deeply held commitments and practices of this model of national manhood actually make those who most identify with it malleable, exploitable, and politically incompetent in a time of national crisis? Based on readings of recently published analyses of and documents associated with the so-called “war on terror,” my paper traces how the deployment of this model of masculinity plays its relentless part in creating and maintaining complicity, cowardice and gullibility in those who are enthralled by it. Third, once we understand the role that this “cartoon masculinity” plays in the deployment (and the development?) of the science of torture, how does this inform our understanding of the relation between the science and the politics of torture?
Writings and speech about interrogation strategies, like writings about US war strategy in the build up to the Iraq war more generally, hinge on a constantly reasserted but shifting boundary between “hard” and “soft”. Detainees are “softened up” for interrogation, the interrogators are “hard-liners,” CIA operatives accuse FBI operatives of being “squishy.” This bottom-line valuation of the hard over the soft, and commitment to creating the “soft” in the “enemy” and maintaining the “hard” in American decision makers and soldiers, undergirds the more specific techniques of torture. Four types of techniques, elaborated initially by psychologist employed directly or contracting their services to the US military, came to characterize the US interrogation program. The program relies on: 1) total sensory deprivation (sight, sound, touch, texture), accompanied by or alternating with sensory exhaustion (heat, cold, pain), and the complete disruption of the detained person’s sense of time and place; 2) the use of “stress positions” to induce excruciating pain for hours at a time; 3) exploitation of the perceived “cultural sensitivities” of the detained persons, especially in regards to gender roles and sexuality (i.e. psychologically engineered sexual abuse); 4) exploitation of individual fears of detained persons as identified by psychologists who are “treating” the persons in question. Individually or in combination the effect of these techniques is ostensibly to produce a complete breakdown of the will to resist in the persons who are interrogated, and a total dependence on the interrogator, in order to secure actionable intelligence for the CIA and the military. Given that the scientists who played a part in designing this program were fully cognizant of and acknowledged the unreliability of confessions secured through these means, and that initial results of interrogations conducted in this manner indeed produced all kinds of wild false assertions that were quickly disproven, and that the CIA and the military continued to expand such programs in the face of overwhelming evidence that it did not produce reliable intelligence, it is important to recognize that the interrogation program served other purposes. Those close to the program suggest that it served as retaliation, punishment and revenge for the 9/11 attacks. Elaine Scary’s groundbreaking work on torture (The Body in Pain) confirms that the purpose of torture is not intelligence but the production of the omnipotence and the expansion of the world of the torturer.
The model of American masculinity as omnipotent and infallible is entangled with its practices of torture in complex ways. This masculinity fantasizes itself to be omnipotent in the deepest sense of the word, i.e. it aspires to the position of creator of the real. As stated clearly in the document that served as the blueprint for the initial bombardment of Iraq (Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance), the US military seeks to become the environment of the besieged population by controlling every facet of that environment. The practices of torture embraced by the CIA and military enact this level of omnipotence through detailed, ritualized dehumanization, the purpose of which seems to be the symbolic, ceremonial affirmation of American manhood. In this sense the ritualized torture of detained persons performatively produces, for the perpetrators of the abuses, the omnipotence they so self-assuredly proclaim and declare. On the other hand, this masculinity wears its teenaged belligerence and cartoonish tough talk on its sleeve, allowing it to be dismissed by sympathizers as something more or less benign, the torture in Abu Ghraib was likened by more than one source to fraternity hazing rituals, for example.
What is perhaps most astonishing lesson of this recent U.S. history is the degree to which the smokescreen of “awe” produced by a masculinity that so utterly certain of itself serves somehow to enthrall perfectly intelligent men (and some women), who were unwilling to confront these practices. A number of people who would have been in a position to speak against these practices and didn’t, report a fear of being seen as “soft”. One purpose of this paper is to interrogate the deeply held identity commitments that produce such fear.
Given these reflections, what are we to make of the science of torture that psychologists served up to the CIA and the U.S. military?
The malleability of the masculine: The science of torture and American manhood in post 9/11 USA
This presentation is part of the Sex and Gender: Military Contexts track.
After 9/11/2001, programs of torture designed, coached, and monitored by military and private sector psychologists were mainstreamed in U.S. military and CIA practices. These programs had been under development for a period of forty years, in different forms, and used in various U.S. sponsored training programs and conflicts around the globe, as well as in the training of U.S. military personnel to resist torture in the event of capture. This paper poses three questions about the science of torture and its relation to the model of American manhood that was already prevalent, but became absolutely dominant on the U.S. cultural scene immediately after the attacks of 9/11/2001. First, how do the techniques of torture which came to characterize the CIA’s secret treatment of American detainees (and spread to the military as well), reflect a certain dominant conception of American manhood? Second, how do the deeply held commitments and practices of this model of national manhood actually make those who most identify with it malleable, exploitable, and politically incompetent in a time of national crisis? Based on readings of recently published analyses of and documents associated with the so-called “war on terror,” my paper traces how the deployment of this model of masculinity plays its relentless part in creating and maintaining complicity, cowardice and gullibility in those who are enthralled by it. Third, once we understand the role that this “cartoon masculinity” plays in the deployment (and the development?) of the science of torture, how does this inform our understanding of the relation between the science and the politics of torture?
Writings and speech about interrogation strategies, like writings about US war strategy in the build up to the Iraq war more generally, hinge on a constantly reasserted but shifting boundary between “hard” and “soft”. Detainees are “softened up” for interrogation, the interrogators are “hard-liners,” CIA operatives accuse FBI operatives of being “squishy.” This bottom-line valuation of the hard over the soft, and commitment to creating the “soft” in the “enemy” and maintaining the “hard” in American decision makers and soldiers, undergirds the more specific techniques of torture. Four types of techniques, elaborated initially by psychologist employed directly or contracting their services to the US military, came to characterize the US interrogation program. The program relies on: 1) total sensory deprivation (sight, sound, touch, texture), accompanied by or alternating with sensory exhaustion (heat, cold, pain), and the complete disruption of the detained person’s sense of time and place; 2) the use of “stress positions” to induce excruciating pain for hours at a time; 3) exploitation of the perceived “cultural sensitivities” of the detained persons, especially in regards to gender roles and sexuality (i.e. psychologically engineered sexual abuse); 4) exploitation of individual fears of detained persons as identified by psychologists who are “treating” the persons in question. Individually or in combination the effect of these techniques is ostensibly to produce a complete breakdown of the will to resist in the persons who are interrogated, and a total dependence on the interrogator, in order to secure actionable intelligence for the CIA and the military. Given that the scientists who played a part in designing this program were fully cognizant of and acknowledged the unreliability of confessions secured through these means, and that initial results of interrogations conducted in this manner indeed produced all kinds of wild false assertions that were quickly disproven, and that the CIA and the military continued to expand such programs in the face of overwhelming evidence that it did not produce reliable intelligence, it is important to recognize that the interrogation program served other purposes. Those close to the program suggest that it served as retaliation, punishment and revenge for the 9/11 attacks. Elaine Scary’s groundbreaking work on torture (The Body in Pain) confirms that the purpose of torture is not intelligence but the production of the omnipotence and the expansion of the world of the torturer.
The model of American masculinity as omnipotent and infallible is entangled with its practices of torture in complex ways. This masculinity fantasizes itself to be omnipotent in the deepest sense of the word, i.e. it aspires to the position of creator of the real. As stated clearly in the document that served as the blueprint for the initial bombardment of Iraq (Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance), the US military seeks to become the environment of the besieged population by controlling every facet of that environment. The practices of torture embraced by the CIA and military enact this level of omnipotence through detailed, ritualized dehumanization, the purpose of which seems to be the symbolic, ceremonial affirmation of American manhood. In this sense the ritualized torture of detained persons performatively produces, for the perpetrators of the abuses, the omnipotence they so self-assuredly proclaim and declare. On the other hand, this masculinity wears its teenaged belligerence and cartoonish tough talk on its sleeve, allowing it to be dismissed by sympathizers as something more or less benign, the torture in Abu Ghraib was likened by more than one source to fraternity hazing rituals, for example.
What is perhaps most astonishing lesson of this recent U.S. history is the degree to which the smokescreen of “awe” produced by a masculinity that so utterly certain of itself serves somehow to enthrall perfectly intelligent men (and some women), who were unwilling to confront these practices. A number of people who would have been in a position to speak against these practices and didn’t, report a fear of being seen as “soft”. One purpose of this paper is to interrogate the deeply held identity commitments that produce such fear.
Given these reflections, what are we to make of the science of torture that psychologists served up to the CIA and the U.S. military?