Author: Caleb Crain

It would be easier to believe that American abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan was the work of a few rogue interrogators if it didn’t have a pattern. But if the abuse is spontaneous and uncoordinated, how come it always seems to involve hoods? In “The Experiment” (not online) in this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer solves the mystery. Waterboarding, stripping, extreme cold and extreme heat, sleep deprivation, “noise stress,” sexual ridicule, desecration of religious symbols, manipulation of national flags, and hoods are all techniques practiced in a classified Pentagon program called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape), launched at the end of the Korean War to train American soldiers to resist torture.

“After September 11th,” Mayer writes, “several psychologists versed in SERE techniques began advising interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. . . . Interrogators and BSCT members [Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, also known as ‘Biscuits’] at Guantanamo adopted coercive techniques similar to those employed in the SERE program.” A scientist connected with the program told Mayer that graduates now have to promise in writing not to use the techniques they learn at SERE on detainees: “We did this when we learned people were flipping it.” (Exit horse; the barn door shuts.)

It’s amazing journalism; many puzzle pieces now fall into place. It’s also chilling. Mayer describes a military psychologist from SERE who allegedly advised U.S. interrogators to reduce a detainee to the condition of a dog in a psychology experiment shocked so many times that when untied it no longer shies away from further shocks. Perhaps it’s time to stop worrying that comparisons to Nazi Germany might be alarmist. What else should such a mindset be compared to?

In the London Review of Books, Ed Harriman reads through a stack of audits to find out how wisely and carefully the United States has spent its money and, in much larger quantities, Iraq’s. His conclusion: “Americans can’t be expected to do their sums when they are spending other people’s money to finance a war.” The best vignette concerns one of the American agents who was given several million dollars of Iraqi money to distribute in the field. On occasion such agents were cavalier about paperwork. Not this fellow.

One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that ‘this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash,’ . . .

What a lovely piece of understatement. It also suggests, of course, that his reserve was so ample that $1,878,870 didn’t even squeeze him.

No doubt writing book reviews for a living hasn’t helped. But that’s mere superstructure. Wayne Allyn Root’s Millionaire Republican, according to Penguin/Tarcher’s fall catalog, promises to go down to the basis:

Currently, the GOP controls the United States presidency, Congress, Senate, Supreme Court, and the majority of governorships and statehouses. That will NOT change.

Americans are moving in droves to red states, states where government is smaller, taxes are lower, jobs are plentiful, churches abound, and small businesses are thriving. Blue states will continue to lose population, government funding, electoral votes, and political prominence. What will remain are two Americas: red states full of young, vibrant risk-takers with high incomes, advanced levels of education, strong marriages, and high church attendance. Blue states, on the other hand, are often marked by decaying, high-crime areas with older populations, infrastructures in disrepair, and sluggish business growth.

Economic analysis or found poetry? Message from the national unconscious, or harbinger of a coming Teapot Dome? The all-caps NOT is so authoritative, so final. Apparently Root’s last book concerned gambling, and he lives in Las Vegas, but in this book he’s taking no chances. He derives “The 15 Republican Secrets of Mega Wealth and Unlimited Success” by means of logic: “The real key to becoming a Millionaire Republican is to do the opposite of what the masses do,” the catalog copy explains.

Oh, the masses. Well, yes, naturally. The book doesn’t seem to be a parody, but it’s hard to say. Other titles on Tarcher’s fall list include a witchcraft manual and a biography of John Paul II.

In the first half-hour or so of Batman Begins, young Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) treks up a mountain in what we are probably supposed to imagine is Tibet (in reality, I suspect, it’s an as-yet-unmelted part of Alaska), in order to join a group of vigilante ninjas known as the League of Shadows, led by Liam Neeson. For a while it seems like a good fit. They hate crime; he hates crime. They like wearing black; he likes wearing black. They enjoy alternating swordplay with sonorous apothegms about civilization, guilt, and corruption, and by the look on his face, he enjoys it, too. He even seems to believe it doubles as a kind of psychotherapy.

But there’s a hitch. (Spoiler alert.) It turns out that the League of Shadows are fond of kidnapping a person, putting him in a cage, and cutting off his head, if they feel relatively sure that they’ve correctly identified a criminal. Bruce, square thing, protests that even criminals are entitled to a trial. He and the League of Shadows must, therefore, part ways. And this, according to movie convention, requires that Christian Bale have with Liam Neeson the Conversation about Civilization vs. Evil, punctuated by a lot of close-cut whams and pows.

Liberals among the audience breathe a sigh of relief. Phew! So he didn’t believe that fascist mumbo-jumbo after all. And it’s very timely, this Conversation, since our politicians have been having it, too. Is Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay an exercise in lawlessness that bears analogy to historical outrages like the Holocaust? Or is it merely the force necessary to check evildoers, who would take advantage of such liberal weaknesses as a jury, the right to confront your accuser, and due process. Liam Neeson explains that the League of Shadows has cleansed corrupt societies before, and he cites Rome, Constantinople, and London. Not sure why he omits the ghettos of Germany and Poland from his resume. Perhaps his advisers warned him that it would get him in trouble with Karl Rove, who, after all, shares his belief that mealy-mouthed liberals are so spineless in their approach to evil that they might even offer evildoers psychotherapy. Psychotherapy without benefit of swordplay, even.

But before we take too much solace in Bruce Wayne’s refusal to join the brown shirts, let’s recall that Anakin Skywalker didn’t prove so politically correct. All is not well in the symbolic unconscious of American popular culture, I don’t think. And why should it be? Yesterday the New York Times added significantly to our knowledge of the complicity of psychiatrists and psychologists at Guantanamo Bay. Evidently they have advised interrogators on, say, how to exploit a detainee’s fear of the dark or his longing for his mother. Not sure how this squares with “First, do no harm.” Arkham Asylum, anyone?

And then, this morning, the Times reports that Chiara Nobili, a judge in Milan, Italy, has ordered the arrest of thirteen C.I.A. agents for the kidnapping of a suspected Al Qaeda sympathizer named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Nasr was seized on 17 February 2003 in Milan. He was sprayed in the face and thrown into a white van. The Italians identified the American agents as his kidnapers by tracking cell phone activity where he was taken—a number of calls to northern Virginia were dispositive. The spies took Nasr to an American-Italian air force base in Aviano. From there, he was flown to Ramstein, Germany, on a U.S. Air Force jet, and then, on a private jet rented by the C.I.A., to Cairo. In April 2004, fourteen months later, Nasr resurfaced long enough to call his wife. He told her that he had been tortured with electric shock and that “he could barely walk.” Soon after, the Egyptian police re-arrested him. His whereabouts are now unknown.

An unnamed “senior Italian official” explained why the Italians are risking the wrath of the United States, which is not likely to take calmly the potential unmasking of thirteen field agents: “Our belief is that terrorist suspects should be investigated through legal channels and brought to a court of law — not kidnapped and spirited away to be tortured in some secret prison.” The Italians, you may recall, aren’t real fond of kidnaping as a form of politics; cf. Aldo Moro. After they cross-referenced credit card numbers to the C.I.A.’s cell phone accounts, the Italians discovered that the American agents stayed in five-star hotels in Milan, where they spent $144,984 in hotel bills during the abduction. After they successfully “rendered” Nasr to the Egyptians, two of the agents rewarded themselves with “a few days’ holiday at five-star hotels in Venice, Tuscany and South Tyrol.”

It’s so Bruce Wayne! Playboys with secret identities, who kidnap bad guys and arrange for their torture and lynching, then bask in luxury in southern Europe as part of their cover story! Or rather, it’s what Bruce Wayne would have been, if he’d joined the League of Shadows. But he didn’t, right? Tell me he didn’t.

Fortunately, we’re bound to be hearing a lot about this case. Just as we’ve heard so much about the case of Khaled el-Masri, the German citizen who was kidnapped at the Macedonian border on New Year’s Eve 2003, flown to Afghanistan, beaten, stripped, shackled, hooded, photographed nude, injected with drugs, and then dropped at the Albanian border in May 2004. American agents had evidently confused him with a suspected 9/11 conspirator named Khalid al-Masri. Oops. The Germans considered legal action, but unlike the Italians, they could identify no individual kidnapers. The United States refused to own up to the mistake until April 2005, when U.S. government officials revealed that Condoleezza Rice had personally ordered el-Masri released, though she had to issue the order several times before it was put into effect. As I say, you’ve heard a lot about the el-Masri case, right? And he’s still alive and has a lawyer. So you’re bound to hear at least as much about this one.