Tony Judt, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, And Torture

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Tony Judt, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, And Torture
By: Spencer Ackerman Friday January 8, 2010 10:22 am	Tweet62

I’m only now reading about the historian Tony Judt’s affliction with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, prompted by this piece. So I went back to his moving NYRB essay, “Night,” from a few weeks ago, in which Judt describes imprisonment inside his body. This haunted me:

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.

I would like to email this link to the office of Judge Jay Bybee and Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo. I remember when they wrote:

… you [the CIA] have informed us [the Office of Legal Counsel] that he [Abu Zubaydah] would spend at most two hours in this box. You have informed us that your purpose in using these boxes is not to interfere with his senses or his personality, but to cause him physical discomfort that will encourage him to disclose critical information. Moreover, your imposition of time limitations on either of the boxes indicates that the use of the boxes is not designed or calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality. For the larger box, in which he can both stand and sit, he may be placed in this box for up to eighteen hours at a time, while you have informed us that he will never spend more than an hour at a time in the smaller box. These time limits further ensure that no profound disruption of the senses or personality, were it even possible, would result….

Send “Night” to Bybee and Yoo. Send it to George Tenet and James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen and Alberto Gonzales and David Addington and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Hang it on the wall of the Bush library when it opens. Listen to them howl and hector and dissemble and prevaricate and sniff and sneer and distinguish. And then remember what the truth is when the liars tell you it isn’t what it is.

2 Comments

2 Responses to “Tony Judt, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, And Torture”

mikeyhemlok January 8th, 2010 at 11:25 am

We’ve gotten so far out in the tall weeds on the torture-as-policy discussion that I guess it needs to be said again.

It isn’t about the torturers, their victims, the ‘effectiveness’ of interrogation under torture, the suffering or the nightmares.

It’s about us. What kind of society we want to live in, the kind of cultural values we want to embrace, whether we see the rule of law as a cornerstone of our society or a pretty inconvenience to be circumvented whenever we’re frightened or angry.

Torturing people is a crime. Torturing people who have no access to process, no charges filed and such a complete and utter lack of power over their own existence that even their sleep can be modulated is something even more heinous, kind of a crime squared.

If we want to have a policy debate about torturing suspects and detainees (and let’s not forget just how far through the looking glass we are to even entertain the thought), then that debate needs to be about making these acts legal, and passing the appropriate legislation. If we’re not going to even consider enforcing the existing laws and treaties, then clearly they are of no value and should be reconsidered.

But under no circumstances should we ever forget that the blackest stain, the worst, most toxic outcomes, are on US, you and me and the old lady down the street. They are making us torturers, they are murdering people in our names, they are replacing our bedrock cultural values with something dark and sick and ultimately evil.

And we are allowing it…

mikey