America Doesn't Torture?
A Call for Consistent Values
2009-05-04
By DeAngelo Starnes

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I lived in Inglewood, California while attending law school.  There was small art shop near my apartment on La Brea and Centinela.  Every Black History Month, the art shop had a window display that contained numerous post-lynch photos of African Americans.  Most of these victims were men.  Some were boys.  Some were hung; some burned alive; one photo showed a man who was tied to a post with barbed wire.  It was apparent all were beaten before the ultimate act of death.  Reading historical accounts about the acts depicted in the photos, many had been mutilated in various forms and fashions, including castration along with multiple stab and bullet wounds.

So when you hear rhetoric that America doesn’t torture, a long and careful staring of these photos might change your mind about that.

Over the past six or so years, the term “waterboarding” entered the national lexicon.  Waterboarding against African Americans is nothing new, as illustrated by this Mississippi case from the 1920s.  In that particular case, the appeals court overturned the conviction because it was obtained via torture.

More recently, the city of Chicago agreed to pay a nearly $20 million dollar settlement to four African American death row inmates who were victims of torture at the hands of a notorious police unit.  Between 1972 through 1992, this unit tortured an estimated 135 Black males in locations know as “Area 2” and “Area 3.”  The police beat these persons on various parts of their bodies, hung some of them by handcuffs, suffocated them by placing a plastic bag over their heads punching them in the stomach (the resultant gasping caused a sudden intake of air the bag blocked – kind of like waterboarding without the water), used a steaming radiator to burn their stomachs and chests, and electrically shocked them with various contraptions, including cattle prods, on different parts of the body including the genitals.  The torture elicited false confessions while prosecutors unlawfully suppressed exculpatory evidence.  City lawyers - including future mayor Richard Daley - internal investigators, fellow police officers, and government officials were aware of Areas 2 and 3 but did nothing about it.  In some cases, a combination of these individuals covered it up.

A group of Black bloggers collectively known as “AfroSpear” have uncovered a disturbing pattern of police abuse using Tasers against Black males.  They are seeking support for their petition to Congress requesting an investigation. The abuse of Tasers is increasing and occurring across the country in a racially discriminatory manner.

We often hear torture has diminished America’s stature in the international community and expanded resistance in the Arab world (for example al-Qaeda’s increased number of recruits). But the logic of torture is to suppress and submerge violence. What happened to Black people in American history is instructive on this point.  During slavery, daily whippings and rapes caused many violent uprisings by the slaves. However, superior weaponry put down these uprisings in a vicious manner.  During Reconstruction and Jim Crow, torture and public lynchings dispelled the notion that Freedom was really free, or even true, for Blacks.  During the Civil Rights and Black Power era, water hoses, more lynchings, police brutality, political assassinations, and COINTELPRO tempered the changes to laws that had previously kept African Americans separate but unequal. And now beatings, shootings, cattle prods, and Tasers aid sloppy police work and keep the lid on the unrest of rough economic times.

Violence and legal justification for its use is nothing new. The two go hand-in-hand when you’re trying to break the will of a people. They will trump morality without strong leadership.

I have two not necessarily mutually exclusive beliefs about the employment of torture. On one hand, torture and its condonement are an appeal to fear and a false sense of insecurity. It’s mind-control for the public. It’s used to demonize and maintain a system based on false notions of inherent superiority. The use of the information extracted, whether valid or not, confirms hypotheses and theories about a designated boogieman/enemy. On the other hand, if not for the awful reality of physical and psychological abuse, torture as interrogation is a laughable notion. It’s punishment without trial. If nothing else, it’s a short-cut for lazy and/or ineffective investigation. Or maybe the truth lies between these two notions.

In keeping America safe, the Cheney Administration claimed “enhanced interrogation” techniques elicited information that thwarted more terrorist attacks on the United States. I don’t buy it. It’s fairly common knowledge to anyone who cares to delve into the subject that torture procures highly unreliable information. After all, you’d say or sign whatever you needed in order to avoid being choked, electrocuted, or waterboarded.

I applaud how Obama continues to reverse the Orwellian dumbing down of America. Obama, as other critics of torture, opined that torture violates our “values.”  Enhanced investigation into, along with prosecutions about what’s gone on abroad may serve notice on torture committed here in America.  After all, if our values are truly based on integrity and high standards of morality, there needs to be a consistent application here at home.  Once again, African Americans serve as the example and leaders to making this country a better place.

DeAngelo Starnes is a writer and attorney living in Denver with his wife and son.
Photo Credit: (AP) Members of the Bibb County, Ga., chain gang pay a penalty by serving time in the stocks at the convict camp March 8, 1937.