What We're Really Talking About

Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice.

-- Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish

As I mentioned yesterday, Dick Cheney, giving one of his "interviews" to one of his radical right-wing radio friends, spoke rather cavalierly about the practice of "waterboarding." Here is the transcript:

Q: I've heard from a lot of listeners -- that's what we do for a living, talk to good folks in the Heartland every day -- and I've talked to as many who want an increased military presence in Iraq as want us out, which seems to be the larger debate, at least coming from the left -- cut and run, get out of there. One fax said, when you talk to the Vice President, ask him when shock and awe is coming back to Iraq. Let's finish the job once and for all.

And terrorist interrogations and that debate is another example. And I've had people call and say, please, let the Vice President know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided us with enormously valuable information about how many there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth, we've learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that.

The Congress recently voted on this question of military commissions and our authority to continue the interrogation program. It passed both Houses, fortunately. The President signed it into law, but the fact is 177 Democrats in the House -- or excuse me, 162 Democrats in the House voted against it, and 32 out of 44 senators -- Democratic senators voted against it. We wouldn't have that authority today if they were in charge. That's a very important issue in this campaign.

Are we going to allow the executive branch to have the authority granted and authorized by the Congress to be able to continue to collect the intelligence we need to defend the nation.

Q: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that.

And thanks to the leadership of the President now, and the action of the Congress, we have that authority, and we are able to continue to program.

Well, that's some hard hitting journalism. Fortunately, these remarks have caused what the Times calls "a furor," even though the White House continues to deny that he meant anything by it:

Mr. Snow, who spent much of his day dealing with questions about the comments, told reporters that none of them related to interrogation techniques, which are classified. “I’m telling you what the vice president’s view is, which is it wasn’t about waterboarding. Period,” he said.

The exchanges grew testy at times, especially when Mr. Snow said Mr. Cheney is not someone who slips up. One reporter noted that the vice president had once used a profanity on the Senate floor, and also shot a friend in the face during a hunting accident last February.

OK, so, that's funny. But none of the rest of it is -- especially if we look again at some of the descriptive language in the article. As I noted yesterday, waterboarding has nothing to do with "dunking," which something schoolchildren do to one another in swimming pools:

Waterboarding is actually not a dunk in the water, but rather, covering a subject’s face with a constantly soaked cloth to make breathing difficult.

Are you having trouble visualizing that? Is this language that evokes an image that "shocks the conscience," or even troubles it? Does the practice it describes seem terrifying to you?

I don't think so. Please take a few minutes to watch the following video, and you tell me how we should describe it.



In the epigraph to this post, Foucault is tracing the historical progression of punishment from a concentration on the body, and the spectacle of public torture and execution, to the secretive, invisible punishments of the modern prison, designed more to target the soul than the body. As with all other things, the Bush administration is a retrograde chapter in such a history, returning quite unabashedly to a fascination with the bodies of our prisoners. And this violence, this obsession with the corporal, is not accompanied by the slightest hint of shame. Foucault writes that the violence of the modern state is no longer glorious, but something to be tolerated:

If it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for. The apportioning of blame is redistributed: in punishment-as-spectacle a confused horror spread from the scaffold; it enveloped both executioner and condemned; and, although it was always ready to invert the shame inflicted on the victim into pity or glory, it often turned the legal violence of the executioner into shame.

Unlike this scenario, wherein the executioner is tainted by the shame he is meant to dispense, those who traffic in torture today do so with impunity, flippancy, and in the name of patriotism -- and then they deny doing it after all. While the state now seems willing to do virtually anything, it is entirely unwilling to come out and say so. It's actions are entirely shameless, but somehow they seem so ashamed. That torture, including waterboarding, has become standard interrogation practice, is obvious to anyone existing outside the persistent vegetative state. It is out in the open for all to see, and, paradoxically, as it is enveloped in a shroud of silence, for all to deny. "We don't torture," says the Vice President. Well then, what are we doing?