Darius Rejali on Violence

Tell me about your first book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by Philippe Sands.

This is a book about the genesis of a single memorandum authorising what I would call torture. It was called the Rumsfeld Memo and it was issued to the American military at Guantanamo in December of 2002; the draft was begun in October 2002 and Rumsfeld rescinded it in January of 2003. What is wonderful about this book is that it’s written like a detective mystery – how was this memorandum composed, how did people come to write a memorandum which authorised torture? But it also is a legal analysis that implicitly identifies and pins responsibility on different actors within the Bush administration. 

It is written by a very sharp member of the Queen’s Council. I can’t imagine any of the Bush administration officials he interviewed knew QCs were among the élite of the barristers in Britain and, in Sands’s case, very knowledgeable in international law. Had they, they might never have talked with him. Nevertheless, they did. 

So what happened to them during the interviews? 

Well, what happened was that he recorded all of them on tape describing their roles in the production of the memorandum, and he pieced together how the memorandum was written, identifying who the principal players were. Once the book came out it created a sensation in Congress. You had the principals implicated in drafting this memo volunteering to testify before Congress to ‘clarify’ what they had said, which is unheard of for Bush administration officials when it comes to the torture question. For me it is a very powerful book, both a really good read and a really insightful legal analysis. But, professionally speaking, and what is important for me, it is a really fine discussion about a well-known problem in the study of violence generally – which is ‘the problem of many hands’.

Most violence today isn’t done by a single person. It is usually organised by many people and this enables them to take less responsibility for what they do. In this case we are looking at how actual agents higher up used bureaucracy to massage, intimidate, cajole and generally get lower-downs to do or say things they would not have originally set out to do. In the end the lower-downs end up taking the blame if things go wrong while the higher-ups walk away untainted. Sands’s book reverses all this, showing the complicity of the higher-ups. Another point to remember is that Rumsfeld didn’t actually write the memo. The person who, according to the book, had primary responsibility for this was General Counsel for the Defence Department, William Haynes II. The book ends with Sands meeting Haynes and explaining his conclusions after which he is informed by the GC’s office that he may not refer to the conversations they had that day. I would say this book brought Haynes’s government career to an end and it makes clear that Haynes himself realised he was deeply vulnerable to future war crimes litigation.

Let’s move on to your next choice, None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture by Joshua E S Phillips.

This book is a different kind of book entirely. It is the intersection of war journalism and human rights. It takes the story of a tank unit in Iraq and this was a tank unit that didn’t end up doing much fighting with tanks after the first few days of the war and the members of the unit were assigned to prison detail and in the process ended up doing terrible things which they didn’t tell anyone about. 

And when they came back to the United States, one of the members, Sergeant Adam Gray, became a disciplinary problem wherever he was stationed, and he eventually committed suicide. Another one, Jonathan Millantz, an army medic, approached the author, a war reporter, and asked him to look into this matter. Eventually Millantz too committed suicide. What emerged is that the unit had been immersed in torture and people were feeling guilty, and guilt is one of the most toxic emotions we know of, and whether you feel it is not in your power to control. In this way soldiers become a danger to themselves as well as, potentially, to others like their families. So it is a really important book on atrocity-related trauma and the blow-back effect from Iraq, as well as the importance of seeking help for these conditions as soon as possible.

There are many things in this book that are fascinating and generally unknown. One is that these soldiers were afraid to report what they had seen and done for fear of losing their military pensions, but without reporting it they couldn’t receive any medical help for their trauma. And so they were caught in that Catch 22 which is where torturers often find themselves. 

And had the order for torture to do this come from above?

This is another very important feature of this story; there was no order in that sense. There was a sort of implicit understanding that you had to be tough and that is one of the points that the book makes and I think this is where my take comes in. One of the things that this book shows is that torture had begun in Afghanistan well before the memos were even drafted. It also shows that torture in the US military was far broader and more extensive than torture in the CIA but it remains the least investigated part of the Bush era legacy. The book goes through all the ways the US military managed to evade allegations of torture within the army so it is a very good antidote to a myopic approach on memos, water-boarding and the CIA. 

It also shows something that we all know, which is that torture has a slippery slope and once you authorise it, or even create the atmosphere to encourage it, it rapidly runs out of control.