Suicide: an act of asymmetric warfare

This year’s Australian Orwell prize has been awarded to the Australian Wheat Board and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for “excellence in deception and determined distraction”.

The citation at the Australia Press Freedom dinner in April recognised a “superb team effort that created Australia’s biggest scandal, from the AWB executives who spoke no evil, to the DFAT officials and their masters who went above and beyond the call of duty to see no evil, to the Australian public and the media who as a result heard no evil”.

Winner of the International Gold Orwellian was US Vice President Dick Cheney who “peppered his hunting companion in the face, neck and shoulders with birdshot, then waited a full four days before ending his silence and admitting it was his fault”.

George Orwell’s last book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published seven months before his death in 1949, showed how language in totalitarian society would eventually hide from the powerless the intentions of the powerful. Such a regime would be up and running by 1984 with a new form of verbal communication, “Newspeak”, eventually making all other modes of thought impossible.

In his introduction to the 1987 edition, Ben Pimlott suggested Orwell’s prophecy was wrong because his predictions had not come about by 1984. However, in his own appendix to Ninety-Eighty Four, Orwell wrote, “it was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak [Standard English] by about the year 2050”. So there’s still plenty of time and evidence that it’s on the way.

When three prisoners in Guantanamo Bay military detention centre hanged themselves, reports David Rose of The Observer, the centre’s commander said it was “not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against us”.

The dead men, he said, had “no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own”. A defence department spokesman said there was no need to regret these deaths because, “These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg,” and the Pentagon reclassified hanging as “manipulative self-injurious behaviours”.

A guard told another prisoner shortly before the suicides, “They have no hope in their eyes. They are ghosts and they want to die. No food will keep them alive right now.” No charges had been laid against the men.

It turns out six-person teams of military police were supposed to patrol past each cell every 30 seconds. Doors are made of see-through mesh and bright neon lights shine permanently. Yet these three detainees managed to tease bedsheets through the mesh walls, tie them into nooses and hang themselves. This would have taken considerable time, and a neurologist said the men would have taken up to five minutes to expire.

In Steven Poole’s new book Unspeak he demonstrates how modern language frequently distorts meaning rather than clarifies it, usually with an ideological purpose, in many areas of life:i.e., community, nature, tragedy, operations, terror, abuse, freedom, extremism. In the chapter on abuse - which often means torture - he describes how two prisoners at the Bagram US base in Afghanistan died after what was officially called “repetitive administration of legitimate force,” reminiscent of the Chinese “death by a thousand cuts”.

Repeated blows just above the knee targetted the peroneal nerve, a specific technique used to disable the leg. A military policeman testified, “It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a peroneal strike just to hear him scream out ‘Allah’. It went on over a 24-hour period [with] over 100 strikes”.

Coroners later compared it to the results of being run over by a bus - and it turned out the victim was an innocent taxi driver. Poole comments it is difficult to see how deliberate, regular strikes on a sensitive part of the body which kill a man can be described as “legitimate force”.

The term “stress position” may sound relatively innocuous. But one example is having the wrists handcuffed together and with a long stick pinning the elbows behind the knees, forcing the prisoner into a permanent crouch. Another position has the detainee’s wrists shackled behind his back and suspended by them from the ceiling. In 2003 a man hung up in this way during questioning at Abu Ghraib died after half an hour, US soldiers were subsequently photographed looking triumphant alongside the corpse.

Wet towels were used in Guantanamo during questioning to cause what officials called the “misperception of suffocation” because, they said, there was no actual intention to suffocate. A fine splitting of hairs: as Poole points out, if a person feels he is suffocating then that is his reality, not his “misperception”.

Forced sleep deprivation is defined in the US Army’s interrogation manual as mental torture but at Guantanamo it is called “sleep management”. In 2002 US President George Bush ordered the armed forces to “treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva” - but the appeal to “military necessity” undermines the rest of the statement.

Poole argues the word “abuse” is used because it can mean anything from killing to calling someone an idiot. Some abuse is criminal, some not. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, commenting on the photos of Abu Ghraib prisoners being taunted, said, “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture … I don’t know if it is correct to say … that torture has taken place … therefore I’m not going to address the torture word”.

Experienced journalist Christopher Hitchens has also become caught up in the use of loaded language. He argued the outcry over Guantanamo was unjustified because members of Al-Qaida and its surrogate organisations did not fight for a recognised authority but were “more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers - three categories of people outside the protection of any law”. But Poole points out no person on earth is outside such legal instruments as the UN Convention Against Torture or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Australian David Hicks has been imprisoned in Guantanamo for more than four years, often in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Many other inmates have returned to Britain or their homes in the US while Hicks continues to be punished for crimes his American lawyer, Major Michael Mori, says he has not committed. The Australian Government shows no interest in bringing him to trial in his own country and seems to define him as a terrorist because he’s in prison, inverting the presumption of innocence.

As long ago as 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte said, “It has always been recognised that torture produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything they think the interrogator wishes to know.” Today the US Army’s interrogation manual reads, “Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results”. So, it seems, torture is called something else.

It’s all Humpty Dumpty’s fault, insisting, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less”.