The uses of confession

In 1938, Nikolai Bukharin stood up in a Moscow courtroom and confessed. “I plead guilty,” he said, “to … the sum total of crimes committed … irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took direct part, in any particular act.”

If the breadth of that admission (“Whether or not I knew or took part”) recalls the recent and remarkable statements by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one should not be surprised. According to Michael Otterman’s new book American Torture, the techniques now employed by CIA interrogators were developed in emulation of the Eastern Bloc and its show trials.

In 1948, the Stalinist dictators in Hungary put Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty in the dock. A fierce opponent of the regime, Mindszenty had previously left his supporters a note, assuring them that any confession would be “forged or false”.

Two months later, he stood up in court.

“I am guilty in principle and in detail,” he said, “of most of the accusations made”.

The Mindszenty affair convinced the American security forces that the Soviet Bloc had mastered “mind-control”, a technique that the CIA duly tried to master through bizarre experiments with drugs, hypnosis and even brain surgery. After years of trial and error (in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere), they established what Stalin’s jailers already knew. Sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, physical violence, continuous interrogation, psychological manipulation: a combination of these eventually break the strongest detainee.

For example, Nikolai Krestinsky, one of Bukharin’s co-accused, at first denied every accusation.

The next day, he shuffled out again.

“I fully and completely admit that I am guilty of all the gravest charges brought against me personally,” he said tonelessly. “I admit my complete responsibility for the treason and treachery I have committed.”

If Krestinsky changed his mind after a single evening, it is entirely understandable that, after four years in an undivulged location, Mohammed should admit, not only to 9-11, but to the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and the Bali nightclub attack, attempts to kill Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and the Pope, and plans to destroy the Empire State Building, Sears Tower, Heathrow Airport, Big Ben and the US embassy in Canberra.

Indeed, the little we know about Mohammed’s treatment illustrates just how well his captors have learned from history. According to journalist Ron Suskind, interrogators told him that, if he refused to talk, his children, also in US custody, would be killed - precisely the technique that Stalin successfully employed on Lev Kamenev, a key defendant in the Moscow Trial of 1936.

The same methods: the same outcome. And to what end?

Most obviously, the Americans see Mohammed’s transcript (PDF 1.35MB) as a political intervention, much needed evidence about their progress in the Global War on Terror. After all the embarrassing revelations about Afghan warlords selling innocents into Guantanamo for the reward money, here’s one Gitmo inmate proclaiming his terroristic proclivities at the top of his lungs.

Yet Mohammed’s remarkable mea culpa also performs a less obvious - and quite contradictory - function. The confession provides evidence of success; it’s also intended to show that success is not possible.

That is, if we take seriously Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s shopping list of atrocities, we can only assume that myriads of similarly diabolical schemes are being hatched by those terrorists not in custody. Al-Qaida boasts, we are told, thousands of adherents, each one a potential Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If a single person can set in motion so many plots in so many different places, the terrorists can never be totally defeated.

Such is the message from Mohammed’s revelations.

And if that seems counter-intuitive, consider the Moscow Trials once more. The confessions they produced - the claims that behind every misfortune of the Soviet Union lurked sabotage and treachery and intricate conspiracies - justified every fresh purge, each new trial. With hidden wreckers lurking in every cranny of society, vigilance could not be relaxed for an instant. The stronger the enemies of the State, the stronger the State had to become.

In a similar way, Mohammed’s hallucinogenic confession provides a justification not only for Guantanamo Bay but for Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim that the War on Terror, and everything that goes with it, will last for generations.

Amnesty International once described the CIA’s network of secret prisons as the “gulag of our times”. The Soviet camps were more extensive and more deadly, but they operated according to the same self-perpetuating and totalitarian logic.

A conventional trial, with evidence publicly weighed and sifted by argument and rebuttal, would have told the world far more about both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and al-Qaida than any number of ludicrous confessions.

But Stalin needed Bukharin as a monster, not a man, and the War on Terror needs Mohammed in the same way.