From the Lubyanka to Abu Ghraib: Political Time, Political Crises, Informal Institutions and the Adoption of “Alternative Procedures” of Interrogation By the Soviet Union and the United States

Tracy Lightcap Professor Department of Political Science LaGrange College LaGrange GA 30240-2999 [email protected]

Prepared for delivery at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans LA 3 January - 7 January 2007

Any comments on this paper are welcome. Please direct them to the author at the address above.

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From the Lubyanka to Abu Ghraib: Political Time, Political Crises, Informal Institutions and the Adoption of “Alternative Procedures” of Interrogation By the Soviet Union and the United States Abstract: This paper will attempt to explain the adoption of torture and abusive practices as methods of interrogation by United States security organizations. I will use a “most dissimilar systems” design comparing the use of torture by the United States and the Soviet Union. I will present a comparative data analysis of the interrogation methods used to establish the basis for comparison. I will use Buthe’s (2002) method of comparing paralell historical sequences to test a series of hypotheses concerning the decision to adopt torture as a method of interrogation. Specifically, I will explore the role of leadership styles in political time, responses to political crises, and the creation of accomodating informal institutions as determinants of the adoption of torture as a method of interrogation by security personnel. I conclude with some observations concerning the policy consequences of these developments. Introduction On 28 April 2004 viewers of the CBS television newsmagazine 60 Minutes II were surprised to be confronted with a dozen photographs documenting inhumane treatment of Iraqi detainees by U.S. military police and others at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. Two days later, Seymour Hersh published an article in The New Yorker giving further details about abuses at Abu Ghraib and referring extensively to the then still secret AR - 15 criminal investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade conducted in January of that year by Major General Anthony Taguba, followed by a more detailed report on 14 June (Hersh 2004a, 2004b, Taguba 2004). After that the story mushroomed, as it became apparent that the commanders of Coalition Forces in Iraq had been informed of possible problems by the International Committee of the Red Cross (hereinafter ICRC) during the previous year and that accounts of detainee treatment that had been widely discounted before appeared to have been confirmed by the subsequent investigations (ICRC 2004, Ricchiardi 2004). It further developed that the Department of Defense had launched multiple investigations of potentially criminal 2

abuses of detainees not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Fay and Jones 2004, ACLU 2006c, Schlesinger 2004). Subsequently, continuing requests under the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union (hereinafter ACLU) and others as well as independent investigations showed a disturbing similarity in patterns of abuse, patterns that suggested an overall scheme of interrogation and incarceration that departs radically from past U.S. policy on both matters (Physicians for Human Rights 2005, Center for Constitutional Rights 2006, ACLU 2006). The evidence now at hand indicates that the interrogation practices adopted by military and civilian intelligence agencies during the war on terror are in clear violation of international conventions that the United States has sponsored and abided by for much of modern history. Indeed, the practices revealed clearly contravene international standards proscribing torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners taken during wartime (1). The torture and abuse of U.S. detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay has contributed to a foreign policy debacle of unprecedented scope and intensity. Islamic radicals have long held that the United States and it’s allies are engaged in a war to undermine Islam itself. Further, they have warned that in this war the United States would stop at nothing to destroy the cultural and political basis of the modern Middle East and replace it with a secular, capitalist, and Christian alternative (Rodenbeck 2006). It would have been difficult for America’s enemies in the Middle East to have thought up a scenario that more closely fits their narrative explaining the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq then the events at Abu Ghraib and other prisons holding Islamic detainees. When combined with the constant friction that an occupation by a foreign and culturally dissimilar power inevitably creates, the image of tortured and abused detainees has greatly complicated the task of reconstruction in both occupied countries. In addition, the “soft power” of the United States - the power it has a result of 3

domination of communications and cultural and ideological hegemony - has been undermined not only in the developing world, but among America’s allies in Europe and Asia (Nye 2004). Distrust of the intentions and policies of the United States have reached new heights world-wide and, for the first time, outright fear of American power has become commonplace (Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2006). While the collapse of American prestige is not complete and recovery is possible, former Secretary of State Colin Powell was almost certainly right when he said recently that the torture and abuse of detainees has undermined the moral basis of the “War on Terror” (DeYoung and Baker 2006). As might be expected, such a drastic alteration in national fortunes has not gone without attempts at explanation. Jackson (2006) has identified three different strains of thought concerning this question. The first ties the abuse of detainees to directly to policies of the present government of the United States. There are two tracks to this explanatory narrative. Some hold that the abuses were due to a lack of effective leadership and control of the prison systems in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. The many recent investigations undertaken by the Department of Defense into these matters are a good example of this. All have pinpointed either unclear policies concerning intelligence interrogation, shortages of personnel or training, or poor coordination and supervision by commanders as the root causes of the problem (Human Rights First 2004, for the best overview, see Schlesinger 2004). The second track is more accusatory, tying the torture of detainees to deliberate policy decisions made by members of the Bush administration. Here the focus is on the results of the prolonged debate concerning interrogation practices within the administration as the need for intelligence concerning terrorist organizations increased and the pivotal decision to condition the application of the Geneva Conventions to war on terror detainees (see Danner 2004 for the text of the memos in question). Critics of these deliberations tie the abuse of detainees directly to 4

them, holding that the ambiguities of policy mentioned above stem from the decision to both redefine torture and to blur the limits of interrogation techniques (Hersh 2004b, Hooks and Mosher 2005, or Greer 2004). Further, the conscious decision to migrate interrogation techniques from Guantanamo Bay to Iraq is generally seen as the precipitating cause of the widespread proliferation of torture and abuse of detainees (Danner 2004). The second explanation focuses on systematic factors influencing the adoption of torture by threatened regimes. There is a long research tradition addressing general questions about the suppression of human rights, but studies specifically addressing the use of torture are both recent and rare. There are two main threads of research. The first harks back to past experience of the United States and other developed nations involved in guerilla wars in developing world. Here the abuse of detainees is tied here to either the continuation of imperial attitudes and methods in now “neo-colonial” environments (see Historians Against the War 2006 or Harbury 2005) or to the degrading effects of guerilla warfare on constraints on treatment of prisoners of war (Forsythe 2006). From these perspectives, the reappearance of prisoner abuse is related to a longstanding predilection for the use of “extreme measures” by U.S. forces and others engaged in asymmetric warfare in the Third World. As Jackson (2006) points out, America’s record of abusive treatment of prisoners in asymmetric wars is a long standing one. From Indian wars to the Philippine insurrection to Vietnam and the COIN wars in Latin America, U.S. armed forces and, in more modern times, intelligence agencies have treated prisoners with no more and often less regard than has been shown in the war on terror (Jackson 2006, McCoy 2006, Harbury 2005). Further, as some critics have pointed out, this is by no means a solely American trait. Indeed, the abuse of prisoners appears to be common among former colonial powers (Forsyth 2006, Jackson 2006).

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The second body of research is built around large N quantitative comparative studies of torture and focuses on the so-called “domestic democratic peace” thesis (Davenport and Armstrong 2004, 2005). There is good evidence that on most combined measures of human rights democratic regimes are less likely to be repressive, though only at high levels of democracy. Hathaway (2002), in the first study specific to torture, looked at whether ratification of human rights treaties made a difference in torture practices and reached similar results. Davenport and Armstrong (2005) and Davenport, Armstrong, and Moore (2006) have extended this thread by examining torture practices in regimes under various levels of threat from civil war, political dissent, and guerilla war. Their research leads them to conclude that, given a high enough level of threats to regimes, there is a strong propensity for governments of all kinds to revert to torture, a propensity strengthened by any prior experience using torture. Further, while democracies are marginally less likely to engage in torture, the incidence of abusive practices under conditions of threat is surprisingly high. Indeed, like the more qualitative critiques cited above, these studies remark how unusual it would be if torture of detainees did not happen, given the circumstances leading to the War on Terror. The final thread of explanation concerns the cultural and psychological framework providing the individual and social justifications for torture. Here perspectives show more diversity of approach. Some scholars have focused on the degrading effects of war itself as a enabler for detainee abuse. As war dehumanizes those waging it, the barriers to abusive behavior become significantly lowered; only an igniting spark is necessary to trigger it (Calhoun 2005, Hedges 2003). Others have described the construction of social narratives dehumanizing enemies in the war on terror, narratives that so drastically change perceptions of wartime prisoners as to make falling into abusive patterns easy (Jackson 2006). Finally, some have emphasized a combination of conditions involving

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euphemistic justifications for torture, administrative quiescence, insularity and secrecy, and competition among interrogators as determinative (Huggins 2004). All of these perspectives have something to offer the interested scholar, but all have weaknesses as explanations for the current situation. It is true that both organizational failures and administrative decisions have had a role to play in the appearance of widespread use of torture in interrogations by the United States. But this observation begs the important questions. Why did the organizational failures occur? Why were official decisions made that facilitated the torture of detainees? It is also true that the United States has a long history of prisoner abuse and remains faced with substantial threats. However, the abuses visited on America’s enemies in the past were never the result of anything like the systematic deliberations and careful vetting of decisions that led to the tortures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. Why did American officials suddenly allow abusive behavior to become institutional? Finally, the cultural and psychological studies, while illuminating, do not explain why dehumanizing conditions and enabling narratives appear to have worked so well in this instance. After all, dehumanizing enemies is a normal part of warfare, yet the United States has avoided official involvement in sanctioning systematic prisoner abuse in the past (2). In each instance here the missing component is an institutional perspective. Indeed, most of the explanations above resolve themselves into various species of the “bad apples” argument used by American officials to explain the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Organizational failures are the result of administrative incompetence and neglect. Official decisions were made to facilitate torture because of the bad intent of decision-makers determined to retrieve a deteriorating situation in Iraq. Dehumanizing narratives were promulgated to allow officials to use fear to manipulate their constituents. In all of these attempted explanations, the same question emerges: what set of political and organizational incentives led to the decision to torture and abuse American detainees? 7

This study is an attempt to answer this question. It is based on a most dissimilar systems design. I will use comparative historical narratives of the decision to officially adopt torture as a part of the interrogation process made in the Soviet Union from 1937 38 and in the United States from 2002 - 04 as the basic tool of analysis (Buthe 2002, Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003). I will present theoretical arguments showing that the official sanctioning of torture as part of interrogations in both countries was the result of a confluence of the dilemmas of their political leadership in political time, the presence of political crises that presented opportunities to overcome these obstacles and achieve longstanding political goals, and the use of accommodating informal institutions as the tool for instituting torture as a policy (Skowronek 1997, Helmke and Levitsky 2004). I will conclude with an evaluation of the approach and some final observations. The Explanandum and the Research Design As I said above, this paper is an attempt to explain the adoption of torture as a common means of interrogation by the United States in the war on terror. To accomplish this task I will present a sequential model linking political and organizational incentives to the decision to use torture in interrogations in two separate cases: the Soviet Union and the United States. A comparison of the two narratives should be a more compelling test of the model I will suggest (Buthe 2002). As Buthe points out, the first step in any paper using historical narratives as their prime source of data is to establish the explanandum, the dependent variable to be examined (Buthe 2002). The most straightforward way to establish the explanandum of this paper is to present a comparison of the results of the decision to use torture in the two countries. Table 1 presents a comparison of the interrogation techniques used by the NKVD in the Soviet Union from 1937 - 38 and those used by the United States from 2002 - 05 (3). For illustrative purposes, the categories are drawn from the listings of NKVD interrogation techniques compiled by Solzhenitsyn (1973) and Conquest (1990). (See 8

Appendix 2 for a discussion of the sources used in the table.) While by no means comprehensive, the table cites 42 different interrogation techniques in the order given by Solzhenitsyn, with some additional categories. Three of the techniques - persuasion, psychological contrast, and deception - are non-abusive interrogation methods commonly used by both civilian and military interrogators. Of the other 39 techniques, all involving either torture or abuse, 27 were used in both Soviet and American interrogations, five are NKVD techniques have no American parallel, and seven are American techniques that have no Soviet counterpart. These results show substantial agreement in the torture techniques used by both countries; 69% of all methods listed were used by both Soviet and American interrogators. (Table 1 about here) The actual styles of interrogation combine many of the techniques used, albeit in slightly different ways. Both the NKVD and American military and civilian interrogators have favored what Conquest (1990, 124) refers to as the “long interrogation”. Long interrogations involve prolonged questioning interspersed with torture sessions meant to break down resistance by prisoners and obtain their full cooperation. Russian interrogators in 1937 - 38 appear to have tended more toward brute force in their work; American long interrogations depend more on humiliation and solitary confinement for prolonged periods in punishment cells (see Solzhenitsyn 1973, CCR 2006, or the sworn statements in Danner 2004 for descriptions of interrogations). However, as table 1 reveals, the basic technical means adopted in both cases are quite similar. This uncanny resemblance presents us with a seldom realized research opportunity. Given the isomorphism characteristic of nation - states in an increasingly interconnected world, it is not surprising that most comparative studies of all kinds must be based on most similar systems designs. The logic here is straightforward: one picks cases that are similar in most aspects - economic, political, and social - except for the area of concern. 9

One can then hold the similar aspects constant and look to the differences for explanatory factors. It is not often that the reverse situation presents itself: a set of cases where almost everything is different except for the area of concern. Here a different logic pertains; the differences between systems act as controls for systemic effects, allowing similar patterns of relationships in cases to be examined fruitfully (Przeworski and Teune 1970). In these two cases, the logic of dissimilar systems fits extremely well. As can be seen in table 2, the United States in the early 21st century is a very different place than the Soviet Union in the 1930’s. There are some similarities, of course. Both the United States today and the Soviet Union then are extensive countries with large populations that were founded by revolutions and inherited from them Enlightenment ideologies that impacted their political cultures. Other than that, however, virtually every aspect of the two societies is at odds; economic systems, political institutions, and cultural mores and frames, all are distinguishable. Indeed, when one looks at the two cases, the shared decision to use torture in interrogations is very close to their only communality. The stage is set, then , for an attempt at explanation based on analysis of historical narratives of that decision in the two cases. (Table 2 about here) In the following sections, I will present an argument in three parts. First, I will attempt to describe the leadership situation faced by George W. Bush and his administration and that faced by Josef Stalin and his allies in the ruling elite of the Communist Party. To do this, I will use Skowronek’s scheme for describing patterns of the American presidency in “political time”, applying his analysis of the leadership dilemmas of “orthodox innovators” to both elites (Skowronek 1986). This will be followed by a narrative concerning the history of the early leadership of both administrations. Here I will concentrate on how political crises presented both leaders with opportunities to overcome the limitations inherent in their leadership situations. Finally, I will show how the threat 10

of continuing opposition to the enabling projects in both regimes led to the development of torture in interrogations being established as an “accommodating informal institution” (Helmke and Levitsky 2004). I will then present a discussion of the comparative narratives and some conclusions. Political Time in the United States and the Soviet Union Legitimate leadership is difficult to establish and indispensable to effective government. As Skowronek points out, perhaps the most salient characteristic of legitimate leadership is the disruption of accepted legal and organizational norms (Skowronek1997). In his work on the American presidency, he has posited a pattern in what he refers to as political time; i.e. “… the historical medium through which authority structures have recurred (Skowronek 1997, 30).” It is leadership in political time - leadership that reinforces or repudiates established ideological regimes and policy commitments - that establishes the basis for legitimate exercise of executive power (Skowronek1997). As the course of regimes through time changes, the character of leadership needed to establish authority does as well. Skowronek elaborates a complex scheme for determining the leadership strategies available to executives at different points in political time (Skowronek1997). Here I will generalize parts of his framework to a consideration of the establishment of legitimate leadership in the United States and the Soviet Union. Skowronek’s typology is based on a pattern of regime stability and vulnerability seen in most modern polities. All new political regimes begin with a repudiation of previous states of affairs. He holds that such repudiations are particularly useful for establishing legitimate grants of power for new leaders. Such “great repudiators” are in a unique position. The bankruptcy of previous regimes, dislocated by both the pressure of events and the difficulties of maintaining political coalitions, can make substantial new constituencies available for mobilization once the moment in political time presents it11

self. Regimes can be reconstructed on this basis (Skowronek 1997). By galvanizing both ideological elites and mass publics for change, great repudiators have an unequaled opportunity to establish new policies and institutional changes without at the same time fracturing the new coalitions. Shortfalls in programatic agendas can be effectively blamed on either the priorities forced by the need to solidify regime foundations or on resistance by remnants of the opposition. In either case, great repudiators are generally spared recriminations from dissatisfied partners in their new regime. They have, after all, cleared the decks for the future and delivered power into the hands of the previously marginalized (Skowronek 1997). Subsequent rulers called on to articulate the regime’s vision, however, face a much more arduous task. These “orthodox innovators” must turn the destructive power of executive power to the task of fulfilling the agendas left to them. This might sound easy enough, but, as Skowronek points out, the process of doing so is fraught with peril. Those who established new regimes often cut corners for a good reason. Often, the opponents of their innovations - in and out of politics - were too strong, members of their own coalition disagreed about the course to follow, or the resources available to the new government were insufficient to the tasks (Skowronek 1997). The orthodox innovators who follow, however, are expected to fulfill the regimes promise, no matter the consequences for the political alliances that sustain it. The almost inevitable result is fragmentation of the political support of the regime. As these leaders use their power to disrupt newly established arrangements to fulfill regime agendas, they also disrupt the balances between regime supporters that sustain their actions (Skowronek 1997). Political Time and the Politics of Definition in the United States “A Charge to Keep” calls us to our highest and best. It speaks of purpose and direction. In many hymnals, it is associated with a Bible verse, 1 Corinthians 4:2: ‘Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.’” - George W. Bush (Bush 2000) 12

Skowronek’s scheme was devised to study the American presidency and proves particularly useful when applied to the leadership dilemmas of George W. Bush when he ascended to office. Recall the course of the present dominant conservative coalition in the United States since the “Earthquake Election” of 1980. In that year, a candidate representing the long maligned right wing of the Republican party, Ronald Reagan, was elected president and delivered at the same juncture control of the Senate and a substantially reduced Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Reagan’s combination of reduced taxes, a reinvigorated foreign policy, and support for moral refoundation struck a chord with an electorate disenchanted with the vagaries of the Carter administration. The same combination helped establish a new cadre based on an alliance of fiscally conservative Republicans, right wing Democrats concerned about shortcomings in foreign policy, and newly activated, socially conservative Republican evangelical Christians (Phillips 2006). These new forces seemed unstoppable. When George W. Bush took office in 2000, after the most closely contested and acrimonious presidential election since 1876, he found himself the hope of an increasingly frustrated alliance. The first Bush administration’s triumphs in foreign policy, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet bloc in 1989 - 91 and the destruction of the Noriega regime in Panama, were diminished by the “failure” to insure regime change in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. In domestic affairs, the level of disaffect became even greater. George H. W. Bush had broken the pledge to hold the line on the taxation, finally yielding to financial pressures in the tax agreement of 1990. Further, he had shown, if anything, even less interest in the social agenda of the new coalition than Reagan had (Heclo 2003). Finally, no progress had been made on the dissolution of the New Deal welfare state that many felt was both the root of the problem and of continuing opposition to further conservative reform. Republican cadres were convinced that these failings had led to the Democratic triumphs of 1992 that swept the party from power across the 13

board, putting a formidable political opponent, Bill Clinton, into the presidency (Wills 1996). The Republicans return to control of Congress in 1994, further, bore little fruit. The stifling of Clinton’s national health insurance scheme and the increasing distraction of his administration by investigation and, finally, by impeachment proved illusive. Clinton’s ability to maneuver his opponents into political corners, unsurpassed in recent times, proved their measure. Impeachment proved a costly and embarrassing fiasco, actually increasing Clinton’s political capital. Further, after an initial Republican triumph “reforming” welfare in 1996, his adroit use of executive power in both domestic and foreign affairs proved the equal and more of his opponents (Wills 1996). The emergence of George W. Bush as the candidate of the Republicans in 2000 raised hopes. Bush had been endorsed by the corporate elite of the party, had shown some talent as governor of Texas, and, as a convinced evangelical Christian, embodied the hopes of the party’s social conservatives, now highly motivated by Clinton’s reprehensible moral lapses. His triumph, even in a tainted election, gave all supporters of the Republican project reason for elation. At the same time, however, it opened the possibility of great problems for the new president. Bush faced some formidable tasks. There was the inherent problem of the perceived illegitimacy of his election and the pall this cast over his capability to take independent action. Despite the resonance of some social issues with wide swaths of the electorate, most Americans did not support unraveling the legislative framework of the New Deal in 2000 or agree strongly with most aspects of the Republican agenda (Jacobs and Pierson 2006). Finally, the task of keeping evangelical Christians, many with concerns for the poor, traditional business oriented Republicans with their tight focus on taxation and regulation issues, and neo-conservative intellectuals looking to frame a new world with American power as supporters without unhinging their coalition replicated the di14

lemma that had destroyed the presidencies of many orthodox innovators in the past (Skowronek 1997). As Skowronek says, Bush took arms against these troubles by attempting to define himself politically in ways that would quiet concerns and defang his enemies (Skowronek 2005). His pronouncements in the campaign had laid out what Skowronek calls a “stalwart” position. Bush proposed a “compassionate conservatism” that combined the Reagan legacy of tax reduction, regulatory reform, a no-nonsense approach to crime control, decentralization of government, and “family values” with new initiatives addressing education reform, new health programs, and a serious commitment to allowing faith-based organizations to provide some government services (Skowronek 2005). Here was a candidate with something for everyone in his “base”: not the unfocused piety that passes for religion in Southern California, but solid Texas evangelical Methodism; not conservative rhetoric and marginal change, but a commitment to fundamentally recasting the regulatory and social policies of the American state; not compassion for the poor, but a program to reform the poor’s souls; not a foreign policy based on “realism” and “nation-building”, but a muscular assertion of American interests. No wonder conservative hopes were high when Bush finally took office. Contrary to popular expectations, he immediately proposed much of this agenda. Bush took stances that belied a compromising past as governor of Texas and established him as a leader who knew what he wanted, did what he promised, and ruthlessly held his subordinates to his priorities (Skowronek 2005, Heclo 2003, Suskind 2004a). As a stalwart who could be trusted to follow through he made a useful contrast to the slippery nature of the preceding occupant of the oval office. All of this was combined with a coordinated “message discipline” within the administration, Congressional Republicans, and the party’s allies in the electorate aimed at forestalling successful media attacks on the new presidency and keeping policy focus (Skowronek 2005, Jacobs and 15

Pierson 2006). In short, Bush began to define the terms of his leadership and attempted to impose them on a sometimes reluctant polity. Political Time and the Politics of Definition in the Soviet Union DEPARTING FROM US, COMRADE LENIN ENJOINED US TO REMAIN FAITHFUL TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL. WE VOW TO YOU, COMRADE LENIN, THAT WE SHALL NOT SPARE OUR LIVES TO STRENGTHEN AND EXTEND THE UNION OF THE WORKING PEOPLE OF THE WHOLE WORLD - THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL! - J. Stalin (Central Committee of the Party of Labor 1979, 5 (capitalized in the original)) It should be obvious that the greatest source of the repudiative authority that Skowronek describes would be the leadership of a successful revolution. When V. Lenin led the Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolshevik) to victory in the revolution of 1917, he faced a dire situation. However, through economic collapse, civil war of four fronts, and, later, foreign invasion Lenin’s leadership and his capacity to pick and manage able subordinates proved to be the stabilizing force the Bolsheviks needed to finally win the civil war and consolidate Red power in Russia. This is usually and correctly considered a great political achievement, no matter how one gages the consequences. It made Lenin the undisputed architect of the new Soviet state and imputed to him (much to his chagrin) almost superhuman powers of political skill and policy acumen. It is not to much to say that, to other Bolsheviks, “Ilyich’s words” were law (Deutscher 1966, 272). However, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lenin’s time in power is how little of the agenda of the now All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) had actually been realized when he died in 1924. Revolutionary activity in Europe, initially counted on to bring the new government aid, subsided by 1920 and neither direct (the invasion of Poland was defeated in that year) or indirect (the Comintern attracted new communist parties, not successful communist regimes) action could reignite it. While the Bolsheviks had established themselves as the premier political force in the country, all knew the 16

new government rested on, at best, a quiescent population. The cadre who might have changed that had perished in large numbers in the civil war and the new state had neither the resources or the people to replace them. Further, while a new constitution had been promulgated in 1922, central administration was hardly on its legs yet; in that year Georgia still had a Menshevik government, Ukraine its own foreign ministry (Nettl 1970). Most telling of all, however, was the inauguration of the New Economic Policy (N.E.P.) in 1921. The regime had been forced by circumstances to back away from the combination of forced requisitions and barter that had been used during the civil war (the so-called “War Communism”) and instead turn to a partial restoration of capitalism. Perhaps only a figure of Lenin’s authority could have sustained such a reversal. The first socialist party to take power anywhere sanctioned the re-establishment of capitalist firms in small and service industry and of private agriculture, keeping for itself only the “commanding heights” of heavy industry and finance. The first miles of the long road to socialism had been rocky indeed (Nettl 1970, Deutscher 1966). Lenin’s incapacitation and eventual death did little to change these trends. The now leaderless party submitted to collective direction of its affairs under the Politburo (the political bureau of the central committee of the party) and awaited events. Those events came more and more to favor the General Secretary of the party, J. Stalin. Stalin’s capacity for administrative work had attracted Lenin’s attention early on and had been rewarded (though few looked at it that way) with the newly created position of General Secretary in 1922 (Nettl, 1970). As the administrative head of the party, Stalin proved efficient at his work, both in providing competent personnel for managing affairs and in reminding cadres who had their future careers in his hands. His capability to be both conciliatory to his friends in the party apparatus and ruthless to his enemies soon made Stalin a force to be reckoned within the party and the government. But he was by no means the only one. 17

Stalin had a difficult row to hoe in party circles at first. Rivalries between the different factions in the Politburo and Central Committee made the period from 1923 to 1928 an interesting study in organizational dysfunction. After Lenin’s death, there was no question who the most able man - Lenin himself said it - in the leadership was: the Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky (Deutscher 1966). The prospect of Trotsky in power, however, was unsettling to other prominent Politburo members, due both to fear of military dictatorship and of their personal ambitions being thwarted (Deutscher 1966, Tucker 1990). Stalin tacked with and helped create the prevailing wind in the Politburo at different times, allying first with G. Zinoviev and L. Kamenev to oppose Trotsky from the “left”, then, with Trotsky in eclipse, joining N. Bukharin, M. Tomsky, and A. Rykov to form a “right” bloc against his former allies (Deutscher 1966, Tucker 1990). In all instances, however, it was Stalin who made just enough concessions and qualifications to avoid clear identification with either faction. Instead, it was he who took the main role in defining the stances of his opponents (Deutscher 1966, Tucker1990). These definitions, further, were the hammer he used to bring his faction - and himself - to prominence. The party’s strict discipline and prohibitions against open opposition to party decisions combined with the statements and actions of his rivals in past contests to provide Stalin all the ammunition needed to brand his rivals as deviants from the Leninist framework the party had inherited, a framework he defined and exemplified. Meanwhile, the rank and file of the party stood as aghast and impatient at a leadership groping its way forward without facing any major decisions about the country’s direction as Republicans in the United States did later during the Clinton administration (Deutscher 1966). Only the “Leninist Central Committee united around Stalin” seemed to show a way forward (Deutscher 1966). As George Bush did for conservatism, Stalin offered a more extensive vision of the Leninist legacy, “socialism in one country”. While the idea was not original with him, Stalin had used it effectively in the debates with the “left”. Basi18

cally, socialism in one country, contrary to what most Bolshevik theorists (including Lenin) had maintained, held that the revolution did not need the help of revolutionary regimes in more advanced capitalist countries to succeed. Instead, the revolution could “build socialism” on its own, even in the underdeveloped environment of Russia. While Stalin had little reputation as a theorist and never pushed the concept beyond speculation, both the idea and its proponent were very attractive to the new party he was building (Deustcher 1966). Here was a leader who offered not dry intellectual theorizing but a practical administrative streak; not a policy of waiting on events but a road for taking control of them; not more intra-party maneuvering but a strong, already proven hand; not accommodation of class enemies but a willingness to accept revolutionary action. When by 1928 Stalin had succeeded to Lenin’s role as leader of the party and effective executive director of the country, he had a substantial part of the party behind him (Getty 1993). Like George Bush, Stalin was established as a stalwart, Lenin’s closest follower and comrade. He now had the reins of power in his hands and no opposition to stop him from using it. But using that power had as many potential difficulties built into it as Bush faced 72 years later. The regime was still floating on a restive population with only utilitarian connections to it. The economy remained largely in the hands of small capitalists and farmers. The party itself still contained a large number of Stalin’s old rivals and. even more unsettling, new cadres of uncertain loyalties. The legacy Lenin left the party had hidden as many faultlines as the one Ronald Reagan left George Bush; class conflicts had been muted, the inconvenient fact that no one had any idea how to make a fully planned economy work had been papered over, and the party had reached, if not consensus, at least quiescence. As an orthodox innovator, however, Stalin in power, like George Bush, could only establish his own authority by unsettling the situation. Political Crisis and Political Opportunity 19

Orthodox innovators face, as was said above, a political dilemma. As Skowronek points out, American presidents in this category must fulfill at the same time the obligations and promises left by repudiative regimes and take actions that recast those obligations and promises to achieve the regime’s potential (Skowronek 1997). The almost inevitable result in American presidential history is that the different forces in the regime coalition consume themselves in recriminations over the way their particular promises have been betrayed. The presidents in question then find themselves presiding over a politics dominated by contests with the leaders of rival regime factions and slowly decreasing effectiveness as their own policies are used as evidence of their betrayal of the stalwart’s creed (see, for example, Skowronek 1997, 155 - 76). How can this situation be overcome? Not by negotiation between factions; each is justified by prior commitments and, besides, public wrangling over regime principles simply provides opportunities for opponents. Not by policy decisions that remake the political environment; such decisions inevitably are seen to favor one regime faction or the other and simply add fuel to the tribal fires each faction dances around. The solution is both difficult to carry off and dependent on exogenous events: the formulation of an overarching narrative that insulates the decisions of the executive in question from direct challenge by providing new resources that allow him take action without providing either friends or foes opportunities for overt conflict over policy decisions. Such narratives are usually developed during times of national crisis. As Americans were recently reminded by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, political crises are moments of both danger and opportunity (NBC, 2006). The danger is usually self-evident; the opportunity less so. However, if it can be effectively seized, many of the dilemmas of orthodox innovator leadership can be solved. Political Crisis and Political Opportunity in the United States

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“We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." - Anonymous senior advisor to George W. Bush (Suskind 2004b) 9/11 changed everything and changed nothing. When the United States was attacked by al Qaeda, a terrorist non-governmental organization, the government was temporarily thrown into disarray. The scope and effectiveness of the attacks surprised everyone, not least the new president and his advisors. By the time of his speech to the nation on 21 September, however, the president had not only recovered but had begun to lay the framework to transcend the difficulties his presidency had already begun to face. For before and after the crisis the leadership situation Bush faced had not been substantially altered. The 2000 election had not delivered an evident “mandate” for completion of a conservative agenda. As was said above, Bush had responded to this by immediately attempting to push through a domestic policy agenda that would give to his stalwart credentials substance. By August 2001, however, it was obvious that this agenda was in trouble. The first of the tax reductions the president had promised had been passed, but other measures, except education reform where the president had adopted a Democratic proposal, had met indifferent fates (Jones 2003). The defection of Senator James Jeffords, revealingly over continuing disagreements about the “values” issues dear to evangelical Republican voters, had cost his party control of the Senate (Reeves 2001). Bush’s approval ratings were still fairly high, but the level of partisan division in the electorate on his performance was unprecedented (Jacobson 2003). Finally, in what could have been a telling cultural signal, he achieved the dubious distinction of being the first American president to be the subject of a television situation comedy; That’s My Bush! premiered to critical acclaim in April 2001. 21

The attacks, as Skowronek (2005) points out, played to Bush’s major strengths. The president had already established a persona aimed at taking action based on trust in his “instinct” or “gut”. That instinct, informed by a lively faith and a preference for evaluating policy by evaluating the people proposing it, gave Bush an aura, well deserved, of decisiveness at the very moment it was most called for (Suskind 2004a, 2006). Congress authorized the president to use military force (AUMF) on September 14th. The subsequent successful invasion of Afghanistan and passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 signaled a major shift in public perception and approval of the president’s actions (Jacobson 2003). Bush had thought, as have many other orthodox innovators, that using his powers as commander in chief would be a great aid to realizing the stalwart agenda. The president’s role as commander in chief in time of war is his office’s central grant of constitutional authority and the soundest basis for the extraordinary extension of executive capabilities (Skowronek 1997). Now that role found full play as the administration embarked on a variety of ad hoc extensions of presidential power aimed at vanquishing all enemies, foreign and domestic. It also signaled the beginnings of a new narrative justifying administration policies that conveyed substantial political benefits. The administration quickly moved to bring an already weakened al Qaeda to its knees. Already the CIA and FBI had been given marching orders to cooperate in a domestic and international effort to identify and neutralize terrorist networks (Suskind 2006). These clandestine efforts were supported by a public diplomatic offensive aimed at establishing a unilateral right to preemptively intervene to forestall further attacks (Suskind 2006, Clarke 2004). Accompanying these initiatives, the administration carefully constructed a vision of a nation at war; a war of a new and dangerous type, a global “War on Terror”. Jackson (2006) describes several dimensions of this narrative: a contest between good (America and Americans) and evil (the terrorists), invocation of a right to national self-defense, the need for “new thinking” about warfare and executive 22

power to protect national security, and the continuous threat to national security posed by a faceless, stateless enemy. This new narrative was soon to be put to use in preparing the nation for an attack on Iraq. The continuing existence of the Baa’th regime in Baghdad had been a sore point with many of Bush’s advisors for many years and their counsel finally prevailed with an invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Suskind 2004a, 2006). The rhetorical attack on the Baa’th regime combined all these themes. Iraq was portrayed as a “rogue state” possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and aiming to acquire more. It was alleged that Saddam Hussein had ties with al Qaeda and that there was a real risk that he would provide them with the weapons they needed for a new, more destructive attack on the United States (Suskind 2006). Further, many in the administration believed that overthrowing the Baa’th would create the conditions necessary to drain the swamp of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Creating a democratic government in Iraq with American support would undermine authoritarianism in the Middle East, creating a new set of circumstances much more favorable to American interests (Suskind 2004, Clarke 2004). This combination of fear of terrorists and hope for a new, democratic Middle East provided the justifications the administration thought it needed for avoiding both grand coalitions that would limit America’s response and the need for an international sanction for action against Saddam Hussein. They proved correct; the war was undertaken in partnership with the United Kingdom without UN support, leading to a stunning military success and a new day in Iraq. At the bottom of these themes was the invocation of presidential authority to conduct war and to protect Americans. It was claimed that a war against an evil, dedicated, clandestine enemy requires an executive untrammeled by excessive legal restraints and calls for an extraordinary public deference to presidential decisions. This, the administration inferred, is the price exacted by a true national security emergency. Much of this 23

is to be expected after such a rude awakening, but notice the ramifications for the president’s leadership situation. By calling on a new understanding of executive power, Bush was also calling on a new understanding from the regime coalition. This is not unfamiliar for orthodox innovators, but there were some new wrinkles to his approach, especially as domestic policy was concerned (Skowronek 1997). “We've got to hang with the president because if you start splitting with him or say the president has been abusing power we'll all go down." - Anonymous Republican Senator on George W. Bush (Drew 2006) Normally in wartime, a nation is asked to tighten its belt and sacrifice its sons. One would be hard pressed to find a set of issues more likely to expose the fault lines between Bush’s supporters, however. Instead, the administration pressed on to a second round of tax reductions in 2003, excusing skyrocketing budget deficits as either the result of war or the price of maintaining economic stability. Usually, such a strategy would have led to some difficult budgetary decisions in Congress. In this instance, however, the government’s deficits were covered by foreign investors and, increasingly, the central banks of Japan and China. Both countries had an interest in seeing that Americans did not lose their capacity to buy their goods; a capacity sure to decrease if American public debts forced a devaluing of the dollar (Quiggan 2004). Further, the Republican controlled Congress had no more interest in exposing the inherent conflicts in the regime coalition than the president did. They had cooperated with the new administration course by abandoning the “pay-go” rules (a requirement that new programs and tax reductions be revenue neutral) in 2002 (Kogan 2005). The administration reciprocated by declining to veto spending legislation. The price demanded for this understanding was a high one: party discipline behind the president’s major priorities (Hacker and Pierson 2006, Suskind 2004a). This served both branches well; the president got the legislative program he wanted and that his ideologically unified party could support. The Republican Congress got government 24

spending that could be used to mollify constituents and create political advantages (Hacker and Pierson 2006). Further, both sides got these benefits with a modicum of public exposure. The president, by the judicious use of his decree powers, appointments (often recess appointments) of conservative executive and judicial personnel, and signing statements that conditioned executive compliance with legislation was able to deliver for different factions of the regime coalition without consistent resistance (Drew 2006, Broder 2006). This expansion of executive power in domestic affairs was protected by the high approval ratings generated by his performance on national security issues, especially after the Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2002. The Republican controlled Congress used the halo effect of Bush’s performance as a tool to tamp down insurrections in the ranks and to solidify, along with the substantial increases in government spending, their ties to their supporters (4). While the conundrum of orthodox innovator leadership was still present, the situation was now manageable for all concerned. Conflicts within the regime coalition could be either be countered by calls for support for the commander in chief or by policy deliverables in kind and symbol that satisfied factional disquiet; indeed, the Madisonian scheme of separation of powers depending on interbranch conflict and oversight seemed almost superseded (Hacker and Pierson 2006). Further, public division over the president’s policies could now be assaulted as bordering on treasonous activity for opponents and, for both for administration officials and for ordinary supporters, as rank disloyalty to the cause (Suskind 2004a). Bush’s re-election in 2004, a rare event in the careers of presidents in his group, was the proof of the pudding (Skowronek 2005). Political Crisis and Political Opportunity in the Soviet Union “It was both possible and necessary to alter everything: the streets, the houses, the cities, the social order, human souls. And it was not all that difficult: first, the unselfish enthusiasts would outline the plan on paper; then they would tear down the old (saying all the while, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”); then the 25

ground would be cleared of the rubble and the edifice of the socialist phalanx would be erected in the space that had been cleared.” - Raisa Orlova, remembering her childhood in the 1930’s (Fitzpatrick 1999, 69). When Stalin became the leader of the Bolsheviks, the Soviet regime faced a crisis every bit as threatening as the attacks of 9/11. In 1927 grain deliveries from the still largely private agricultural sector to urban areas fell short of requirements by over two million tons (Deutscher 1966, Tucker 1990). The prospect of starvation was a real one and brought to the fore a continuing problem with the agricultural reforms that had accompanied the establishment of the Soviet state. The breakup of the great estates of the Russian nobility had increased the share of small farms in grain production to 85%, with corresponding decreases in overall productivity and, given increases in consumption by farm families, much lower amounts of marketable grain (Sherman 1969). The NEP had restored the industrial sector of the Soviet economy to pre-1917 levels but mainly by reconstructing plant and expanding light industry. The prospects for long term development depended greatly on increasing overall productivity through investment in basic heavy industry, investment now curtailed by persistently high food prices (Sherman 1969). With his major rivals off the stage and a looming crisis before him, Stalin took action as decisively as George Bush did after 9/11. At the Fifteenth Congress of the party in December 1927, party members voted to begin the collectivization of agriculture by dispossessing the kulaks (large farmers, though not by any usual standards) and moving small and medium sized farmers gradually into larger collective farms. The Congress also charged the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) to put together a Five Year Plan for the entire economy to begin in 1928 - 29 (Nettl 1970, Sherman 1969) (5). The basic idea was a Leninist stalwart’s solution to the state’s economic difficulties: a) increase grain deliveries by providing the enterprise scale necessary to make higher capital inputs in agriculture feasible, increasing productivity; b) use the agricultural surplus to 26

lower real wages and to provide export earnings, creating, along with retained profits from the socialist sector, an investment fund for heavy industry and, as importantly; c) break the political power of small industrialists and capitalist farmers by increasing the size of the socialized industrial sector and of the working class. While the actual plans were modest in scope - originally no more than 14% of the rural population were to be collectivized by 1933-34 - the application of the new order proved more precipitous (Sherman 1969). The Gosplan was unable to get a final plan approved for most of 1928, but increased investment in industry and initial collectivization efforts (and forced grain collections) showed positive effects quickly. That led to Stalin’s approval of upwardly revised plan targets in 1929-30, the first full year of the plan’s operation. This decision had very dire consequences. A greater pace of development meant higher investment then planned and rapid expansion of urban areas. That, in turn, meant much more pressure to collectivize agriculture. Only collectivized farming had any chance of delivering the higher levels of grain needed, both for the vast numbers of new industrial workers and for generating export earnings. That in turn meant an accelerated campaign against the kulaks, who had the livestock, farm implements, and capital needed to make the collectives work (Sherman 1969). As the party had already accepted the idea of intensified class conflict in the countryside, the new directives were put into force with enthusiasm by local cadres, usually with little or no direction from either government or party, except to get busy with the task at hand (Viola 1993). Within a short time, 58% of rural households had “joined” collective farms (Sherman 1969). The resulting debacle haunted Soviet agriculture for decades to come. The story is a familiar one: perhaps as many as a million families displaced to new, inhospitable locations with attendant losses of life and productivity; opposition to collectivization in the countryside resulting in the slaughter of a substantial proportion of the country’s live27

stock (including draft animals), effective passive resistance by the peasantry; and disorder approaching civil war (Sherman 1969, Wheatcroft 1993). Stalin directed a halt to collectivization at the end of 1930 as a result, leading to a quick departure of 30% of the farming population from the new collectives (Sherman 1969). But the respite was only temporary. The collapse of Soviet agriculture in 1931-32 made taking action even more important and the Stalinist leadership was ready for it. To make the great sacrifices necessary justifiable, however, there had to be a further transformation of the leadership narrative. The basics were already in place; socialism in one country had been given actual substance by the adoption of the Five Year Plan and increased class antagonisms had been sanctioned. As was the case with the Bush administration’s narrative improvisations, however, the Stalinists came up with a collection of new themes rather than a coherent extension of ideology. Fitzpatrick (1999a, 1999b) has identified several of them: commitment not simply to building socialism, but to building a new world based on it; a call for heroic efforts and sacrifice; the remaking of individuals and “remolding of everyday life” to acquire skills and attitudes promoting rational behavior and a “Bolshevik way of thinking”; and a demonization of opposition to the Stalinist leadership tied to intensified emphasis on the machinations of the Soviet Union’s domestic and foreign enemies (see also David-Fox 1999). The new rhetoric of the party was reinforced by widespread use of military metaphors (“Bolsheviks can storm any fortresses”, “iron discipline”, ect.), by a pervasive fear of war from an encircling capitalist and fascist enemy, and by repressing opposition to the party’s directives (Fitzpatrick 1999, Getty and Naumov 1999, Sakwa 1999). The final mortar for these disparate bricks was an increasing “cult of personality” around Stalin himself as the leader of the country’s reconstruction and the guarantor of its advances. Surprisingly, given the ad hoc nature of the Plan, the privations involved, and the level of disorder, the regime was able to pull through the crisis of 1931-32. By 1933-34, the higher levels of 28

investment in industry and the partial recovery of a now collectivized agriculture (there was eight times as much cultivated collective and state farm land in 1932 as in 1928) had made the Soviet Union an industrial nation and apparently opposition to the new policies had been quieted (Sherman 1969, Getty and Naumov 1999). The new world was actually appearing. “We, as members of the Central Committee, vote for Stalin because he is ours." - V. Rudzutak, speech at the Central Committee plenum of 7 - 12 January 1933 (Getty and Naumov 1999) As with the narrative adopted in a new century by the Bush administration, the new Stalinist leadership narrative embodied a new understanding for members of the regime coalition. Stalin’s supporters were part of a party that had enjoined organized factions since Lenin’s time, but disputes over policy (supported, of course, by unofficial factions) were another matter. Those disputes had riven the party throughout the 1920’s, but had always been settled in the end, usually by the temporary expulsion of opposition figures from policy-making positions and their eventual recantation and partial reestablishment. Lenin, while nobody’s idea of a democrat, had established this pattern early on; if a member had skills the revolution needed, was willing to recant, and afterwards showed appropriate discipline, rehabilitation was likely (Deustcher 1966, Getty and Naumov 1999). Stalin demanded a new level of discipline from party members; opposition now had serious consequences for careers and was sometimes lifethreatening. That discipline had some real benefits to party cadres, however. First, the vast administrative and managerial responsibilities created by the Five Year Plan insured the place of the party in the nation’s life as nothing else had. This was especially the case for the regional party organizations. These now assumed a more active and, at first, independent role in the workings of what was now truly a party-state. Indeed, the normal interactions between center and periphery became characterized by hierarchical lobbying efforts by local and regional party organizations (Fitzpatrick 29

2004). The interactions within the leadership were also affected. Instead of abstract doctrinal disputes, careers were made or broken in bureaucratic combat between different fiefdoms in the vastly expanded socialist industrial sector (Fitzpatrick 2004). But even low level cadres now had both the promise of suitable work and the status accruing to the creators and monitors of a new society. The new role of the party was accompanied by a new acceptance of social and economic inequality by the Stalinist leadership. In the first years of the Five Year Plan, there had been a resurgence of efforts to build a “proletarian culture”; a cultural revolution aimed at education and the arts in particular (Fitzpatrick 1974, 1999). However, the lack of differential wage scales had made for difficulties in maintaining stable workforces in the new industrial enterprises; engineering and agricultural specialists were also in short supply. In his soon-famous speech, “New Conditions - New Tasks in Economic Construction”, Stalin, redefining the problems as usual, called for wage differences between skilled and unskilled work and for a new push to create a working class intelligentsia (Sakwa 1999). Given the privations associated with the initial years of the plan, the status now given party members in managerial and administrative roles was no small thing. But party elites realized that these privileges were a two-edged sword. Stalin’s initiatives had badly unsettled affairs in the Soviet Union with attendant problems in morale. Some of this could be handled by repression and by public show trials, of which more below. Party members knew, however, that the disorder in the country was a visible threat to the regime. Under these circumstances, one of the requirements for party members had to be a willingness to suppress the doctrinal differences that had divided them in the past (Getty and Naumov 1999). A lack of discipline under the NEP was regrettable; under the Five Year Plan it was dangerous. Yet opposition continued to appear; the appearance of the so-called Riutan Platform, denouncing Stalin and his allies, 30

and new threats by the now-exiled Trotsky seemed concrete proof (Getty and Naumov 1999, Thurston 1996). Such action threatened to split the party in the face of continuing unrest and endangered the socialist project itself. Members of the party elite saw themselves at the turning point; how could any one who called himself a communist not throw in his lot with socialist construction and push through to the end (Getty and Naumov 1999)? The quote from Rudzutak that begins this section was partially strategic, of course, but it appears to have reflected the majority sentiment of the party as a whole at the time. Again, the dilemmas of orthodox innovator leadership had been effectively answered by a combination of political incentives offered by the regime and ideological conformity within the ruling party. Torture as an Informal Institution Torture in both its physical and psychological forms has been practiced almost since the beginning of organized society. It has had three common uses. First, torture was commonly used in some classic and stateless societies as a test of courage, either rite of passage for young men, or as a test of the courage of captives in war, or as part of religious practices (Cartledge 2003, Tuchman 1979). Second, torture was commonly used as a deterrent device, particularly for elites. Offenses particularly undermining either religious, economic, family, or political institutions were often attended by horrific punishments, usually ending in death. The higher one’s social status, the more terrible and degrading the death was (Cicero 1990). Further, torture has been commonly used to maintain order in prisons. Finally, torture has been used as a tool of interrogation. The justification has usually been to insure that the terror of torture would make prisoners who are unlikely to respond to usual questioning more pliable. There is also a persistent belief that torture can insure a speedier answer to questions. The first two varieties of torture have been thoroughly delegitimized. Some modern religions still sanction self-torture as a means of meditation, but its use in rites of pas31

sage has largely disappeared (Walsh 2004). The application of “cruel and unusual punishment” as criminal penalties has also been eclipsed as Enlightenment ideas and modern conceptions of citizenship and penal practice have spread world-wide. Here the process is less complete; the use of torture techniques as a form of prison discipline has continued and may even have expanded. Still, the use of more extreme methods has become much less systematic. The use of torture as a method of interrogation, however, has continued and even thrived. These practices have two general purposes. First, in times of national security emergencies, real or perceived, the need to gather information concerning enemy activity may lead to using torture as a more expedient interrogation method. The second is more sinister. Often torture of prisoners has been used as a tool to intimidate opponents of existing regimes. The fascist regimes of the 1930’s and 40’s were well known for such tactics, as are the military dictatorships found in many parts of the developing world. However, the practice is not unknown in democratic states, although the target in that instance is seldom its own citizenry (6). Using torture in interrogations, however, creates a major problem for modern states, no matter what their ruling ideology. The difficulty attaches to modern citizenship, as is mentioned above. Citizenship in a modern state includes the notion, no matter how honored in the breach, of individual autonomy; an autonomy that is guaranteed by, among other things, citizens equal political status as members of a community (Marshall, 1965). In other words, citizens have, in theory if not in fact, equal dignity and standing in the community. That standing is obviously and deeply undermined when the state adopts torture as an interrogation technique or uses it to maintain prison discipline. It is this standing that makes torture so difficult to analyze as an institutional phenomena. No modern state has statutes in place that either mandate or condone torture. As we shall see, when torture is practiced, it is commonly done within an ad hoc

32

framework that seldom officially describes the actual techniques that evolve and, of course, records are seldom kept. How, then, are we to approach analyzing it? In a recent article, Helmke and Livitsky (2004) point the way by proposing a theoretical framework for examining informal political institutions. They define informal institutions as “… socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created. communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels (Helmke and Levitsky 2004, 727).” They further divide such informal institutions into types depending on how they fall under two dimensions. First, the outcomes favored by formal and informal institutions may agree or diverge; second, formal institutions may be be effective in constraining informal ones or ineffective in doing so. The four types of informal institution that result - complementary, accommodating, substitutive, and competing - can be characterized depending on how they combine these dimensions (Helmke and Levitsky 2004, 728-30). I postulate in the following sections that the use of torture in interrogations by modern states is an example of an accommodating informal institution. As Helmke and Livitsky (2004, 729) say, “Accommodating informal institutions are often create by actors who dislike outcomes generated by the formal rules, but are unable to change or openly violate those rules. As such, they often help to reconcile these actors interests with the existing formal institutional arrangements. Hence, although accommodating informal institutions may not be efficiency enhancing, they may enhance the stability of formal institutions by dampening demands for change.” Such informal institutions can be brought into existence by relatively minor changes in formal rules that change the incentives offered to actors. By the same token, however, formal rules can be subsequently quickly modified to bring sanctions against those still using accommodating, but informal, rules (Helmke and Livitsky 2004). As we shall see, these concepts help explain the emergence of torture in our two cases. Torture as an Accommodating Informal Institution in the United States 33

“… the war against terrorism is a new kind of war … The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American citizens … In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners …." - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Memorandum for the President, 25 January 2002 (Gonzales 2002, in Danner 2004, 84). “However, I stand for 8 - 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” - Handwritten note by Donald Rumsfeld in Action Memo: Counter-Resistance Techniques (Rumsfeld 2002, in Greenberg and Dratel 2005, 237) I have asserted above that the War on Terror has two complementary purposes. The first, of course, is the defense of United States from further attacks. Shortly after the war on Afghanistan was launched in 2001, the United States was informed that before the September attacks Osama bin Laden and his chief aid, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had met with officials from the Pakistani atomic energy commission concerning the acquisition of nuclear weapons (Suskind 2006). The nightmare scenario of a nuclear armed al Qaeda understandably increased the pressure to acquire as much intelligence about terrorist networks as possible in the shortest time feasible. Substantial data concerning the terrorist organization had already been seized during the Afghan campaign. The capture of hundreds of al Qaeda operatives and fellow travelers during the Afghan campaign presented a golden opportunity to gain the information necessary to flesh it out (Suskind 2006). But that also presented difficulties. There were considerable differences between the CIA and FBI concerning the use of “extreme” interrogation techniques. According to Suskind (2006), the Bureau favored the more conventional interrogation methods they had used effectively in previous operations against terrorist networks. Such strategies, however, take time; they depend on the establishment of trust by interrogators. Given the situation and the almost total lack of solid intelligence about the terrorists and their plans, the CIA felt it was necessary to 34

use more intense methods of questioning. As 2002 began, these matters were the subject of an extensive secret debate within the executive branch of the government over the legal limitations on interrogation techniques. This debate considered two questions in different successive phases. The first, in early 2002, concerned whether the detainees from the Afghan War should be extended the protections of the Geneva Conventions (hereinafter GC) concerning prisoners of war. The Department of Justice reached the conclusion that neither the Taliban or al Qaeda were state actors or signatories of the Conventions. Hence the War on Terror was not an intra-state conflict and the GC did not attach. Consequently, the controlling federal statute, the War Crimes Act, did not apply to treatment of detainees either. Further, the President’s powers as commander in chief under both the Constitution and the AUMF allowed him to direct the actions of the armed forces, including treatment of prisoners, during time of war in any manner he saw fit (Gonzales 2002, Bybee 2002a). The Department of State, as might be expected from a bureau headed by a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disagreed strongly. They pointed to the long history of adherence to the GC in all conflicts by the United States and to the attendant dangers to U.S. personnel who might become prisoners during the conflict if the Conventions were held to not apply (Taft 2002). On 7 February 2002, President Bush accepted Justice’s position and decided that Taliban and al Qaeda captives were “unlawful combatants”, a classification new to both U.S. and international law, and that the GC did not apply to them. He directed, however, that “… the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva (Bush 2002, in Danner 2004, 106).” The second phase of debate concerned the actual techniques that could be used to interrogate unlawful combatants under U.S. and international law. Here the debate 35

turned on the nature of torture itself. The Department of Justice held that to reach the level of torture an interrogation technique had to intentionally inflict severe pain or mental suffering and that a “… level that would be ordinarily associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions (Bybee 2002b, in Danner 2004, 115)” would alone suffice for torture to occur. Cruel, inhumane, or degrading techniques, while forbidden by the GC, could be applied to Taliban and al Qaeda detainees since the President had decided that the GC did not apply to them. Further, criminal liability did not attach under U.S. law unless such severe pain was inflicted intentionally (Yoo 2002). Soon afterward, the Department of Defense received a request for further direction concerning interrogation techniques for use at the Guantanamo Bay detention center (hereinafter GTMO) where most of the Afghan captives were held. The result was a confusing set of memoranda from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld first approving a variety of techniques, including some that all involved agreed violated the GC, then partially rescinding them a month later (Haynes 2002, Rumsfeld 2003a). Subsequently, a “Working Group” convened within the Pentagon under Secretary Rumsfeld’s orders, conducted a full review of the legality of interrogation techniques requested by GTMO commanders. They found that use of most of the techniques considered was legal and appropriate and that even those techniques that appeared to skirt the GC could be applied with proper command authority (Department of Defense 2003). Rumsfeld subsequently approved the use of most of the techniques mentioned in the Working Group report (Rumsfeld 2003b). It should be obvious from these descriptions of executive policy decisions that the blurring of formal rules requisite for the formation of informal institutions had taken place by the end of 2002. By then the CIA had already begun using extreme techniques in interrogations of al Qaeda detainees at prisons in allied countries (Suskind 2006). At the Bagram Air Base “Collection Point” prison, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion 36

had also improvised abusive interrogation techniques by winter of 2002 (Bazelon 2005). The new methods sanctioned by the Working Group recommendations had been put into use by the new “Tiger Team” interrogation units created by Major General Geoffrey Miller, who took command of the GTMO Joint Task Force in 2002 (Taguba 2004). Agents of the CIA and the FBI also took part in interrogations at the base (Schmidt - Furlow 2005, Center for Constitutional Rights 2006). The subsequent abuses of detainees in Afghanistan and at GTMO have been well documented (Schmidt - Furlow 2005, Human Rights Watch 2004, Center for Constitutional Rights 2006, Physicians for Human Rights 2005). The accompanying theme to the adoption of extreme interrogation techniques was an increase in attention to the resulting intelligence at the highest levels of government. The President and Vice President, often accompanied by other members of the National Security Council, were (and are) briefed daily by representatives of all intelligence agencies and showed deep interest in the results of specific interrogations of al Qaeda and Taliban operatives (Suskind 2006). While there is no evidence that specific methods of torture were discussed in these meetings, there was little need to do so. The officials at the meetings had, after all, been those who approved the new interrogation techniques and maintaining “plausible deniability” was deemed important, particularly by the Vice President (Suskind 2006). Further, many of them had first hand knowledge of the new techniques; they had approved their use for specific interrogations (Human Rights Watch 2005). “’The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react,’ Bush said, Bremer at his side. ‘The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can’t stand the thought of a free society.’” - Partial transcript of a joint press conference by President Bush and CPA administrator Bremer (Ricks 2006, 248). 37

The second purpose of the War on Terror is to provide the justification for an ideological project providing the cement for holding the regime coalition supporting the Bush administration together. The center piece of this project was the war on Iraq and, as was pointed out above, the war was a great success initially. But problems soon arose. The final admission of a failure to find weapons of mass destruction in any quantity issued in 2004 was an embarrassment for the Bush administration, but did not undermine the narrative of democratic change in the Middle East that stood at the center of their justifications for the war (Duefler 2004). What did undermine that narrative substantially was the rapid decline of the security situation in Iraq subsequent to the military victory there. As soon became apparent, British and American forces had not been committed in sufficient numbers to fully occupy the country. Further, after the Defense Department had been given responsibility for providing a transition administration in Iraq, it also became clear that there had been little attention given to planning for it (Ricks 2006). A series of policy blunders by the newly established Coalition Provisional Authority (hereinafter CPA) - disbanding the Iraqi army, extensive de-Baa’thification, and the privatization of Iraqi industry - placed the entire occupation of Iraq under considerable pressure (Ricks 2006, Galbraith 2006). At first, the consequences of these mistakes were only troubling: increasing levels of crime, widespread looting, extensive unemployment, a general breakdown in public services, and, ominously, small scale guerilla attacks on coalition soldiers. One might expect as much in the aftermath of most wars, but by August 2003 the situation had become much more worrying. In that month, car bomb attacks in Baghdad on the Jordanian embassy and United Nations headquarters had killed and wounded scores of Iraqi and foreign nationals. Further coordinated attacks in October against Red Cross headquarters, police stations, and hotels frequented by foreigners in Baghdad made it clear 38

to all involved that a full scale insurgency against the coalition occupation had been launched. This was confirmed when most international organizations and diplomatic missions subsequently withdrew from the country (Ricks 2006). The command response to the situation was to intensify the war and to increase the demand for tactical intelligence (Ricks 2006). This created some further difficulties for civilian and military commanders. Alert readers will have noticed that, unlike the Afghan war, detainees taken in the conflict in Iraq were never deprived of GC protections; President Bush’s 7 February memorandum is quite clear on this point and was never superseded. However, as subsequent investigations have made clear, executive decisions - including the memorandum itself - delineating the limitations of GC protections were both confusing and contradictory (Schlesinger 2004). The new push to obtain operational intelligence that would help quell the insurgency in Iraq did not improve the situation. U.S. forces now using sweeps of insurgent territory and mass arrests that sent large numbers of detainees to the CPA prison network maintained by the military in Iraq, a prison system already full to the brim with Iraqi criminals and seriously understaffed in trained corrections and intelligence personnel (Ricks 2006, Schlesinger 2004, Taguba 2004). It was that system that now absorbed the expectations of the entire civilian and military command structure of United States armed forces concerning the need to suppress the insurgency. “While eating at the dining facility at Camp Victory, SPC Mitchell, an MI guard, told an entire table full of laughing soldiers about how the MPs had shown him and other soldiers how to knock someone out and to strike a detainee without leaving marks. They had practiced these techniques on unsuspecting detainees, after watching, he had participated himself." - Prepared Statement, Samuel J. Provence (Provence 2006, 4). Those expectations created a situation where an expansion of the use of torture techniques in interrogations as an accommodating informal institution was predictable. For as Iraq slid toward chaos, the public image of American success, an image closely 39

attuned to the leadership narrative adopted as the War on Terror emerged, was relentlessly reiterated by the President and other administration officials. It was clear what the Bush administration wanted from its Iraqi proconsul and its military commanders: victory over the insurgency and a vindication of the strategic vision of a newly “democratized” Iraq, the first step in changing the Middle East to more closely suit American policy objectives (Suskind 2006, Danner 2004). It was as clear to those “on the ground” that, far from being defeated, the insurgency continued to gain strength throughout 2003 and 2004. To defeat it interrogations had to produce information for tactical operations and quickly. Guidelines for such interrogations were sadly lacking. Given the successful intelligence gathering operations at GTMO and the need to greatly increase the flow of military intelligence, Major General Miller and a team from his GTMO task force was seconded to Iraq on 31 August 2003 to report on intelligence operations there and propose new methods (Miller 2003, Taguba 2004). This was a short mission, but had widespread ramifications. As later investigations of the field interrogations conducted by U.S. armed forces revealed, many abuses had already become common practice in some units. With trained interrogators in short supply, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the new commander in Iraq, had allowed general officers in the field to issue orders on field interrogations with highly variable results (Ricks 2006). The resulting situation threatened to spin out of control, especially when the mass arrests sharply increased the number of detainees, most with no intelligence value and held solely for prophylactic purposes ( Jones and Fay 2004, ICRC 2004)(7). Major General Miller’s mission made several suggestions, all based on the GTMO experience: the establishment of a Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center (JIDC) to control interrogations and collate intelligence, using military police in cooperation with military intelligence personnel, use of “Tiger Team” interrogation units, and review of the legal aspects of interrogations in Iraq (Miller 2003, Taguba 2004, Jones and Fay 2004). These suggestions 40

were reinforced by verbal briefings and policy documents concerning the kinds of interrogation techniques used at GTMO promulgated by a follow-up team dispatched by Miller (Jones and Fay 2004, Public Broadcasting System 2005b). Subsequently, Lieutenant General Sanchez issued policies sanctioning several of the GTMO interrogation practices (Danner 2004, Human Rights Watch 2005). Sanchez had been under considerable pressure, including frequent teleconferences with an increasingly impatient Secretary of Defense; a pressure he redirected down line to his military intelligence chief, Colonel Thomas Pappas (Human Rights Watch 2005, Public Broadcasting System 2005b, Danner 2004). Soon new teams of interrogators, dominated by civilian contractors and prescreened by Miller, were arriving at Abu Ghraib to join others already experienced in similar techniques (Public Broadcasting System 2005b). Since intelligence at Abu Ghraib was handled initially by elements of the same 519th Military Intelligence Battalion that had already extemporized extreme techniques at Bagram the year before, the transition was an easy one, again driven by word of mouth transfers of advice and techniques (Jones and Fay 2004). Soon a hodgepodge of poorly trained, understaffed military intelligence and police units and civilian interrogator teams, without clear lines of command or responsibility, and under tremendous pressure to produce “actionable” data, were taking the lead in creatively expanding the envelop of interrogation techniques to the elaborations found in table 1 of this paper (Danner 2004, Ricks 2006). “The terrorists who declared war on America represent no nation, they defend no territory, and they wear no uniform. They do not mass armies on borders, or flotillas of warships on the high seas. They operate in the shadows of society; they send small teams of operatives to infiltrate free nations; they live quietly among their victims; they conspire in secret, and then they strike without warning. In this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists, themselves. Captured terrorists have unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate. … As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so 41

the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why -- if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” - President George W. Bush, Speech on 6 September 2006 (Bush 2006). When the initial revelations about detainee abuses in Iraq surfaced publicly on 28 and 30 April 2004, the administration faced a major strategic crisis. Criminal investigations had already been launched by the army in January of that year when Spc. Joseph Darby had passed photographic evidence of abuses in the “hard site” at Abu Ghraib to the army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Subsequent reports by Major General Antonio Taguba and Lieutenant General Anthony Jones and Major General George Fay on the military police and military intelligence units at Abu Ghraib had already shown how extensive the use of extreme interrogation techniques had become and how completely discipline had collapsed as the informal institutions accommodating torture and abuse became established (Taguba 2004, Jones and Fay 2004). But these investigations had been classified and were conducted under military law, conditions that made handling the entire matter within the military’s command structure easy enough. Having pictures of detainee abuse and summaries of the investigative reports broadcast through national and international media outlets presented a qualitatively different problem. Recalling Helmke and Levitsky again, informal institutions are often “… created by actors who dislike outcomes generated by the formal rules but are unable to change or openly violate those rules (2004, 729).” This is often done in situations where goals unacceptable by either national or international publics are concerned (Helmke and Levitsky 2004). The administration’s response was a classic example of handling an accommodating informal institution when it is exposed. First, the premise of criticisms based 42

on the revelations was denied. Here the initial legal obfuscations deriving from the secret debate concerning torture proved useful. By depending on the narrow definitions of torture and the expansive view of the President’s authority concerning interrogation methods contained in the memos circulated by the Department of Justice, administration officials simply denied that the extreme interrogation methods used in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq rose to the level of torture. This line of defense, however, became more tenuous over time as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other organizations pressed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests through government bureaucracies and, where necessary, the courts. FOIA documents soon revealed wide swaths of data concerning the extent and varieties of techniques used that called American adherence to the GC into question. That the revelations came in the midst of a hotly contested general election campaign did nothing to make the administration’s positions on these questions easier. The Supreme Court’s subsequent decisions in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (542 US 507 2004) and, especially, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (548 US _____ 2006) further undermined the legal distinctions that had been used in this line of defense (Lederman 2006a). In Hamdan the Court decided that Common Article Three of the GC, forbidding not only torture but also cruel, humiliating, and degrading treatment, not only applied to detainees the administration deemed unlawful combatants, but was also enforceable in federal courts as part of American treaty obligations. Since violations of Common Article Three are criminalized under the War Crimes Act, the Court’s decision called the entire framework used for extreme interrogation of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees into question (Lederman 2006a). The second line of defense by the administration is being pursued presently and also fits well in Helmke and Levitsky’s framework. On 6 September 2006, President Bush, at the end of a long internal debate concerning the interrogation techniques and detention responsibilities of the CIA, proposed new legislation to give form to present 43

policies (Liptak 2006, Linzer and Kessler 2006). In his speech on that day, the President admitted that the CIA had been running a secret prison system for some time and using what he referred to as “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives held there. He proposed new legislation that, among other objectives, would allow the “alternative set of procedures” to continue in use by the CIA and the re-establishment of secret prisons by the agency should future situations warrant it (Liptak 2006, Lederman 2006b). There would also be amendments made to the War Crimes Act to immunize CIA operatives using the techniques, to limit the scope of the application of Common Article 3 of the GC to extreme interrogation techniques, and to limit or eliminate judicial review of cases stemming from their use (Lederman 2006c). On the same day, the U.S. Army issued a new field manual for interrogations that specifically forbids the use of many of the abusive techniques discovered in investigations in Afghanistan and Iraq (Barnes 2006). Here, again, we see a vindication of Helmke and Levitsky’s (2004, 732) approach; as they point out, one of the quickest ways to effect institutional change to solidify the benefits of informal institutions is to change the formal rules to sanction informal behavior. Torture as an Accommodating Informal Institution in the Soviet Union “The abolition of classes is not achieved by the extinction of the class struggle, but by its intensification. The state will wither away, not as a result of weakening the state power, but as a result of strengthening it to the utmost, which is necessary for finally crushing the remnants of the dying classes and for organizing defense against the capitalist encirclement that is far from having been done away with as yet, and will not soon be done away with.” - J. Stalin (Stalin 1976, 626) “Isn’t it time to squeeze this gentleman and make him tell about his dirty deeds? Where is he, in prison or in a hotel?” - Handwritten note from J. Stalin to N. Ezhov (Starkov 1993, 29)

44

In 1933, with the economic situation in the Soviet Union somewhat better, there was a perceptible thaw in the legal air. Instructions were issued by the Politburo restricting the use of the notoriously severe 7 August law protecting “social property” and mass arrests were curtailed (Benevenuti 1997, Getty and Naumov 1999). In 1934 an All-Union Procuracy for overseeing courts and police was established and, at Stalin’s suggestion, a new All-Union security agency, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) was created. This new bureau combined the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration, the state security agency) with the state militia (police), border guards, and a host of other functionaries ( Benevenuti 1997, Thurston 1996). In the process, the administrative troikas and the special “colleges” the OGPU used to independently sentence people for criminal offenses and for deportation were eliminated and their jurisdiction transferred to civilian and military courts (Benevenuti 1997, Thurston 1996). The new NKVD had been recast as an investigative and security agency overseen by the Procuracy, much to the chagrin of its narkom (People’s Commissar) G. Yagoda (Benevenuti 1997). This situation was not to last, however. First, while some restraints on the NKVD had been introduced, the level of social disorder in the country as a whole required the new agency to keep administrative discretion to use mass arrests to deport “socially harmful elements” - i.e. criminals, those without proper identification, “professional” beggars, ect. - from the cities (Shearer 2003). Given limited resources and manpower of the NKVD and the constant organizational upheavals accompanying the introduction of a planned economy, normal police operations were simply not feasible. Yagoda continued to press for a reduction of oversight based on the success of these “mass operations” and the resulting reductions of crime rates, but without success (Shearer 2003). Getting the NKVD entirely out of surpressing social unrest, however, was impossible; despite slight improvements in standards of living, the country was still in deep turmoil. 45

The second development was more ominous. On 1 December 1934, the general secretary of the Leningrad party organization and Politburo member S. Kirov was assassinated by a disgruntled party member, L. Nikolaev. While controversy continues about the genesis and cause of this murder, there is no controversy about its results for the budding legal reforms; it stopped them dead in their tracks (8). On the train to Leningrad on the day of the murder, Stalin composed a new extraordinary law aimed at terrorist organizations. The law ordered that all investigations of such activity be completed within 10 days and all cases be sent to court to be heard without either defense or prosecution attorneys present. No appeals of the decisions were permitted and the death penalty could be applied (Thurston 1996 Getty and Naumov 1999). In a stroke, the limitations that had been evolving were eliminated. The new law was applied quickly to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and many of their old comrades. They were accused of operating a terrorist “center” (the first of many supposedly found in this period) in cooperation with Trotsky and of complicity in Kirov’s death. Since the NKVD was unable to substantiate the murder charges, both of the old opposition leaders were sentenced to substantial prison terms after a speedy trial (Thurston 1996). However, when N. Yezhov, the secretary of the Central Committee and head of the Party Control Commission, reported to the Central Committee in 1936 that party “purges”, although involving nothing more than an exchange of party cards, had led to the expulsion of fully 17.7 percent of all party members as spies, former “White Guards” (i.e. czarist soldiers or officials), disguised kulaks, petty criminals, or, most ominously, “Trotskyite - Zinovievite” adherents, the elite of the party was deeply concerned (Thurston 1996, Getty and Naumov 1999). No wonder there was intense interest in the ongoing NKVD investigations of underground activity. In all of this, however, there was no systematic use of torture by the “competent organs”. Criminal suspects and kulaks could expect to be roughed up (and sometimes 46

much worse) during arrest, interrogation, and deportation (Conquest 1990) (9). Further, some defendants in the early show trials of 1929 - 30 were almost certainly beaten by their interrogators and subjected to threats and sleep deprivation if they showed reluctance to confess to their offenses (Conquest 1990, Solzhenitsyn 1973). However, such action was against regulations unless sanctioned by signed orders from the proper authorities and was sporadic as a consequence (Conquest 1990, Solzhenitsyn 1973). This soon changed. As a result of further investigations, Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought to Moscow to be put on trial for their lives, along with 14 codefendants (Hosteller 2003). Interrogation was put in the hands of the NKVD with expectations of further revelations of conspiracies against the regime. This caused some distress among their interrogators; after all, the lead defendants were long time party members, close comrades of Lenin himself, and had held leadership positions in the party. Further, Yagoda had issued orders that interrogations were to proceed without threats or physical abuse of any kind (Orlov, 1953). But such a course became increasingly difficult. The defendants had not, in fact, done anything like the crimes they were accused of. However, Stalin, his suspicions fully aroused by recent events and intelligence reports from both Yezhov and Yagoda, had decided that an example needed to be made and the supposed terrorist conspiracy against his leadership eliminated (Thurston 1996, Getty and Naumov 1999). He was soon pressing Yagoda for the confessions that would substantiate the case being built around the “conspirators”. As these pressures mounted, the barriers against physical pressure on party cadres buckled and, finally, broke. Interrogators using more “forceful” methods seemed to be getting results and their methods were slowly adopted by many of their peers (Orlov 1953). A show trial for Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936 featured their confessions and ended in their conviction on charges based on Article 58 of the new Criminal Code (Hostettler 2003)(10). Thier deaths soon followed. 47

Again, we see the blurring of institutional boundaries Helmke and Levitsky predict. In this case, of course, the process was much easier since the boundaries themselves were so permeable. The Stalinist leadership had never wholeheartedly embraced limitations on the administrative use of repression, despite the reform of the security organs and the renewed emphasis on “socialist legality” (Benevenuti 1997, Thurston 1996). While legal restraints on some NKVD activity had continued, the murder of Kirov and the promulgation of the 1 December law, along with the continuation of limited mass arrests, had laid the groundwork for a return to widespread repression. Both the leadership and the party had been deeply shocked by Kirov’s death and a new atmosphere of diligent self-defense resulted (Getty and Naumov 1999). Further, while Zinoviev and Kamenev probably never were involved in much more than clandestine discussions of politics, there had, in fact, been contacts between their followers and Trotsky during the recent past, contacts that they had lied about to their interrogators (Thurston 1996). Finally, the international position of the Soviet Union had substantially deteriorated. By 1936 the Soviet government was wary of the increasingly aggressive and virulently anticommunist fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. Without firm allies and faced with a quiescent League of Nations, the Stalinist leadership felt that war with powerful and ruthless enemies was a growing threat (Tucker 1990, Thurston 1996). This crisis atmosphere in elite circles had much the same effect in the party as it did 70 years later in the United States. It generated almost irresistible pressure from the highest levels of leadership to root out a conspiracy that threatened to undermine the nation’s security and to leave concerns about the niceties of the methods used to another day. “We must bear in mind that the growth of the power of the Soviet state will increase the resistance of the last remnants of the dying classes. It is precisely because they are dying, and living their last days that they will pass from one form of attack to another, to sharper forms of attack, appealing to the backward strata of the population, and mobilizing them against the Soviet power. There is no foul lie or slander that these 'have-beens' would not use against the Soviet power and around which 48

they would not try to mobilize the backward elements. … Of course, there is nothing terrible in this. But we must bear all this in mind if we want to put an end to these elements quickly and without great loss.” - J. Stalin (Stalin 1976, 627) The trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev shocked both elites and the population as a whole; it seemed that the government had been severely compromised by a combination of foreign and Trotskyite intriguers (Thurston 1996, Getty and Naumov 1999). This public undermining of the party’s unanimity combined with the continuing disorders in the raw new cities thrown up by the Five Year Plan and a sudden slowdown in economic growth to severely strain the Stalinist leadership (Manning 1993 Shearer 2003). If the suppression of opposition and frog-marching the country into a planned economy produced only continuing and, apparently, increasing social disruption, the glue that allowed the Stalinist regime to overcome its orthodox innovator roots and push the “Stalinist - Leninist” social project forward might dissolve. Stalin took action to insure this would not happen soon after the August 1936 show trial by moving his protégé Yezhov into Yagoda’s position as narkom of the NKVD (Thurston 1996). This personnel move had as profound an effect on the NKVD and its use of torture in interrogations as the mission of Major General Miller had on interrogations in Iraq. As has already been mentioned, Yezhov had been in charge of conducting party “purges” in his position as Chairman of the Party Control Commission (Sartov 1993, Thurston 1996). Also, Stalin had used Yezhov in a series of missions aimed at investigating the work of the NKVD after Kirov’s murder; indeed, Yezhov had been in charge of the actual investigation of the murder itself, not Yagoda (Sartov 1993). By the summer of 1936, Yezhov was directing widespread NKVD investigations into suspected conspiracies (Sartov 1993, Getty and Naumov 1999). Replacing Yagoda meant a great opportunity for him, so long as his investigations bore fruit and quickly. Yezhov immediately moved to purge Yagoda’s favorites from the NKVD and put the organization on notice 49

that a new and firmer hand was at the wheel (Sartov 1993). The inevitable followed. In December 1936, Ezhov brought changes of treasonous activities against a second group of prominent Soviet leaders, all former adherents of the “Right Opposition”. In January 1937, Y. Piatakov, Deputy narkom for Heavy Industry, K. Radek, a former head of Comintern, and 15 others were tried and convicted, again using Article 58 (Hostettler 2003, Thurston 1996). Piatakov’s old superior at Heavy Industry, S. Ordzhonikidze died, probably by his own hand, soon afterwards (Thurston 1996). Still, there was no sudden increase in administrative repression overall at this juncture. In part this may be because of the mixed signals from the leadership. Stalin, in particular, seemed of two minds. He continued to call for increased vigilance and obviously supported - indeed directed - Ezhov’s increasing intrusions in the party’s business (Thurston 1996, Khlevnuik 2003). By the same token, however, he also continued to caution against hasty judgments about party members and continually shied away from support for draconian punishments and “mass operations” (Thurston 1996, Getty and Naumov 1999). Then in May 1937, Ezhov’s agents, acting on the confessions tortured out of several Red Army officers in custody for Trotskyite leanings, arrested Field Marshal Tukhachevsky, Generals Kork, Yakir, and Uborevich, and several other officers. After being tortured themselves (Tukhachevsky’s confession reportedly was found stained with blood), all the defendants were tried and executed (Thurston 1996, Getty and Naumov 1999). Subsequently in July, the Politburo issued Order 00447, establishing new administrative troiki for the NKVD and ordering the agency to arrest and try “... former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements” using “simplified procedures”. Those found to be “the most active” were to be shot; others were to be imprisoned for 8 to 10 years. The order included a list of limits on executions totaling more than 72,000 people (Getty and Naumov 1999, 473 - 480). The Yezhovchina had begun.

50

“‘A Chekist must not only be a good investigator, but a politician as well,’ said Molchanov significantly. “He must be able to judge what concerns him and what does not, what has been written for him and what was written for political reasons.’ “How could we know?’ said one of the investigators. “The circular was signed by the People’s Commissar himself and addressed directly to us.’ ‘Now you know!’ retorted Molchanov. ‘I am telling you officially in the name of the People’s Commissar: Go back to your prisoners and give them the works.’” - G. Molchanov, head of the Secret Political Department of the GUPG, to NKVD interrogators concerning interpretation of a 1936 circular from G. Yagoda forbidding the use of physical threats against prisoners (Orlov 1953, 73 - 4).

As in the United States later, the Stalinist leadership clung tenaciously to the leadership narrative it had developed. The sudden turn to administrative repression was played as a necessary step to insure the country’s national security from a new category of villain, the “enemies of the people” (Fitzpatrick 1999). Further, it was clear what Stalin wanted from “the organs”: he wanted opposition to the regime pulled up by the roots and destroyed. Only that would vindicate the course he had set the state on and maintain the political mechanisms needed to solidify his leadership and the party’s “leading role” in the new Soviet Union. Further, the whole process of “unmasking” enemies and scapegoating regime opponents helped distract mass attention form the obvious problems that still faced “socialist construction” (Fitzpatrick 1999). The demands on the NKVD for arrest, investigation, and trial of the “enemies of the people” escalated at once (Fitzpatrick 1999, Solzhenitsyn 1973). In many ways, the situation replicated the later experience of the United States in Iraq. It will be recalled that Yezhov had replaced many of the experienced investigators that Yagoda had slowly built up during his tenure. Now, faced with directives calling for mass arrests - the official number of arrests in 1937 - 38 was 1,575,259 - and administrative trials, the NKVD had to ramp up the personnel needed quickly (Getty and Naumov 1999). As in Iraq, the result was a immense influx of quickly trained, inexperienced interrogators and investi51

gators all under immense pressure from the country’s leadership to arrest, convict, and execute vast numbers of the government’s enemies (Sartov 1993, Thurston 1996). Further, the “simplified procedures” used by the troiki favored confessions; developing cases based on actual evidence took time and, in most cases, the accused had not actually done anything (Solzhenitsyn 1973). The actual history of how torture metastasized in the ranks of the NKVD is not as detailed as the record available to us from U.S. sources; the NKVD was not overseen by a judge advocate general’s corps and a CID - CIS, nor subject to a Freedom of Information Act. What we do know, however, suggests that Yezhov solved the problem of expediting investigations under Order 00447 by abolishing the already weakened constraints in the NKVD on torture. As in Iraq, this was done informally and secretly. Yeshov set the example himself by participating in interrogations where prisoners were severely beaten by NKVD “bone-breakers”, as the specialists in torture were known (Sartov 1993, Conquest 1990). He also had memoranda concerning “progressive experiments” in interrogation techniques circulated (Sartov 1993). Yezhov’s new recruits, knowing little or nothing about how to conduct a sophisticated examination, took the narkom as a template for their own work and began, like their American counterparts later, to experiment on their own. Soon the use of torture as an interrogation technique had generalized throughout the entire NKVD network; the interrogators were already convinced that the defendants were guilty and Yezhov, whose reputation as a defender of the socialist state was very high at the time, had shown them the way forward (Sartov 1993). Indeed, Solzhenitsyn’s sarcastic comment that NKVD interrogators “’… learned from the most successful workers’” about torture methods is probably very close to the mark (Solzhenitsyn 1973, 102). Add in the zeal of local troiki for exceeding the limits set by Moscow and Stalin’s reluctance to give direction to the entire enterprise, combined with his continuing insistence that it was necessary to mercilessly crush opposition elements 52

in Soviet society, and the scenario for widespread establishment of use of torture as an accommodating informal institution is complete (Thurston 1996, Getty and Naumov 1999). “The Central Committee of the VKP(b) explains that the application of methods of physical pressure in NKVD practice was made permissible in 1937 … It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services use methods of physical influence against the representatives of the socialist proletariat and they use them in the most scandalous forms. The question arises as to why the socialist intelligence service should be more humane against the fanatical agents of the bourgeoisie, against the deadly enemies of the working class and the kolholz peasants. The Central Committee considers that physical pressure should still be used unconditionally, as an appropriate and justifiable method, in exceptional cases against known and obstinate enemies of the people.” -Secret telegram sent by the Central Committee to all party and NKVD units from district level up, 10 January 1939 (Khlevnuik 2003, 31). The highpoint of Yezhov’s influence in his era was probably the March 1938 show trial of N. Bukarin, A. Rykov, G. Yagoda, and 17 others (Hostettler 2003). But the toll taken by almost 700,000 executions in less then two years, executions that in most cases were based on little or no real evidence, had begun to wear on both the party and the general population (Getty and Naumov 1999). Most of the executions had, in fact, been of particular classes of ordinary citizens: kulaks, foreigners, “socially harmful elements”, and the like (McLoughlin 2003). Still, the large numbers of former opposition party members killed had a chilling effect on the remaining cadres. Further, the spectacle of the unseemly competition between NKVD units to stretch the limits placed on executions enraged party members (Getty and Naumov 1999). The clearest signal of coming change, one that must have given Yezhov pause as he remembered his own career, was Stalin’s appointment of L. Beria as Yezhov’s deputy in November 1938. Though a longstanding Chekist, Beria was a complete outsider, obviously brought in to give the Stalinist leadership another set of eyes inside the NKVD (Getty and Naumov 1999). Not long afterwards, the Politburo issued a secret directive severely criticizing the NKVD, sus53

pending mass arrests, abolishing the troiki, and calling for a return to legal procedure, overseen by the procuracy (Getty and Naumov 1999). Yezhov’s resignation soon followed. He was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940 (Sartov 1993). Again the sequence laid out by Helmke and Levitsky was followed. The regime never admitted that torture had become commonplace or that the mass operations of the NKVD took place. Instead, the emphasis, at least for party members, was on the “excesses” of Yezhov’s tenure in office (Getty and Naumov 1999). Once the decision had been made to rein in the security agencies, it proved fairly easy to do so. The tools were similar to those used later by the Bush administration as well. Since Stalin had no need to fear journalistic inquiries into the leadership’s actions, no allegations of abuse were allowed to reach general public exposure. Given the targeted nature of the arrests and the constant propaganda about the evil nature of the targets, there appeared to be public acceptance of the necessity of the terror (Thurston 1996). The party elite was placated by assurances that, while the NKVD had done great things in ridding the country of enemies, it had not shown sufficient care for legal procedure in doing so (Getty and Naumov 1999, Getty 2002). Further, when regional party and NKVD organizations began to bring charges against some of the more notorious torturers, the Central Committee sent the secret telegram excerpted above explaining that a decision had been made in 1937 allowing “physical pressure” in “… exceptional cases against known and obstinate enemies of the people (Khlevnuik 2003, 31)(11).” This exercise of executive discretion both kept the option of using torture in interrogations open and allowed the leadership and the party to begin to reassert control over the NKVD through calling for a return to sanctioned norms, albeit more flexible ones (Khlevnuik 2003). Discussion A paper involving such a controversial comparison and on such a controversial subject is almost certain to be misinterpreted. Consequently, a discussion of the arguments 54

made here should probably begin by addressing the most obvious sources of possible misunderstanding. First, some might be tempted to see this paper as an attempt to directly compare the personalities of George W. Bush and Stalin. After all, both men played pivotal roles in the pattern of decision-making that led to the routine use of torture in interrogations. Actually, however, nothing could be further from the truth then such a comparison. The whole purpose of this paper has been to avoid reading the institutional situations that led to the use of torture as an accommodating informal institution in the United States and the Soviet Union as a result of the personalities of the leaders involved. There are some superficial similarities between the two men, particularly in their determination, willingness to take risks, and ideological certainty (Tucker 1990, Suskind 2004b). However, a fuller contrast between the personalities of the two leaders is one of the best pieces of supporting evidence for the institutional perspective offered here. George W. Bush, by all reports, is a compassionate and stable individual with a strong moral sense and religious convictions (Suskind 2004b, 2006). There is little evidence that he has enthusiastically embraced either mass imprisonment or the use of abusive techniques; rather he seems to see them as a matter of national necessity forced on the United States by a relentless enemy (Suskind 2006). Stalin, on the other hand, was a vainglorious and paranoid individual, driven by irrational fears and characterized by an almost sociopathic ruthlessness (Tucker 1990, Medvedev 1999). It takes a special kind of individual to sign death warrants for thousands of people as part of everyday business; Stalin did it regularly during the Yezhovchina (Getty and Naumov 1999). Indeed, Stalin seems to have been driven by a desire to force his opponents to swallow their pride and kowtow to his decisions in every sphere of their lives (Tucker 1990, Solzhenitsyn 1973). There is no mistaking that George W. Bush is a “hard case”, but, even at his worst, he does not approach this kind of behavior (Suskind 2006).

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The second misinterpretation that might be made of this paper involves the question of moral equivalence. Both polities studied here informally instituted torture and some might take this as a claim that there is no substantial difference between them, at least on this subject. Here again I must caution readers against any such misunderstanding. Moral questions are always a matter of degree. It is true that torturing people must be considered wrong and that both states did it. On the other hand, the Soviet Union used torture as an adjunct process that led to the deaths, by official count, of 681,692 people in less than two years and to the incarceration, often on manufactured charges and in horrendous conditions, of better than one million more in the 1930s (Getty and Naumov 1999). The war in Iraq has led to a substantial number of Iraqi deaths and many Iraqis have been imprisoned, often for no more cause and in conditions just as extreme as those found in the Soviet Union. Still, any sense of proportionality between the results of the two cases would not find them morally comparable. Americans have no cause to feel vindicated by the comparison this paper makes, but they have no reason to abandon hope of retrieving their national reputation either. The third caution concerns the scope of this essay. It should be obvious that the framework I have suggested here is not a general explanation for the adoption of torture as an interrogation technique. Torture has been used by both authoritarian and democratic governments. It has been done for different reasons in different situations: to obtain information about political opponents and repress them, to surpress armed uprisings, to intimidate subject populations, to exhault over enemies. My research problem here is a simpler one. I am seeking to explain why the United States set in train policies that led to the institutionalization of the use of torture. One would be hard pressed to find a state with less national interest in doing so or with a political culture less favorable initially to such a development. Further, most of the alternative explanations of this development, as I pointed out above, are lacking in one aspect or another. What I have 56

presented here is a new approach to this phenomena based on comparative historical narratives. By the same token, however, that explanation is a subset of a much wider set of theoretical speculations on this topic. Placing the argument I have made here into a more general picture of the adoption of torture is a project for another day. That said, what have we learned from this exercise? The usefulness of comparative historical narratives built on an institutional approach for examining the adoption of torture by the United States has been revealed in several ways. First, the comparative sequences in the United States and the Soviet Union have revealed, as Davenport, Armstrong, and Moore (2006) predicted, the fragility of both institutional and cultural constraints on the use of torture under crisis conditions. Recall the comparison of the two cases in table 2. The United States is a well developed, highly institutionalized polity, supposedly bound by the rule of law and by civilized values for better than two centuries. The Soviet Union was, at the time of the Yezhovchina, a new state with a ruling elite that struggled with the balance of political expediency and legal procedures. Yet both, under very similar conditions, succumbed to the widespread use of torture in interrogations, destroying in the process both regulatory and social barriers to abusive practices. In both cases the mechanism used was an accommodating informal institution, allowing decision-making elites acting in secret to blur the boundaries of sanctioned behavior while never unequivocally addressing either the practices as they developed or the possible consequences of them. In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, one hears a good deal about the need to strengthen the rule of law as a proof against further slippage toward unsanctioned abuse (ACLU 2006c). It would be wise to remember, however, just how extensive the secret debate within the Bush administration was concerning the definition of torture and its legal ramifications. Obviously, a concern about the rule of law cuts both ways, especially if the practices that result are the product of informal processes arising in crisis situations. 57

The character of those crises is the second revelation of these comparisons. One thing should be clear after reading this paper: the crises that led to the widespread use of torture in both cases were the result of policy decisions framed within the leadership narratives used to overcome the dilemmas of orthodox innovator leadership. The decision to create the informal institutional space for the use of torture on particular individuals was driven by understandable fears of substantial threats to the political arrangements of regimes in both the United States and the Soviet Union. However, it was the further expansion of the regime projects - the war in Iraq and the Five Year Plans that created the levels of opposition and disorder that led to the metastasizing of torture throughout the security agencies of both governments. As that opposition increased, as the disorder invalidated the basic premises of both leadership narratives, the capability of the regimes in question to control how torture was used decreased; accommodating informal institutions, as Helmke and Levitsky (2004) point out, can easily slip out of the grasp of those who create them. And in both cases, the result was a descent into barbarism. Third, that descent was supported by the mass publics in both the United States and the Soviet Union, at least initially. In both cases, the regimes formed narratives that cast their enemies as less than human, as threats to the people and their values, threats that had to be eliminated and suppressed. Of course, the actual denouement of these attempts to combine fear, hatred, and scapegoating for those who opposed the world the regimes tried to create was different. In the Soviet Union, while the population developed a healthy reluctance to challenge government decisions, there is little evidence that the Yezhovchina was seen as a general threat to the entire population. Indeed, if one was careful and not a member of one of the groups proscribed by Order 00447, one could have gotten through the 1937-38 years without tremendous risk (Thurston 1996). There is evidence that the general population thought that those who were tortured and 58

killed were enemies of the state anyway and, when they found that the party apparatchiks and NKVD interrogators themselves were targeted, the general reaction was that there was justice in the country after all (Thurston 1996). Since torture was still a rumor, denied by the government and not contradicted by the press, the people tended to take the Stalinist leadership at its word. Further, the party elite’s need to maintain a leadership stance that avoided orthodox innovator dilemmas was strong enough to withstand the party’s assault on itself (Getty and Naumov 1999). In the United States, the picture is different, largely because the exposure of the abuses of detainees has created a massive public problem for the Bush regime. Still, for a not inconsiderable part of the population and much of the Republican elite, the entire matter of a public debate about the torture of terrorists is considered not just a distraction that threatens national security, but an aid to the terrorists akin to treasonous action (see the various expressions of this linked in Lederman 2006d). Even prominent religious organizations have joined the course calling for forms of abuse very like those used by the NKVD 70 years earlier because they protect the American people and their “values” (Lederman 2006d). Finally, there is the obvious residue of using informal institutions to generate torture as an interrogation technique. That residue is the continuation of the practice in sanctioned forms. Here we see the actual problem. In the Soviet Union, after the barriers to torture were finally destroyed, the kind of wholesale use of torture and abusive techniques in interrogations common in the Yezhovchina receded (Getty and Naumov 1999). But recall the text of the 1939 telegram: the party had not outlawed the use of torture; it had only reserved it for “… exceptional cases against known and obstinate enemies of the people (Khlevnuik 2003, 31).” The interested reader can see how much restraint this created on the security services by reading the wrenching account of the interrogation of Alexander Dallin by Minster of State Security V. Abakmukov’s assistant M. Ryumin in Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn 1973, 126 - 27). The operative part of this account is 59

that it took place in 1948, long after the end of Yezhov’s reign. The United States is today just beginning to retreat somewhat from the widespread use of torture in interrogations, much like the Soviets in 1939. It is revealing, however, that, as I write this passage, the Bush administration has put the final touches on a compromise with Senate Republicans that allows many of the abusive techniques to continue in the future (Lederman 2006c). As in the Soviet Union, the reduction of initial barriers to torture through informal institutions has had the effect of cementing the legally sanctioned place of torture in interrogations for regime enemies. Again, this conclusion tracks the groundbreaking research by Davenport and Armstrong (2005) mentioned earlier. Their study found that as the level of threat to regimes and the initial levels of torture used in the past increase, the likelihood of torture, at least the already established level of violence, is relatively constant across all types of governments. It may be that the initial commitment of the United States to abusive techniques has created the same institutional incentives to continue using them that were observed in the Soviet Union. That, in both cases, the euphemisms for torture and abuse (“alternative set of procedures”, “physical pressure”) used to introduce the newly sanctioned practices only go further to show that the use of accommodating informal institutions serves both elites and mass publics by obscuring the true nature of the policies they adopt. Conclusion "If we don't use the correct words, we live public lies. If we live public lies, the political system is a sham. When the political system is a sham, civil order and refinement deteriorate. When civil order and refinement deteriorate, injustice multiplies. As injustice multiplies, eventually the electorate is paralyzed 60

by public lawlessness. So the Sage takes for granted that he use the appropriate words, and follow through on his promises with the appropriate deeds. The Sage must simply never speak lies." - Confucius (2000) In their recent study of torture, Davenport, Armstrong, and Moore (2006) look at a variety of structural constraints on the use of torture. As they point out, while regimes with high levels of constraints on executives, less regulation of political parties, and greater electoral competition are significantly less likely to torture when not under threat, the substantive differences are much less then then one might have predicted. Further, this finding is recapitulated and strengthened when regimes are under threat. Indeed, when threat levels are high, the incidence of torture is quite similar, no matter what structural characteristics are considered. This picture is disquieting when combined with Davenport and Armstrong’s (2005) earlier assertion that, as governments gain experience with torture, even democratic regimes are likely to continue to use torture to the extent they have historically. That this tendency is especially likely when governments are under higher levels of threat has a chilling lesson for us as both scholars and citizens. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 recently signed by President Bush has sanctioned, as I pointed out above, some the torture practices used by the CIA and service intelligence agencies and, tracking the Politburo in 1939, immunized agents of all “competent organs” from further prosecution for abusive practices. The Act, however, has other provisions that should give all pause: - the ceding of power to the President to determine, in secret, what types of interrogation techniques fall under the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions; - the creation of a new category of detainee, “unlawful enemy combatants”, not recognized under the Geneva Conventions and porous in its specifications; 61

- the establishment of military troiki with substantial departures from even military legal procedures, including the admission of “coerced evidence” and limitations on the ability of defendants to confront evidence against them; - The elimination of habeus corpus for “unlawful enemy combatants” and depriving federal courts of the power to review any aspect of the incarceration of those detained under the act (Lederman 2006c). The parallels between the two cases I have presented here should be obvious, even without the use of Soviet terminology I have allowed myself here. That such legislation will be signed into law is not the root of the problem; some of its provisions are almost certainly unconstitutional and probably will not survive judicial scrutiny (Balkin 2006). Further, the application of such measures to American citizens and to prisoners of war has been specifically denied by those favoring the legislation. However, such assurances pale in comparison to the possible risks the new law entails. First, as should be clear by now, the secrecy that stands in the center of the new commission scheme sanctions as part of U.S. law exactly the conditions that allowed the development of torture as an accommodating informal institution and virtually guarantees its further metastasizing as time goes on. Recall what the conditions leading to the use of accommodating informal institutions are: a goal important to ruling elites that cannot be achieved with sanctioned mechanisms and a willingness to blur the legal barriers to the desired behavior. Space for just such a set of conditions has now been legally created. Now the exercise of executive discretion can be unfettered and challenges to both innovations in torture techniques and the justifications for them have been foreclosed to legal process. It is difficult to see how effective oversight of further developments might take place, especially since the military (recall that the new field interrogation manual specifically forbids the use of abusive techniques) may no longer be involved. It was the abuse of detainees in military custody that provided grounds for the 62

use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records of the cooperation of military and civilian intelligence agencies in torture that provided much of the public evidence concerning the practice. Now the Military Commission Act will preclude the kind of legal proceeding that could make it possible to uncover any similar actions in the future. Further, the virtually unbridled discretion the Act gives the President to determine the limits of interrogation techniques makes the prospect of prosecution of security personnel for abuses, already remote, almost impossible. Second, consider these statements in relation to the studies by Davenport and his associates already mentioned. Recall that the War on Terror is an open-ended affair, likely to continue for some time and, hence, likely to increase the manipulation of the public by changing threat levels as Presidents find political advantages in doing so. The possibility of continuous threats to security, both real and manufactured, is virtually certain. If Davenport and his associates are correct, that would mean that as threat levels accumulate over time, the likelihood of torture being used will greatly increase. It is also useful to consider their observations that the level of torture used by a state in the past, no matter what kind of regime is involved, is likely to set the level of torture used in the future and that the greater the level of threat, the less likely a regime is to reduce its willingness to torture. When these findings are tied to the capability of the executive under the Military Commissions Act to further and deepen the informal sanction of torture in interrogation by security agencies, one is faced with the daunting prospect of political expediency overwhelming the weak restraints on the use of torture by security agencies we have now put in place. In other words, at the end of a 200 year history of maintaining civil liberties, we may find ourselves facing the same kinds of elite calculations concerning regime security and political expediency that overwhelmed the attempted legal reforms in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s (Sharet 1993).

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The answer to this dilemma will probably have to be political in character. While the systematic research already cited does not provide much hope for stemming the tide of abusive interrogations now possibly stretching before us, it is instructive to remember that democratic regimes are, in fact, significantly less likely to involve themselves in torture, especially when threat levels are lowered. Here is where the Sage’s remarks that begin this final discussion should be remembered. So long as we allow possible threats to be magnified beyond reason, so long as we refuse to recognize and correctly name what we are actually doing, so long as we allow our legal proclivities to blind us to the actual character of the decision making processes that have been used to foster torture in our government, that is how long it will continue to nest there. The analytical narratives in this paper have, I hope, led the reader to see just how important “using the correct words” and exposing “public lies” have become in our country today. By reasserting the controls over our government that will expose it to retaliation by an aroused electorate, the role of torture the American polity might be eliminated. The results of the 2006 Congressional elections and the promised introduction of Senator Christopher Dodd’s Effective Terrorist Prosecution Act are hopeful signs, but much remains uncertain (Chesney 2006). After all, there is no reason to assume that the reaction to another terrorist attack would not lead to future abuses in interrogation by Democratic administrations; the pressures to do so would be very great and the precedent is already set. Addressing the practicalities of of eliminating torture as an acceptable means of interrogation by agents of the United States awaits further work.

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Notes 1. Defining torture is notoriously difficult. For the purposes of this study, I will use the definition in the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment of Punishment. It is: (a)ny act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of one with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or person acting in an official capacity (United Nations 1984). It is instructive to know that this definition was not agreed to by the United States and does not apply in federal law. 2. Prisoners have been tortured by the security agencies and armed forces of the United States in the past, but the practices were ad hoc and done through third parties. They were never subject of the kind of high level policymaking seen recently (McCoy 2006, Harbury 2006). 3. The choice of time period for the United States is arbitrary. Since these practices were developed and conducted in secret, there is no way to verify that they did not continue up until the Hamdan decision greatly increased the possible criminal liabilities involved. The decision to push for legislation to allow at least some of the abusive techniques to be used suggests that this is what happened (Bush 2006). 4. There are more aspects to this picture, of course. The steadily increasing and coordinated influence of interest groups and the Republican leadership, especially in the House, has a role to play as well. Keeping moderate Republicans behind all the President’s decisions and ramming potentially unpopular legislation through both houses takes a combination of carrot and stick (Hacker and Pierson 2006, Phillips 2006). However, the determining factor that allowed these tools to work effectively was the widespread approval of the President’s handling of the War on Terror. This tended to defang the press in particular, to the great advantage of the Republican coalition (Ricchiardi 2004). The payoff for the administration has been substantial; presidential support 65

scores for Bush during his first 5 years averaged 81.5%, the highest since the Johnson administration (Poole 2006, Kady 2006). These successes were in part due to the administration strongly backing a smaller number of bills, but the overall record is impressive, especially when the slim majorities the Republicans held in both houses are taken into account. 5. In reading the following sections, the reader should keep in mind that the Five Year Plans were based on an 1 October to 30 September planning year (Sherman 1969). Thus, the first year of the plan was from 1 October 1928 to 30 September 1929 and the last 1 October 1933 to 30 September 1934. 6. It can be, however. The record of the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland is instructive (Conlon 1994). 7. A useful discussion of the strains the mass arrests and subsequent prophylactic incarcerations created for the CPA prison system in Iraq and the military units that staffed it is part of the Fay - Jones Report (Danner 2004, 475). 8. There has been as much speculation about Kirov’s murder and Stalin’s possible role in it as there has been about George W. Bush’s role in “fixing” intelligence in the run up to the war in Iraq. Earlier work asserting a conspiracy by Stalin to eliminate Kirov (Orlov 1953) has been shown to have substantial shortcomings, but at this late date the truth of the matter will probably never be known. One thing is certain: there has been no documentary evidence or reliable testimony produced that implicates Stalin. See Getty (1993) and Lenoe (2002) for overviews of the entire matter. 9. Beatings of criminal suspects by the police during arrest and interrogation were a widespread, though seldom admitted, practice throughout the world during the 1930s. It was not until 1936 case of Brown v. Mississippi (297 US 278) that the Supreme Court declared torturing a confession out of a criminal suspect an unconstitutional violation of the due process of law. An idea of how torture was used in some American state prisons at roughly this time can be found in Burns (1997); a comparison with Solzhenitsyn’s (1973) descriptions of torture in the GULAG camps is enlightening. 10. Article 58 (Counter Revolutionary Crimes) is probably the most notorious criminal statute in Soviet law. The article’s provisions allowed for considerable flexibility in formulating criminal charges, particularly as they were amended during the late 1930s. For a description, see Solzhenitsyn (1973, 60 - 68). It was finally repealed in 1958 (Hostettler 2003). 66

11. The text of the actual Central Committee decision has not been found in the Central Committee archives, just the 1939 telegram itself (J. Arch Getty, personal correspondence, 25 May 2006).

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Appendix 2 The list of interrogation techniques in Table 1 is not intended to be comprehensive. As might be imagined, torturers do not leave complete accounts of their methods or of the incidence of them. The techniques I have included here are those listed as used in interrogations only. Needless to say, in both cases abusive techniques have been used subsequent to arrest to keep order in prisons. These are not considered in Table 1. Data in the table is drawn from two sets of sources. For the Soviet Union, I have used the comprehensive list of interrogation methods complied by Solzhenitsyn (1973) from prisoner accounts and his own personal experience, supplemented by techniques cited by Conquest (1999). There are some potential validity problems with these lists; they are based solely on prisoner accounts, hardly a disinterested source. Still, the evidence is overwhelming that the use of torture by the NKVD was widespread in the late 1930s and, while the incidence decreased markedly thereafter, continued in use. There is no reason to discount such personal testimony, especially when so much of it is internally corroborated. For the United States, I have used four different sources. I have relied heavily on the official AR - 15 and AR - 16 investigations of different United States Army (hereinafter USA) units occasioned by the initial revelations concerning detainee abuse and on the report of the ICRC concerning detainee abuses in Iraq. These sources are mutually reinforcing in most respects. Second, I have used the official reports of courts martial and criminal investigations by the Criminal Investigation Division of the USA and the Criminal Investigation Service of the Navy. I have only used investigatory reports that involve either substantiated or indeterminate allegations; no unsubstantiated allegations have been included. My third source is personnel accounts, usually in sworn statements, by American servicemen. This includes some hearsay testimony, but in many cases the hearsay allegations were subsequently found credible in official investigations. Finally, I have used a few sworn statements by detainees themselves, usu68

ally for illustrative purposes. In most instances, the allegations in these statements have been found credible in subsequent investigations or include similar allegations and are supported by accounts of other detainees incarcerated at the same time. ! !

! !

!

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Table 1 Comparison of Interrogation Techniques in the Soviet Union, 1937 - 38, and the United States, 2002 - 05 Soviet Union

United States

Night Interrogation / Sensory Deprivation

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 103 Conquest 1990, 125 (Prisoners interrogated at night)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 260 - 61 HRW 2004, 2 - 3 (Detainees interrogated at night, use of blackout goggles, earmuffs, mittens, hooding (multiple bags, extended periods)

Persuasion

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 104 (“Futility,” “emotional love” approaches)

DOA FM 34 - 52 1987, Appendix H (“Futility,” “emotional love” approaches)

Foul Language

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 104 Conquest 1990, 278 (Prisoners cursed during interrogation)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 264 Al-Sheikh Statement, Danner 2004, 226 (Detainees cursed during interrogation)

Psychological Contrast

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 104 - 05 Conquest 1990, 278 (“Fear up, harsh,” “Mutt and Jeff” approaches)

DOA FM 34 - 52 1987, Appendix H (“Fear up, harsh,” “Mutt and Jeff” approaches)

Preliminary Humiliation

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 104 - 05 Conquest 1990, 122 (Prisoners face down in hall, naked woman in cell, head forced into spittoon, urinated on)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 261 - 262 Taguba Report, Danner 2004, 292 Al-Sheikh Statement, Danner 2004, 228 CCR 2006, 26, 28 Mustafa Statement, Danner 2004, 238 (Detainees naked for extended periods, paraded naked, photographed in sexually explicit positions, forced to wear women’s underwear, forced to masturbate while being photographed and videotaped, “pyramids”, paraded on dog chain, forced to act like dog, subjected to forced grooming, urinated on )

Confusion

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 105 (“Strip-tease” interrogation)

Schmidt - Furlow Report 2005, 7 - 9 FBI Memo, ACLU 2004a (“Lapdance” incident, smearing detainees with perfume, red ink represented as as menstrual blood, detainee genitals squeezed until in pain)

Intimidation

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 105 (Threats of death, transfer to another prison)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 261, 264 Al-Sheikh Statement, Danner 2004, 227 Hilas Statement, Danner 2004, 242 (Threats of death, transfer to another prison, rape)

Deception

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 106 (“File and dossier” approach)

DOA FM 34 - 52 1987, Appendix H (“File and dossier” approach)

Playing on Affections (Hostages)

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 106 - 07 Conquest 1990, 127 (Threats against family, detention, torture of family members)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 261 DOD Memo, Greenberg and Dratel 2005, 1170 Juma Statement, Danner 2004, 244 Provance Statement, HRF 2006, 9 (Threats against family, detention, torture of family members)

Sound Effects

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 108 (Megaphones directly on prisoner ears)

Provance Statement, HRF 2006, 3 HRW 2005, 24 Faleh Statement, Danner 2004, 230 Youss Statement, Danner 2004, 232 (Use of loud music, airhorns, loudspeakers on restrained detainees)

Tickling

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 108 (Tickling the interior of prisoner’s nose)

Cigarette Burns

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 108 (Cigarette put out on prisoner’s skin)

Provance Statement, HRF 2006, 4 - 5 FBI Memo, ACLU 2004a CID Report, ACLU 2006b (Cigarette put out on detainee’s skin, cigarette put out in detainee’s ear)

Light Effects

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 108, 180 (Continuous light in cells)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 263 FBI Memo, ACLU 2004b (Continuous light in cells, continuous darkness in cells, use of strobe lights)

Continuous Movement

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 108 - 09 (Prisoner continuously led to questioning then returned to cell)

Schmidt - Furlow Report 2005, 10 - 11 (“Frequent Flyer” program - detainees moved continuously from cell to cell)

The “Box”

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 109 (Imprisonment in small continuously dark or light cell)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 261 - 62, 267 - 68 Formica Report, ACLU 2006c (Imprisonment in small continuously dark or light cell, detainee imprisoned in 4’x4’x20” cell for 4 days)

Sitting on Stool

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 109 - 10 (Sitting on edge of stool)

Fay - Jones Report, Danner 2004, 518 (Sitting in precarious position on stool)

Divisional Pit

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 110 (Prisoners confined to open pit during initial interrogation)

HRW 2005, 9 HRW 2004, 5 Khalilzad Memo, Greenberg and Dratel 2005, 1171 - 72 (Detainees in open tents in desert, detainees in open cages in tropical climate, detainees in open pens)

Standing on Knees

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 111 (Prisoner kept up on knees 24 - 48 hours)

CIS (Navy) Report, ACLU 2004c (Hand and leg cuffed detainees kept standing on knees for 24 hours)

Standing

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 111 Conquest 1990, 121 (Standing for extended periods, Standing on tiptoe for extended periods)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 262, 265 HRW 2005, 9 Picture 1 - 2, Danner 2004, 221, 223 (app. 1) (Standing for extended periods, use of “stress positions,” e.g. standing on narrow boxes, standing bound to cell door, bedstead or window, standing on concrete blocks, boxes while hooded with hands cuffed behind legs)

Thirst

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 111, 494 (Prisoner deprived of water for 3 - 5 days

HRW 2005, 9 (Detainees fed salted crackers and deprived of water for 12 hours in desert)

Sleep Deprivation / “Conveyer Belt”

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 111 - 13 Conquest 1990, 123 - 4 (Prisoners deprived of sleep for extended periods, continuous interrogation by teams for 3 - 4 days)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 261, 263 Fay - Jones Report, Danner 2004, 506 Provance Statement, HRF 2006, 4 PHR 2005, 35 Formica Report, ACLU 2006c Schmidt - Furlow Report 2005, 20 (Prisoners deprived of sleep for extended periods, continuous interrogation by teams for 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days)

“Box” With Insects

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 113 (“Box” infested with bedbugs)

Punishment Cells

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 113 - 14 (Imprisonment in small cells made alternatively extremely hot or cold)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 262 HRW 2004, 15 - 16 HRW 2005, 16 Al-Aboodi Statement, Danner 2004, 245 (Detainees confined in small cells made alternatively extremely hot or cold, detainees frequently kept naked and doused in cold water to increase effects of cold)

Locked in an Alcove

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 114 (Imprisonment in closet-like cell)

Fay - Jones Report, Danner 2004, 510, 529 - 30 (Detainees confined in “The Hole”, an “isolation closet”)

Starvation

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 114 Conquest 1990, 125 (Limited diet for extended periods)

Formica Report, ACLU 2006c HRW 2005, 12 - 13 (Limited diet for extended periods (17 days on bread and water, crackers and water for extended periods))

Beatings

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 116 Conquest 1990, 121 (Beatings by fist, kicks, stomping, chairs, clubs, rubber truncheons, wooden mallets, the “penalty kick” (kick in the groin), edge of rulers)

Taguba Report, Danner 2004, 292 - 93 HRW 2005 Hanfosh Statement, Danner, 233 CID Reports, ACLU 2005a, 2006d Golden 2005 (Beatings by fist, kicks, stomping, chairs, batons, phosphorus bulbs (phosphorus poured on detainee) , broomsticks, ax handles, kicks to the groin, baseball bats, hung from ceiling and beaten to death)

Extremities

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 116 Conquest 1990, 121 (Fingernails squeezed until they drop off, toenails torn out, fingers slammed in door)

Taguba Report, Danner 2004, 292 Lagouranis Interview, PBS 2005 Statement, Danner 2004, 248 (Feet stomped, feet smashed with ax head, feet jumped onto from bed)

Close Restraints

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 116 (Prisoner restrained in straight jacket)

CID Memo, ACLU, 2005b Picture 3 (app. 1) (“Litter sandwich” (detainee restrained between two stretchers tied together))

Breaking Bones

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 93, 116 Conquest 1990, 121 (Breaking prisoner’s back, legs)

CCR 2006, 20 HRW 2005, 11 ACLU 2006e (Breaking detainee’s back, legs, ribs, hyoid bone (windpipe, detainee died as result)

Bondage

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 117 Conquest 1990, 121 (“Bridling” (handcuffed prisoner bound by rope tying mouth and feet), “The Swallow” (prisoner’s hands and feet tied together, then prisoner pulled off ground))

Meyer 2005 Picture 4, Salon 2006 (app. 1) Golden 2005 ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 262 Pictures 5 - 7, Danner 2004, 219, 221 (app. 1) (“Palestinian hanging” (detainee handcuffed behind back, hands attached to bars of cell door or window at shoulder height or above), detainee handcuffed to ceiling with feet off floor, detainee handcuffed to cell door, bed, or railing)

Mock Executions

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 448 Conquest 1990, 126 (Mock execution by firing squad, pistol)

Court Martial Report, ACLU 2006f PHR 2005, 30 (Mock execution by firing squad, pistol)

Skull Squeezed

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 93 (Prisoner’s skull squeezed in iron ring)

Burns

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 93 (Prisoner lowered into acid bath)

“Secret Brand”

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 93 (Prisoner’s intestines burned with poker)

Crushing Testicles

Solzhenitsyn 1973, 93, 127 - 8 (Prisoner’s testicles crushed beneath boot while restrained)

ICRC Report, Danner 2004, 259 - 60 Lagouranis Interview, PBS 2005 (Detainee hooded, handcuffed, forced onto hot surface in transport to interrogation (three months hospitalization required for burns), detainee forced to sit on hot exhaust pipe of HMMWV)

“Waterboarding”

Danner 2004, 34 - 36 Suskind 2006, 115, 228 - 30 (Face of detainee under restraint covered with cloth, water poured on cloth until detainee cannot breath, simulating drowning)

Rape

Taguba Report, Danner 2004, 292 - 93 Hilas Statement, Danner 2004, 243 (Rape of female detainee by interrogators, rape of male detainees by broomstick, baton, phosphorus bulb, interrogators)

“Sleeping Bag” Technique

White 2005 WAPO 2005 Rosen 2006, 96 - 7 (Detainee with broken ribs forced into sleeping bag secured around detainee with electric cord, then interrogator sat on detainee’s chest to question him (detainee died of asphyxia))

“PT” (Physical Training)

Provance Statement, HRF 2006, 5 HRW 2005, 9, 15 (Hooded detainees exercised to point of collapse in desert climate)

Use of Dogs

Taguba Report, Danner 2004, 292 Fay - Jones Report, Danner 2004, 516 - 23 Picture 8, Danner 2004, 224 (app. 1) (Detainees threatened with, bitten by unmuzzled military police dogs)

“Short Shackling”

HRW 2004, 11 - 12 FBI Memo, ACLU 2004c Schmidt - Furlow Report 2005, 12 Picture 9, CCR 2006 (Detainee’s hands and feet are closely shackled, then attached to a short chain fastened to the floor for extended periods (usually combined with punishment cell regimen - nakedness, closed cell, great heat or cold and frequent dousing with cold water))

Electric Shock

ACLU 2006g (Detainee attached to poles of electric battery and shocked)

TABLE 2 Comparative System Characteristics: The United States 2002 - 2005 and the Soviet Union 1937 - 1938 United States

Indicator

Soviet Union

Political System Civic

Political Culture

Subject - participant

Extensive private associations

Civil Society

Extensive state-controlled associations

Liberal democratic

Dominant Ideology

Marxist - Socialist

Competitive, multi-party

Electoral/Party System

Uncompetitive, single legal party

Variable

Executive Constraints

Nominal

Substantial

Administrative Capacity

Low

Substantial

Legislative Capacity

Nominal

Substantial

Judicial-Legal Constraints

Nominal

Capitalist, post-industrial

Economic System

Command, developing industrial

$34,899 (2002)

Per Capita GDP

$1,440 (1938)

80.3% (2000)

% Urban Population

33% (1939)

28.4% (2000)

% Population in School

21% (1941)

74% (2000)

% Population Over 18

55.7% (1939)

.57 (1985)

ELF*

.67 (1961)

Socio-Economic System

*Ethnic Fractionalization Index Sources: Political system: Barghoorn (1972), Armstrong (1978), Almond and Verba (1963), Lowi, Ginsberg, and Shepsle (2005). Socio-economic system: Sherman (1969), Johnson and Williamson (2005), Harrison (1994), Perry and Mackun (2001), Nove (1989), Bauman and Graff (2003), Meyer (2001), Anonymous (1939), Roeder (2001)

Appendix 1 Picture 1: Stress Position

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_4/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

Picture 2: Stress Position

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_7/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

Picture 3: “Litter Sandwich”

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_9/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

Picture 4: “Palestinian Hanging”

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_1/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_1/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

Picture 5: Handcuffed to Cell Door

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_1/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

Picture 6: Handcuffed to Bed

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_1/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

Picture 7: Handcuffed to Railing

www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1211872,00.html Accessed 24 July 06

Picture 8: Threatened by Unmuzzled Dog

www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_8/index.html Accessed 12 July 06

Picture 9: “Short Shackled”

www.ccr-ny.org/v2/legal/september_11th/docs/Guantanamo_composite_statement_FINAL.pdf Accessed 12 July 06