A little over a week ago, in the wake of mass outrage over the confirmation of Gina Haspel, avowed torturer as the new Director of the CIA, I asked myself a question. Then, I asked 71 of my closest friends.
To be honest, I asked 1,063 of my closest friends, acquaintances, debate colleagues, fellow aspiring writers, and other associations on the much-maligned but still infinitely-used portal of human connection known as Facebook. Of them, 70 others (plus me) elected to publicly cast their vote in the binary poll. This is a non-scientific sample of 6.6%, which is probably well above the polling rates that contributed to recent mis-predictions in the 2016 UK Brexit vote, the 2016 US general election, the 2017 UK general election, and even the recent election in Malaysia. In any event, the question, as you can see above, inquired whether the answerer, presumably an American citizen in almost all cases, believed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had stopped torturing people as they previously admitted doing during much of the W Bush administration.
87% said no, the CIA was continuing to torture. Nine people (13%) said yes, they believed the CIA’s claims. You can see the full results here.
I won’t dig too deeply into who the nine dissenters in the crowd were (it seemed, for example, at first worth noting that all are male, but then again just 17 of the 71 respondents were female [24%], so this is possibly irrelevant data… then again, it means that 100% of women [17/17] surveyed believe the CIA is torturing people, while just 83% of men [45/54] do). Whatever might be made as a generalization of these exceptional folks, it would be a generalization and hard to draw conclusions from. They disproportionately (indeed, almost entirely) hail from the debate world, but the same can be said for the pool of 1,063 initially offered survey candidates writ large, and most of the large majority of the voters in the poll.
Whatever we can’t say about them, we can say that they were vastly outnumbered. And yet they are joined, apparently, by most of the US Congress (whose approval rating, perhaps notably, is probably around that same number of 13%) and especially by Ron Wyden (D-OR) and his ilk, who find it most aggrieving that the CIA, who is probably continuing to torture people, would hire an avowed torturer as the head of the agency. This disconnect is, of course, what prompted my interest in the poll question in the first place… do you really believe Gina Haspel and past CIA Directors when they say torture is a thing of the CIA’s past and not its present or future?
If you’re inclined to believe this, I won’t try to bully you by pointing out what a small minority you’re in (of my Facebook friends who chose to publicly answer the poll, which you could argue is possibly a skewed sample size in one or, indeed, the other direction, or maybe both). What I will observe is that much of the controversy around Ms. Haspel involved her time at black site in Thailand. How many of you knew we had a black site in Thailand? Anyone? I guess that’s why we call it a black site, because no one knows about it. Anyone even suspect Thailand as a likely torture shop? No? But you’re pretty confident everything the CIA is doing gets publicly disclosed, right?
As my friend Andrew posted in the opening comment on the surprisingly tame (for my Facebook feed) poll:
“At one point the conversation digressed to CIA staging coups, killing people, etc. and the guy was like, no, wait, CIA has never killed anyone. The interviewer, a bit stunned, said, ‘so you’re saying CIA has never killed a person?’ And the former director basically said something like, CIA has never publicly stated that they have killed a person, therefore they haven’t.”
That’s the official government line. Your government has only done things the government publicly admits it has done. Even though any even cursory analysis of CIA operations is discussed by those selfsame government experts as clearly doing “whatever it takes” to “protect the United States.” There is winking acknowledgment even in such public statements that the CIA is out there killing and lying and buying elections and toppling leaders with the best of them, but of course none of this can be stated with any specificity or certainty. Because whenever we get caught, we immediately stop. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
The credulity of the American public (or 13% of it? less? more?) to believe this must in some way be related to the inability of Americans to be sufficiently self-critical to expect that Russia or other powerful countries might attempt to interfere with the democratic processes of the American election, much less that same could be justified in a world where America interfered first. Especially, no less, when American interference often looks like targeted assassinations, ballot tampering, voter suppression, and/or funding with a massive warchest, while Russian interference, at worst, looks like buying a lot of Facebook advertisements featuring lies. I have little doubt that Russia and its agents openly preferred the candidate who was not threatening to start a hot war with Russia (I wonder if Russian agents also helped propel Barack Obama over a surprisingly hostile-to-Russia Mitt Romney in 2012). I also have little doubt that phrases like “rigging” or “hacking” are a bridge very many rivers too far, and that even rigging or hacking would be sauce for a very plump gander indeed when the table was being turned on the old CIA-wielding US of A. When there was even discussion of a policy that America did not assassinate foreign leaders or operatives, a policy to which even a passing invocation died during the advent of the War on Terror, it can surely be seen that some aspiration to principle was a minor factor in this policy’s inception. Not wanting retaliatory assassinations against us, surely, was the primary motive.
No doubt there are a lot of folks out there who now wish to register their vote with the 13% in the hopes that it will rise, perhaps even as high as 25%. I find this is likely to miss the point I’m trying to make. We could argue till the Facebook algorithm falls into the sea that my Facebook friends are disproportionately distrustful of the government, or likely to vote publicly on a poll saying so (although, really?), or that such opportunities are only shown by Facebook to people who have checked a sufficient number of likes and dislikes to be considered registered unAmerican infiltrators. In which case, let me say this: I would love to see a reliable, scientific poll. Phone a friend. Ask the audience. See what people say.
In the meantime, I’m sticking with 87-13. I don’t usually, or even often, get the results I’m looking for on Facebook polls. Three and a half years ago, a ton of people said they hadn’t heard of the Rose Parade. Facebook doesn’t always tell me what I want to hear.
But what I want to hear now is why, if the CIA is an institution who, among other roles, has a major role in torturing human beings of other nationalities in other nations, do we care that the head of the CIA helped carry out torture? Why do we go through the grand charade of making her promise that she won’t reinstitute a program which is clandestinely ongoing? And what is the point in getting so upset about this, of all the many unfortunate things the Trump administration is both starting and continuing as bad policy in the United States?
Torture is bad. I get it. Kind of by definition. But if torture is bad, don’t we do ourselves as would-be checks against torture a massive disservice in making grand theater out of pretending to oppose it while tacitly allowing it to continue behind closed doors after all?
Say I’m wrong, along with my 85%+ of fellow voters. Say the CIA has stopped torturing people. What then? Most of us believe it hasn’t. So, other than the people who the CIA wants to torture but won’t because of policy, who is impacted? We still believe the CIA is an agency of torture and now an especially dishonest one at that. We still fear that if we run afoul of the CIA, we might get tortured. The role of the CIA in our imagination and in the day to day of the average American, the perceptual reality, remains. It’s an agency of torture. Whether it is or isn’t, that’s what it appears to be.
As Kurt Vonnegut reminds us, we must be careful what we pretend to be. For no matter how we might change or backtrack later, no one will believe that we are anything much beyond the worst we are capable of. Yes, an avowed torturer is in charge of an organization that almost certainly spends a lot of its time torturing. This is both unfortunate and seemingly kind of irrelevant. Would an avowed anti-torture advocate have the power to really stop the torture? Or would we even know if they were telling the truth? It’s one of the problems with having an entity whose primary directive is utter secrecy that still purports to be held accountable to a higher authority. Doubly so in an alleged democracy, where the public is supposed to be the long tail of that check.
The public has spoken, at least my public on this day. We have about as much ability to check the CIA as we do to get into that black site in Thailand and take a gander.
