Читать книгу This Side of Silence - Tobias Kelly - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction
In late April 2002 Binyam Mohamed was turned over to the US authorities after being arrested by Pakistani police at Karachi Airport. Mohamed was born in Ethiopia but in the mid-1990s had claimed asylum in the United Kingdom. He had converted to Islam in 2001, and later the same year traveled to Afghanistan and then Pakistan. Following Mohamed’s detention in Pakistan, he was interviewed by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and flown to Morocco, where he was imprisoned for eighteen months. Mohamed was then sent to a detention center run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Afghanistan, and finally, in September 2004, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay. The US military alleged that Mohamed had been trained in Kabul to make “dirty bombs” and was planning to carry out an attack on US soil. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and he was released and returned to the United Kingdom in early 2009.
While Mohamed was in Guantanamo Bay, he made allegations that he had been tortured when he was in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan. A US court later ruled that Mohamed’s “trauma lasted for 2 long years. During that time, he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food. He was summarily transported from one foreign prison to another. Captors held him in stress positions for days at a time.”1 Back in the United Kingdom, Mohamed’s lawyers filed a petition in the courts demanding that the Foreign Office turn over all the evidence they had about his abuse. In the summer of 2008, English judges ruled that any documents held by British authorities should be given to Mohamed’s lawyers but not made public, on the grounds that their full disclosure could harm the intelligence relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. The judges also found that British agents had “facilitated” Mohamed’s interviews by the Pakistani and American security services.2 Two years later, English Appeal Court judges ruled that if it “had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom,” the treatment inflicted on Mohamed by US officials “would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom.”3 They also ruled that all evidence about Mohamed’s ill-treatment must be released.4
Alan Johnson, the British home secretary at the time, responded to the judicial rulings and newspaper headlines that followed by saying that allegations of British complicity in torture were a “gross and offensive misrepresentation of the truth” (Naughton and O’Neil 2010). The Metropolitan Police Service, however, announced that it was launching a criminal investigation into the involvement of the British security services in Mohamed’s ill-treatment. In addition, Mohamed’s lawyers launched a claim for civil damages, suing the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and the Attorney General, as well as MI6 and MI5, for their complicity in his unlawful detention and ill-treatment. In 2010, the newly elected Conservative-Liberal coalition government declared that once criminal and civil proceedings had come to an end, it would launch a judicial inquiry to “look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees, held by other countries, that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11.”5 By the autumn of the same year, Kenneth Clarke, the new minister of justice, told parliament that an out-of-court settlement had been reached. He argued that if the case had continued, “Our reputation as a country that believes in human rights, justice, fairness and the rule of law … risks being tarnished.”6 Clarke added that no admission of liability had been made and that the details of the settlement were to remain confidential. The following day, the director of public prosecutions announced that the MI5 officer investigated for complicity with Mohamed’s ill-treatment in Pakistan and Morocco would not be prosecuted.
Since 2001, images of tortured bodies and the claims and counterclaims they generate have shaped much international politics. Binyam Mohamed’s case was just one among many. Probably the most infamous incident involved the release of pictures of American troops mistreating Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. After the release of these photographs, there were further revelations about ill-treatment by the US military in Guantanamo and Bagram, as well as the use of secret detention centers and “extraordinary rendition” to places where torture was, in effect, outsourced. In the United Kingdom, the photographs from Abu Ghraib have also been overlaid by several subsequent events. Six months after the invasion of Iraq, British soldiers used stress positions and beatings on Iraqi detainees, resulting in the death of one man and the hospitalization of others. A few years later, photographs were released showing British soldiers forcing Iraqi detainees to simulate oral and anal sex. In another story, which was later revealed to be a hoax, a British newspaper published photographs apparently showing soldiers carrying out mock executions of Iraqi detainees.7 As well as the claims made by Binyam Mohamed, other allegations were made about the complicity of MI5 and MI6 in torture carried out by Pakistan and Egypt, among other countries. Further controversies arose over the use of British airspace in the “extraordinary rendition” of detainees to places outside the protection of the law. The list of examples could go on.
Torture is a word with immense ethical, political, and cultural power, seeming to encompass all that is wrong with arbitrary and excessive power. It has become seen as close to the very worst thing that can happen to someone or that one person can do to another. One respected commentator has even argued that it is worse than all forms of killing (Shue 2004). Many people would concur. Some may disagree over the definition of torture, but in doing so they are not challenging the privileged status of torture as a form of suffering and cruelty above nearly all others. To be sure, the moral objection to torture is not universal. However, torture is still not something that many people will openly admit to doing. Perpetrators will dress up their acts in euphemisms, deny that what they have done counts as torture, or dance around the edge of definitional debates. Torture remains beyond the pale, in words if not in deeds. It is not a term that is going to be given a positive spin any time soon. Even those who would condone the use of torture in very specific circumstances say they do so with heavy hearts (see, for example, Elshtain 2004). From this perspective, torture is still very wrong but just not quite as wrong as other things.
Current debates about torture are saturated with law. In the United States, lawyers were involved in writing memos that justified nearly every aspect of military and CIA interrogation programs. Since the memos were made public, there have been numerous court cases concerning the treatment of detainees. In the United Kingdom, the meanings and implications of torture have been thrashed out in a number of legal and quasi-legal forums. The extensive litigation around Binyam Mohamed was just one of several cases. Conflicts have ranged over the protections owed to torture survivors, the responsibilities of those complicit in the perpetration of torture, and the United Kingdom’s international human rights obligations. These disputes have taken place in court-martials, judicial inquiries, immigration cases, reports before UN monitoring mechanisms, appearances before the European Court of Human Rights, and in domestic civil litigation, among others. Legal forums have entered deep into the political arena, as judges have been asked to adjudicate on some of the most contentious contemporary concerns. Not only have judges become heavily politicized in this process, but politics has become judicialized.
We are increasingly accustomed to thinking about responses to cruelty and violence in terms of the legal category of torture. However, this has not always been the case. It is only since the late twentieth century that torture has been associated with precise legal definitions and thought of as a specific human rights violation above nearly all others. Over the last three hundred years, the meanings ascribed to torture have changed from a legitimate judicial procedure to elicit the truth, to be seen as the very worst infraction of the physical, psychological and moral integrity of human beings. Our current understandings of torture are a product of ongoing struggles between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and international organizations, as concerns over post cold war armed conflict, medical notions of trauma, and concerns about immigration have all come together.
To stress the historical contingency of the legal category of torture is not to say that people do not act cruelly, and that people do not suffer. Rather, it is to ask why this person’s suffering and not that of the next is taken into account, why this form of pain and not another is deemed significant, and why this action and not another is recognized as torture. The point is not to trivialize the suffering of torture survivors nor to denigrate the effort of all those who work against torture. Neither is it to relativize torture or to deconstruct it into thin air. At its heart, the concept of torture contains a crucial ethical concept: People should not be treated cruelly and the deliberate infliction of pain is something that should be avoided at (nearly) all costs. It is also important to recognize that the fight against torture can serve as an important “tool in the demand for justice” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 279). The struggle to prohibit torture has made a real difference to people’s lives around the world. However, it is important to note that our concepts of torture do not include all possible harms and that legal processes do more than neutrally recognize when torture takes place. They determine what acts count as torture and how we should respond.
This book asks what can be seen and said, and what has to be ignored, when we understand suffering and cruelty through the legal category of torture. In doing so, it treats torture as, above all, a problem of recognition. One of the dominant cultural images of the torture survivor is a body wracked by pain, crying out in anguish, unable to express what has happened to him or her (Scarry 1988). However, the problem of recognition is not caused by the inability of the survivor to communicate. Binyam Mohamed, for example, could give long, articulate statements about his treatment in detention.8 The issue is, instead, one of our ability to listen, to see, to name, and to take responsibility for what is in front of us. The key question is therefore what types of victim and perpetrator, what forms of innocence and guilt, do legal understandings of torture allow us to acknowledge?
Whereas most recent books on torture have focused on why it happens, the ethics of the prohibition of torture, or the effects of torture on its victims, I will examine empirically how real or supposed instances of torture are constructed, debated, questioned, and brought into focus. Much analytical ink has been spilled in trying to define the ethical and legal boundaries of what does and does not count as torture.9 The topic was given an added urgency by the attempts of the George W. Bush administration to redefine where the line between acceptable and unacceptable treatment of detainees lay. But torture is not simply an abstract category to be debated in terms of broad principles. The issue is not merely about choosing between competing legal or ethical norms but about deciding how and whether those norms apply to any given situation. It is not simply about setting out the rules clearly but about making a judgment about how and whether those rules apply in specific contexts (compare Anderson 2011). It is therefore important to examine the concrete dilemmas and difficulties involved in documenting and recognizing when torture has taken place. If, as Stanford Levinson has argued, “Torture as a term is a place holder—an abstract word made concrete by the imagination of the reader” (2004, 27), it is through the everyday practices of the lawyers, judges, doctors, psychologists, and bureaucrats charged with documentation and recognition that the implications of what is and what is not torture are produced.
The central argument of this book is that although the legal category of torture appears to prioritize individual suffering and cruelty, the turn to law can make it very difficult to recognize specific survivors and perpetrators. In part, this is because torture can be inflicted in ways that produce few identifiable traces. As Darius Rejali has shown, the twentieth century saw the development of coercive interrogation techniques specially designed to leave behind no evidence (2009). However, the issue is broader than simply the techniques through which torture is perpetrated. Although the prohibition of torture may be absolute in principle, in practice it becomes slippery and indeterminate when applied to concrete cases, making demands for forms of proof that are often unobtainable. Legal processes can therefore give with one hand, promising to protect and prosecute, and take away with another, by setting conditions that are very hard to meet. In this context, legal discussions of torture tend to break down into arguments about due process and the rule of law. The suffering of specific individuals and the intentions of particular perpetrators melt into the background. We are left with broad ethical injunctions and general procedural guidelines.
Focusing on the United Kingdom in a book about torture may at first glance appear a little peculiar. There is an implicit bias in many social science studies of human rights toward states that are seen as being unstable, authoritarian, and illiberal. However, in this process not only are the often-contradictory ways in which human rights are embedded within established liberal democracies ignored but, perhaps more important, it is often assumed that human rights are only a real problem for non-Western states. Britain’s role as a junior partner in the “war on terror” has disturbed many of these assumptions. Even before this, anyone with a cursory acquaintance with the history of British involvement in Ireland, Cyprus, Kenya, or Aden; France in Algeria; or the United States in the Philippines or Vietnam would know that torture has not been practiced only by rogue states. Furthermore, although much of the critical focus in the last ten years has been on the decisions made by the Bush administration, this has had the effect of narrowing the discussion and ignoring the greater historical depth and wider import of debates about what does and what does not count as torture. Torture, as a category, is often used to draw a line between the civilized and the uncivilized, the compassionate and the barbarous. Focusing on the United Kingdom, rather than on, say, Iraq, might help us rethink where those boundaries lie.
Torture has been a key trope through which Britain has related to the rest of the world, caught between the self-imposed duty to “save” distant others from suffering, and the desire to “protect” its own citizens from seemingly threatening outsiders. In the United Kingdom, a history of colonial expansion and retraction has given the word torture its very own political and ethical connotations. In the early twenty-first century, as the concept of torture moves between the laws of war and asylum, the tension within Britain’s international relationships are laid bare. These contradictions can be seen most clearly in its relationship with the citizens and states of the broad arc from North Africa to Central Asia. On the one hand, the human rights and refugee principles to which the British government has committed promise to save people fleeing from torture in Iraq, Algeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. On the other hand, British security policy toward many of those same states can sit uneasily with ethical injunctions against any involvement in torture. Binyam Mohamed, for example, had come to the United Kingdom claiming protection but ended up suing the British state for its complicity in his torture.
At this stage, it is important to make it clear what I am not trying to do. I am not investigating the complicity of UK officials in torture. Although the issue is important, an anthropologist is probably not the best person to carry out such a project. I am also not exploring the different definitions of torture. Again, such a project is best left to a philosopher or lawyer, and there are numerous impressive examples.10 Furthermore, I am not attempting to examine whether torture can ever be justified. Once more, not only is an anthropologist not the best person for this job, but there is already a vast literature on this issue.11 Finally, I am not attempting to examine the impact of torture on survivors. I am neither a doctor nor a psychologist and am not in any way qualified to make such an evaluation. Rather, I am investigating the ways in which legal processes classify, sort, and prioritize different forms of suffering and cruelty, in order to bring the processes they label “torture” into view.
Understanding Torture
What do we talk about when we talk about torture? We might take it for granted that lawyers have a special place in the conversation, but this is far from inevitable. In this section, I will outline five different but related ways of understanding torture—the ethical, the political, the therapeutic, the sentimental, and the legal—before explaining why this book focuses on the last. The distinctions are not hard and fast, and the different understandings play an important role in informing one another. However, the distinctions can serve as a useful heuristic device, as they highlight the ways in which different types of intervention create alternative notions of victim, perpetrator and remedy.
The ethical objection to torture rests on two legs: suffering and cruelty. It is an abhorrence of the deliberate infliction of pain, in a direct infringement of another person’s dignity, which lies at the heart of the objection to torture. As philosopher Henry Shue has argued, torture is inflicted on the defenseless, forced on those who cannot fight back (2004). Equally important, the objection to torture is based on an abhorrence of the particular intent of the perpetrator. As Judith Shklar has implied, torture is the worst form of cruelty (1984). It was, for example, the fact that the photographs from Abu Ghraib showed the soldiers enjoying their brutality that was particularly disturbing.
Along with such ethical claims, the argument against torture can also take a political shape. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the campaign against torture was used to mark opposition to the ancien régime in the name of the values of enlightened liberalism (Peters 1996, 75). Voltaire, for example, turned the judicial torture of Jean Calas, a French Protestant convicted of killing his son, into a cause célèbre, standing for all that was wrong about intolerance, arbitrariness, and unnecessary cruelty (1764). Similarly, the Italian philosopher and politician Cesare Beccaria’s polemic On Crime and Punishment became a central text in campaigns for penal reform from the late eighteenth century (1778). In his short book, Beccaria condemns torture, as well as the death penalty, as historical anachronisms. As a utilitarian philosopher, Beccaria’s principle objection to torture was not simply that it caused suffering, but rather that it was outdated and inefficient. He wrote, for example, that “by this method the robust will escape and the feeble be condemned” (1778, 64). For Beccaria, torture was above all an issue of due process. In late eighteenth-century Europe, campaigns against judicial torture therefore brought into focus a wider critique of the legal and political regime.
In the twentieth century, an aversion to torture was used to mark opposition to totalitarian forms of government, from both left and right. Torture was seen as standing in absolute opposition to liberal democracy, and its presence was a key, and often problematic, marker of distinction between modern democracy and authoritarianism. Amnesty International, for example, wrote, “Torture has by all indication increased over the last few years … [I]ncreasing perpetration is accounted for by states who use torture as a means of governing. Torture in those countries plays an integral role in the political system itself” (1973, 17). Furthermore, in 1970s North America and Western Europe, as the numbers of refugees from totalitarian regimes in Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as in South America, grew, opposition to torture became a way of expressing solidarity with political exiles. Crucially, as both eighteenth- and twentieth-century political understandings of torture were aimed at reforming the state, emphasis was placed on state officials as perpetrators, significantly narrowing the ethical objection to torture as an infringement on human dignity. It is this emphasis on state officials that has run through the human rights campaigns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
A third way of understanding torture treats it as a particular type of trauma, and therefore an issue of therapy. Although a focus on suffering may grow out of an ethical objection to torture, for the eighteenth-century anti-torture polemicists torture was not a distinct experience; rather, it was part of a broader process of irrational punishment. Indeed, much of Beccaria’s concern was with the coarsening effects of torture on those who witnessed it rather than on the victims themselves. However, from the mid- to late twentieth century, there was growing emphasis on the unique nature of the pain and suffering experienced by torture victims. The presence of large-scale refugee populations in Europe and the United States, with their own vulnerabilities and health needs, also saw an increasing emphasis on torture as a physical and psychological problem (Pupavac 2008). Medical doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts became central figures in the production of knowledge about torture. In many places, the anti-torture movement became a torture rehabilitation movement, focused on providing therapeutic services—rather than political or legal reform—to those in need. There was also therefore a potential, although not always fulfilled, move away from an emphasis on state officials as perpetrators. If torture is a unique and specific form of suffering, it can seem irrelevant if the perpetrator is a police officer or a former boyfriend.
Along with ethical, political, and therapeutic notions of torture lies what might be called a “sentimental” understanding (Peters 1996; Rorty 1993). In the early twenty-first century, the word torture is widely used to describe intolerable and objectionable forms of pain and cruelty inflicted on people. In 2009, when two boys aged eleven and ten beat two other boys to death in northern England, the ordeal was widely described as “torture” (Walker and Wainwright 2010). That same year, a mother who killed her disabled son by injecting him with heroin told the court before she was sentenced that his life was “torture” (Rojas 2010). The term can also be used in everyday language to describe unpleasant experiences, such as the morning commute, a particularly difficult exam, or a visit with one’s in-laws. The sense of intense suffering found in the ethical or trauma-based understandings of torture are used to signify displeasure and dislike of relatively mundane events.
In expanding the notion of who can be responsible for torture, as well as the forms of pain and suffering that it involves, there is a danger of diluting the meaning of torture. The risk exists of spreading the idea of torture too thin and of applying the notion to any sort of discomfort, robbing the word of ethical or political force. Legal practices have historically given torture its greatest definitional coherence, albeit often drawing on broader ethical objections and forms of knowledge that come from clinical practice and political activism. More specifically, the concept of torture has its origins in legal practices concerned with the correct procedures for interrogations and the provision of evidence. John Langbein has argued that the growth of judicial torture in medieval Europe was not simply the product of an arbitrary and a capricious politics but rather a desire to create legally reliable evidence (2006). It is from this particular judicial history that we get the sense that torture is the deliberate infliction of pain by state officials in order to collect information.
Despite this judicial history, by the end of the nineteenth century, torture was widely considered a primarily ethical and political category that was used to critique practices felt to be uncivilized, irrational, and inefficient (Peters 1996, 75). It was only after World War II and late into the twentieth century that the concept of torture began to regain greater legal precision, as principles of due process, criminal law, and international human rights came together, often in contradictory ways. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) stated that no one should be subjected to torture or other forms of ill-treatment. However, the following years saw a realization among human rights campaigners that without the power of enforcement, the UDHR would remain solely aspirational. As a result, NGOs, some governments, and many people within the United Nations lobbied for the increasing codification of human rights and the creation of legal mechanisms of enforcement.
Because torture was a crime perpetrated by state officials, the antitorture movement sought to appeal to a higher authority, above and beyond the state, and therefore turned to international law. The meanings and implications of torture have therefore been shaped by international institutions, such as the United Nations, and NGOs, such as Amnesty International. As such, to talk about torture is to always bring into play wider international politics. By the start of the twenty-first century, the prohibition of torture could be found in numerous international conventions, protocols, and agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the European Convention on Human Rights.12
This legalization of the definition of torture does not mean that wider ethical, political, therapeutic, or sentimental definitions of torture are not widely used. Nor does it mean that legal dominance of understandings of torture is uncontested. The torture rehabilitation movement, in particular, has played an important role in current understandings of torture, pushing the boundaries of legal claims. Clinicians and political activists can often be exasperated with the narrow formalism of legal approaches to torture, pushing at its edges to include wider forms of suffering and more varied responses. Furthermore, and perhaps most important, legal understandings of torture are not self-enclosed. Legal processes can often draw on other forms of expertise—medicine in particular—to provide evidence about pain and suffering. In addition, there are significant tensions within legal attempts to define what counts as torture. Specifically, there are disagreements about the level of pain and suffering necessary to be considered an act of torture, the nature of intention, and the relative balance between the level of pain and intention in distinguishing torture from other forms of ill-treatment.
Nevertheless, legal forums remain the central place where the precise meanings of torture are debated and recognized. Furthermore, political and clinical movements often refer to international conventions when defining what they do. It is legal forums that decide on the criminal prosecutions, civil damages, and grants of residency, among other things, that do or do not follow from claims of torture. As Samuel Moyn has argued, law has become our “privileged instrument for moral improvement” (2010, 211). It is therefore of crucial importance to ask what are the implications of entering the legal realm for the ways we seek to allocate responsibility, redress and the promise of protection.
Issues of Recognition
In early 2004, I was approached by a British immigration lawyer to write a report to support the claim of one of her clients for asylum in the United Kingdom. I had previously carried out research in Israel and Palestine, and I am therefore often called on to provide evidence in refugee cases involving people originating in that area. The client, whom I shall call Hassan Ahmed, was a Palestinian from the West Bank. He claimed to be a former activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Ahmed had told his lawyer that on several occasions throughout the 1990s he had been detained by the Israeli military. During these detentions, he had been beaten, had been forced to crouch in a sitting position in a cold cell for hours on end, and had his hands forcibly tied behind his back and yanked upward. He was never charged with any offense but was kept for several different three-month periods in administrative detention. He had also been detained by the Palestinian Authority mukhabarat (secret police), who had dealt with him in a similar way. Ahmed eventually decided to leave the West Bank and had found his way to the United Kingdom overland, traveling through Syria, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and onward in the back of a lorry.
Ahmed’s lawyer was now trying to collect enough evidence to support his case for asylum. The witness statement that Ahmed had produced was full of intricate and precise details about what the Israelis and the Palestinians had done to him. However, it was also rambling and at times confused. Ahmed had long-standing mental health issues, some of which seemed to predate his detention, making his memories often erratic. A medical doctor had examined Ahmed and found no scars on his body that he could document and also said that it would be difficult to say, with any certainty, to what extent Ahmed’s forgetfulness and occasional delusions were the result of his mistreatment in the West Bank. The lawyer had turned to me to try to corroborate his case. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even the US State Department have all documented the use of torture and other forms of ill-treatment by the Israelis and the Palestinians.13 However, although I could document the situation regarding the general treatment of detainees, I could not write a report that said there was specific evidence that Ahmed had been tortured. Without this, it was open to the immigration authorities to say, “Yes, torture happens, but we do not think it happened in this case.” Ahmed was therefore forced to rely heavily on his own witness statement. His lawyer was concerned that his account would not be believed. She was right to be worried. Ahmed’s case for asylum was denied. His account was deemed by the immigration authorities not to be credible.
How can we recognize when torture has taken place? Elaine Scarry has argued that the distinctive nature of torture lies in its ability to destroy the capacity to communicate (1988). For Scarry, the pain of torture can produce silence, as victims turn in on themselves. However, the idea that the pain of torture is a fundamentally private experience denies the ways in which pain is itself a social relationship. As Veena Das argues, the statement “I am in pain” is a declarative statement that does not seek to describe a state, but to voice a complaint (1997). Ahmed was able to articulate his experiences; the problem he faced was that people did not believe him. The issue is therefore not so much that victims cannot voice their suffering, but that lawyers, doctors, and other practitioners find it difficult to know when and where legally significant cruelty has taken place. This is not to say that the pain of the victim of torture can be directly experienced by another. There is always an “irreproducible excess in pain” (Asad 2003, 85; Lyotard 1989). All attempts to grapple with the meanings and implications of any horrific form of suffering, not just torture, can seem to fail to do them justice. However, pain and suffering are not all about incommensurability. The experience of pain is always at least partly constituted by social interaction. As such, the problem of torture is not one of the failure of language but of the failure of recognition. It is not the survivor’s inability to speak; rather, it is our inability to listen.
The issue here is not the ability of the law to grasp and represent the full experience of suffering and cruelty in its entirety, for what would be the point of that? To grasp pain in its fullness would only be to reproduce it (Perrin 2004). Rather than addressing profound questions about experience, legal forms of recognition are above all pragmatic—they are about the granting of residency rights, passing prison sentences, and allocating compensation—and as such they seek to recognize pain and suffering in very particular ways. As Andrew Williams argues, what counts as a wrong, as far as legal processes are concerned, is not suffering in and of itself, but the breach of a legal norm. To count as a legal harm, suffering therefore has to be framed according to the correct legal categories and standards of evidence (2007). To be a legal violation, there must be a victim, a perpetrator, and a remedy. To be accepted, a claim must adhere to procedural rules and evidentiary tests. Many claims about suffering and cruelty simply will not meet these standards (Veitch 2007). The legal recognition of torture is therefore not about sharing intimate experiences, making deep claims about the nature of being, or acknowledging the other with all their differences and similarities (see, for example, Honneth 1996; Povinelli 2002). Legal recognition is instead instrumental, concerned with the distribution of rights and the acceptance of obligations, and the meeting of the conditions necessary to make those decisions.
Yet, the legal recognition of torture is never a neat process. Behind the façade of certainty found in legal definitions, the concrete recognition of torture is itself shot through with disjunctures and fissures. It is marked as much by gaps that have to be continually jumped over, as it is by internal coherence. In this context, the task is not to examine how the processes of recognizing torture bleach out and thin down subjective experiences but rather to explore how the legal recognition of torture produces multilayered and often contradictory forms of knowledge about suffering and cruelty.
Recognition has its twin in the form of denial. Given the special stigma attached to torture, denial is often the immediate response in the face of an accusation. As the direct or indirect involvement of a public official is one of the key components of torture, the full resources of a state can be put into denying that torture took place. Denial is rarely just the act of an individual but is publicly sanctioned. There are a range of reasons for refusing to acknowledge torture. As Stanley Cohen has argued, these reasons can include the simple calculus of realpolitik or compassion fatigue, among other things (2000). The mechanism through which denial takes place can include individuals turning a blind eye, a bureaucratic deferral of responsibility, or simply the renaming of an atrocity as something else. As Cohen has also argued, denial is not the opposite of knowledge (2000). To say that someone is in denial, you must also be able to say that at some level, the person knows what is happening. There is no simple opposition between a truth and a lie or between knowledge and ignorance, but instead, both sides of the coin can be bound to one another in complex ways, forming “public secrets” or “unknown knowns” (Taussig 1999; Zizek 2004). The forms of denial involved in legal processes are very particular. Legal processes can know about events but deem them, legally, irrelevant. The relationship between legal denial and recognition is therefore not simply about the inability to speak truth to power. Such an argument would assume that the legal category of torture exists as an ahistorical or a metaphysical category. Rather, sorting among all the forms of violence that are inflicted on a daily basis, legal processes seek to make a series of historically contingent distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate force, in the full knowledge that they are producing a limited picture of suffering and cruelty.
Evidence of Torture
The legal recognition of torture is a problem of evidence. Talal Asad has argued that at the heart of the concept of torture is the notion of a universally comparable form of suffering, the precise levels of which can be calculated (2003, 117). However, in practice, torture resists easy measurement. Under most definitions, for an act to be considered torture, along with the direct or indirect involvement of a public official, it must contain at least two further elements: a severe level of pain in the victim and the intention of the perpetrator. However, although pain may be a universal and an inherently social experience, it has famously resisted attempts at replicable measurement. Far from creating an easily replicable standard, the emphasis on pain generates questions about the very subjective nature of the experience. Intention also raises its own often awkward evidentiary issues, as it implies a particular state of mind and therefore requires inferences about private thoughts and beliefs.
In assessing evidence, legal processes rarely treat the individual claims of torture survivors as self-evident. Survivors often face a general skepticism that their claims are fabricated. Writing about France, Fassin and d’Halluin argue that as doubts are cast about individual narratives, the body and mind become the places from which attempts are made to read the truth of particular claims (2007). They write, “Scars, both physical and psychological, are the tangible sign that torture did indeed take place and that violent acts were perpetrated” (2007, 599). In a context where the claims of survivors are doubted, medical doctors, psychologists, and social scientists, among others, are called on to provide further evidence about torture. Past suffering becomes accessible only through legal and diagnostic criteria, rather than through direct testimony (Antze and Lambek 1996, xxiv). Claims about torture are therefore often filtered through specific forms of expert knowledge, with their particular understandings of causation and subjectivity. However, courts and other forums often express as much skepticism about professional forms of expertise as they do about the claimants appearing before them. Ahmed, the Palestinian asylum seeker, and his lawyers had tried to collect as much evidence as possible to support his claim, calling on doctors, anthropologists, and the reports of human rights organizations to support his claims after his testimony was deemed not to stand alone. Yet, even this evidence was limited and questioned by the judges hearing his case. All claims, expert or not, are open to second-guessing. By entering the legal realm, claims of torture must come up against standards of proof which they often cannot meet.
It is important to remember though that the forms of proof demanded by legal processes do not exhaust the ways in which it is possible to talk about torture. When I was carrying out fieldwork in the Occupied West Bank at the height of the second intifada, my Palestinian next-door neighbor, a police officer with the Palestinian Authority, was detained by the Israeli military. Several weeks later, he returned to the village in obvious physical pain and was unable to walk without difficulty. His account of torture (ta’dhib) by the Israelis was accepted by everyone in the village without any demand for further evidence or debate about what was or was not torture. In a very different context, as part of the research for this book, I spent time at the offices of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in London and Glasgow. Among other things, the Medical Foundation provides therapeutic care to survivors of torture, mainly refugees or asylum seekers. The remit of the Medical Foundation focuses on torture, so potential clients are assessed before being accepted. The evaluation of claims in this process, though, is very different from that found in a court of law because it is based on therapeutic practices. Doctors, activists, survivors, and perpetrators can all demand very different forms of proof from legal forums. As legal regimes face different ways of knowing, built on different methodological assumptions, theoretical foundations, and political commitments, there can be a clash of epistemologies. In legal forums, though, it is legal actors who come out on top.
Researching Torture
To explore how, when, and where legal processes make torture visible, and what happens when this occurs, I carried out anthropological fieldwork with lawyers, with human rights groups, at the United Nations, and in British (English and Scottish) courts between early 2004 and the end of 2010.14 The fieldwork was led by a sense of following the issues, rather than a focus on a particularly bounded location or group of people. I tracked attempts at the legal recognition of torture through different jurisdictions and forms of expertise. In particular, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork at an anti-torture NGO in London and Glasgow over a period of one year. In addition, I followed thirty-five immigration cases from start to finish. I also sat in on British immigration tribunals and criminal court hearings. I made three separate trips to the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) in Geneva. The research also involved more than 140 interviews with lawyers, judges, police officers, doctors, psychologists, therapists, government officials, human rights activists, and politicians. The questions focused on the problems, dilemmas, and potentials they felt when carrying out their work. This has been supplemented with extensive archival work in London and Geneva and the analysis of domestic case law and international conventions.
Crucial to the nature of the arguments I am making here is the fact that I did not speak to torture survivors, for two reasons. The first was ethical. It would be presumptuous to assume that someone who has been through experiences of immense suffering and pain would necessarily want to recount these experiences to an academic who could offer no obvious or immediate practical help. Although in some cases talking may be cathartic, I am not the right person to undertake such a role. Torture survivors in the United Kingdom, in many cases, are already forced to recount their experiences to a vast array of people, including immigration officials, lawyers, judges, and doctors, and it seemed unnecessary to add to that number. The second reason has to do with the analytical thrust of my arguments: the key issue in cases of torture is one of recognition, of being able to acknowledge when and where torture has taken place. As a result, the focus is on the doctors, lawyers, and officials who are charged with documenting and recognizing incidents of torture. It is their dilemmas and conundrums that I examine. There is of course a real risk here of a double silencing of survivors, by writing them out of the account. However, I am not making any claim to be able to speak in their name. Rather, I am trying to examine how the myriad professionals that they encounter try to understand and document what has happened to them.
There are limitations but also opportunities in carrying out fieldwork in such a context. Many of the issues I examine are highly confidential. They not only involve secret evidence presented behind closed doors but also private patient or client information. Some sources of information, while not confidential, were not obtainable through traditional methods of participant observation. Policy documents, case law, medical reports, and UN conventions, to name just a few, all play a crucial role in shaping the terrain. Although such texts always have to be placed in their historical context, if as anthropologists we want to limit our claims to evidence that can be obtained through participant observation, we are, I believe, unnecessarily limiting what we can say. I believe also that there is something central to anthropology that lies between participant observation and high theory. This is a desire to interrogate our key political and social categories and to explore their implications, histories, and trajectories. It involves a commitment to understanding how these categories are used and understood on the ground, rather than simply examining their abstract or normative properties. Crucially, this skepticism toward categories is not a form of relativism. It is not cynical about torture as a category, but it seeks to look at torture from different angles, based on a desire not to take it for granted.
A Critique of a Focus on Torture?
At this point, I want to examine some of the criticisms that might be made of any attempt to understand cruelty and suffering through the legal category of torture, before setting out why such critiques fail to hit home. Many of these arguments can also be made of much of the broader human rights project, but they are brought into particular focus by the example of the attempt to prohibit torture.
One criticism of a focus on the legal prohibition of torture, is that it unhelpfully narrows the scope of the vision. As John Parry has argued, an emphasis on torture separates it from the wider forms of state violence of which it is a part, drawing an arbitrary line through a wider spectrum of practices (2010). The definition of torture in the UN Convention Against Torture, for example, excludes pain or suffering arising from “lawful sanction,” but it is not clear why pain inflicted for legal reasons is any better than other forms of deliberately inflicted suffering. By focusing on the abhorrent and the seemingly abnormal practice of torture there is an obvious danger of implicitly legitimizing other forms of violence perpetrated by the state. Bracketing off torture invites states to play games over where the line lies, rather than dealing with the issue of ill-treatment more broadly.
A second and linked potential criticism is that placing an emphasis on torture reduces politics to an attempt to eradicate pain, rather than economic or political redistribution (compare Berlant 2003; Ticktin 2006a, 2006b). As Wendy Brown puts it, writing more generally, but in terms that could apply directly to torture: “When social ‘hurt’ is conveyed to the law for resolution, political ground is ceded to moral and juridical ground” (1995, 27). In this process, there is a stress on victimhood, of the suffering of a passive individual who needs to be rescued, rather than an engagement with the broader political and economic processes that produce the infliction of violence.
A third related criticism is the claim that the legalized category of torture is simply inadequate to get to grips with the experience of torture. As Kirsten Hastrup argues, by translating thick moral and political problems into thin legal representations, vast areas of conduct are cut off from acknowledgment (2003). From this perspective, the language of human rights simplifies complex and ambiguous situations, erasing important differences among both victims and perpetrators (Kennedy 2004, 14; Wilson 1996). The multiple experiences of torture cannot be reduced to the dry formal language of universal human rights or legal judgments. The causes and consequences of the ill-treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Republican prisoners in Northern Ireland, leftist guerrillas in Latin America, dissidents in China, or even child soldiers in Uganda are squeezed into the limited meanings of one word.
The implicit assumption in all three arguments above is that the dominance of the legal notion of torture as a way of understanding suffering and cruelty makes other emancipatory strategies less available. As David Kennedy argues, “As a dominant and fashionable vocabulary for thinking about emancipation, human rights crowds out other ways of understanding harm and recompense” (2002, 108). Attempts to legally recognize when torture has taken place attract resources and energies that might go elsewhere.
Several immediate responses can be made to these points. First, whether or not the categories of law, human rights, and torture blot out other ways of looking at the world is an empirical question; no answer can be given once and for all. Victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and prosecutors can all pursue their own, often complex and contradictory, agendas within the spaces opened up by human rights mechanisms. The word torture can be understood in many different ways by all those involved. The legal recognition of individual suffering may be just one goal among many, one way in which people may try to mobilize politically. Wider ethical and political concerns can remain.
Perhaps more important, the simplifications caused by the categories of human rights and torture are not necessarily a problem in and of themselves. Reduction can create new possibilities for action (Law and Mol 2002). Although the use of the word torture may gloss over important differences between, say, the acts of the Greek colonels and the Egyptian secret service, it nevertheless provides a useful rallying cry through which global campaigns against state violence can be articulated. The word torture has immense force, as a great ethical taboo; therefore, to accuse someone of torture can get people’s attention.
Finally, legalization does not necessarily result in depoliticization. To argue as much would be to assume a problematic and crude distinction between law and politics. It would be unfair to assume that no one involved in the litigation around accusations of the complicity of MI5 and MI6 in torture thinks that the issue is not inherently political. The same could be said of the court-martial of British troops in Afghanistan, or decisions over whether the United Kingdom can deport a “terror suspect” to a place where he or she might face torture. Rather than make general statements about whether this is “political” or “legal,” one must ask the crucial questions “Who is authorized to speak?” “What are they allowed to say?” and “What types of claims count as persuasive?” It is only by doing so that we can begin to understand how the claimed universal prohibition of torture is made and unmade, again and again, in distinct local contexts.
A criticism that comes from a slightly different angle from those already discussed above, and that has different implications, is that by focusing on violence perpetrated by those acting in the name of the state in particular, the legal category of torture creates discriminatory distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence. This has important implications for survivors of domestic violence, for example. From this perspective, the intentions of the perpetrator and the experience of the victim in cases of prisoner and domestic abuse may be similar, and it is therefore arbitrary to distinguish between the two cases simply because one is carried out by someone acting in the name of the state and the other is not (Edwards 2006; McGlynn 2009). The criticism here is not so much that a focus on torture is a problem, but that the way it is defined is limiting. The argument therefore is for a broadening of the notion of torture to include nonstate actors. In partial response, it may be argued that although the classic human rights position may be that only states can be held accountable for human rights abuses, other areas of law, most notably international criminal law, have no such requirements (Burchard 2008). At the same time though, it is important to point out that simply expanding the definition of torture will not inherently expand the scope of protection it offers. The key issue is the conditions of entry into the legal realm. Formal protections are not enough unless we can expand the ground on which people can claim those entitlements.
British Understandings of Torture
The idea that torture happens elsewhere and that Britain has a responsibility to save other people from these horrors is historically ubiquitous, even if not always supported by events, resulting in a number of legal and political contortions. In the spring of 2007, fourteen British marines were detained after the Iranian navy claimed they had strayed into Iran’s territorial waters. The British press reacted by implying that the captured marines were most probably being tortured (see, for example, Beeston and Bone 2007). However, after twelve days the marines were released and the worst they had to complain about was being asked to wear some ill-fitting and outdated suits for their handover. A year later, the British army issued an internal report in response to the brutal treatment and unlawful killing of Iraqi citizens by British soldiers in Basra (Aitken 2008). Des Browne, the minister of defence, issued a statement that said, the “British public should be reassured that such behaviour is not representative of our thoroughly professional and disciplined armed forces” (Ministry of Defence 2008). For the minister of defence, torture was not something that British soldiers did. In contrast, torture was expected of the Iranians.
Judges have not been immune from such assumptions. In 2004, ten men from across North Africa and the Middle East appealed the decision of the British government to certify them as terrorists and effectively detain them without trial. The case before the Court of Appeal was largely based on the argument that much of the evidence used against them had been obtained through torture in their home countries. The Court of Appeal ruled that evidence that might have been obtained through torture was admissible, as long as British officials had not been complicit.15 The logic of the decision was that as long as British hands were clean, everything was fine. Although the courts could not use evidence collected through torture by British officials, the law did not rule out the use of torture by people in other countries. The decision was later overturned on appeal to the House of Lords. In this decision, Lord Bingham argued, “English common law has regarded torture and its fruits with abhorrence for over 500 years, and that abhorrence is now shared by over 140 countries which have acceded to the Torture Convention.”16 Bingham seemed to be claiming that the international prohibition of torture has its origins in English principles. The House of Lords decision, however, still did not explicitly rule out the use of evidence obtained under torture in intelligence operations, as long as it was not collected with the complicity of British agents.17
English legal actors have long had a self-understanding that torture was somehow alien to the principles of its common law. During the eighteenth-century European campaigns to abolish torture in continental Europe, English commentaries were widely self-congratulatory about their own relative rejection of torture. In his treatise on the history of the common law, English judge and academic William Blackstone argued, “It seems astonishing that this usage of administering the torture should be said to arise from a tenderness for the lives of men; and yet this is the reason given for its introduction into the civil law, and its subsequent adoption by the French and other foreign nations” (1829, 325). He also praised the system “in England, where our crown-law is with justice supposed to be more nearly advanced to perfection; where crimes are more accurately defined, and penalties less uncertain and arbitrary; where all our accusations are public, and our trials in the face of the world; where torture is unknown” (1829, 3). For Blackstone, torture was something that happened on the other side of the English Channel.
It is important to note that the English judicial system did not need to torture, as it could convict with virtually no evidence (Langbein 2006, 78). Furthermore, torture had actually continued under special warrant until 1640 (2006, 81). As such, rather than torture being prohibited, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the use of torture was never regularized within English criminal law as a form of interrogation. The English objection to torture was largely because of concerns about its reliability as a source of evidence rather than for humanitarian concerns. As Blackstone argued, it was absurd to be “rating a man’s virtue by the hardiness of his constitution, and his guilt by the sensibility of his nerves!” (1829, 329). However, seemingly cruel punishments were still used in the United Kingdom throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Executing traitors by drawing and quartering continued in the United Kingdom until 1814 and beheadings were not abolished until 1870.
A key part of Britain’s nineteenth-century colonial civilizing mission was the abolition of torture in distant places. In the 1850s, for example, reports reached the United Kingdom of the use of torture as a policing method in the Madras Presidency, in what is now southern India. The official report into the incidents, however, placed the primary blame on native police. It argued that “the whole cry of the people … is to save them from the cruelties of their fellow natives, not from the effects of unkindness or indifference on the part of the European officers of Government” (Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency 1855, 35). The British colonial presence was not seen as a cause of these abuses but as necessary to prevent them from taking place. The charge of torture was also often levied against the Ottoman Empire, as one way of demonstrating that the regime was corrupt and decaying. As one member of parliament put it, “Statements … have been received of tortures such as it must be a shock to anyone in the civilised world.”18 British intervention was then demanded in order to protect the Christian inhabitants of the Middle East.
The sense that the United Kingdom has a unique duty to save the rest of the world from torture continued into the late twentieth century. When the Labour government came to power in 1997, it soon announced what it said was going to be an “ethical foreign policy.” Looking for something on which to apply this, it latched onto the Optional Protocol for the UN Convention Against Torture, which would allow UN teams to inspect places of detention directly. The assumption was that this would bring little change domestically, but that British diplomats should be asked to lobby for other states to ratify the protocol. The Foreign Office also pumped large amounts of money into the Swiss-based Association for the Prevention of Torture, which had been central in the campaign for the new protocol. All this took place before the launch of the war on terror. Although the photographs from Abu Ghraib initially disturbed the sense that torture was something that only happened in places like Iraq and was perpetrated by people like those in the Ba’ath Party, there was still a strong feeling that this was an American problem and that British troops had a far more civilized way of behaving (see, for example, Bishop 2004; Raymont 2006). Subsequent events proved that this was largely wishful thinking.
Much of the worry about allegations of abuse during the beginning of the twenty-first century has been about the damage they might do to the reputation of the United Kingdom abroad, rather than about the suffering of the detainees. Prime Minister David Cameron called allegations of torture a “stain on Britain’s reputation” (Cobain 2010). Such sentiments are not confined to the United Kingdom. Senator John McCain told the US Senate, in response to allegations of American involvement in abuse, “This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies” (2005). As John Parry argues, debates about torture are often debates about identity (2010). Talking about torture can therefore be a proxy for talking about how one perceives his or her nation-state and its commitments.
The sense that torture is simply not something that the British (or Americans) do, can have pernicious implications. It is arguably, for example, behind the use of extraordinary renditions and the outsourcing of coercive interrogation to other regimes. British security officials may not have directly tortured Binyam Mohamed, but they seem to have been involved indirectly. Allowing someone to be sent to Morocco or Afghanistan is an attempt to maintain the claim of British innocence.
In writing about the often-contradictory relationship between self-perception, policy, and practice, the point is not to highlight obvious double standards. To do so would be to ignore the often genuine ways in which torture is abhorred and opposed by state and nonstate actors. Rather, the aim is to examine the ways in which a focus on torture can lead to blind spots and predilections. People acting in the name of the British state have been involved both in acts of cruelty and in acts of compassion, sometimes at the same time. Focusing on attempts to recognize torture allows us to explore how a “differentiated geography of harm and redress,” compassion, and indignation is formed in the political imagination of the British state, its officials, and its citizens (Das 2007, 333).
Structure of This Book
The roots of our contemporary notions of torture include three common origin stories. The first is to see the category of torture as an inevitable response to cruelty and suffering. The second is to understand a concern with torture as growing out of the increasing humanitarian sentiments born of the Enlightenment. The third is to argue that modern notions of torture have to be understood as a response to the horrors of World War II. However, in Chapter 1, I argue that torture did not gain its particular prominence as a harm above all others until the 1970s. It was at this point that Cold War politics, medical practice, refugee flows, and international human rights activists came together to lead to a focus on individual trauma and precise legal definition.
Torture involves distinct notions of victims and perpetrators, innocence and guilt. To count as a legally recognized survivor of torture, or to be found legally culpable as a perpetrator, one must pass a series of evidentiary and conceptual hurdles. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine how a focus on torture leads to the recognition of particular types of victims and survivors. The vast majority of claims for recognition as torture survivors in the United Kingdom involve immigration claims, and it is therefore on these that I focus. In Chapter 2, I examine the issues raised by attempts to recognize torture survivors in immigration claims. Using the example of one particular Iranian male, I argue that given the inherently problematic nature of much of the evidence presented, the recognition of torture survivors is an inevitably erratic process. In Chapter 3, I explore the dilemmas involved in the production of medicolegal reports about torture survivors. These reports are used by lawyers as evidence to corroborate a claim—made as part of an asylum application—that someone has been tortured. The clinicians writing these reports face the problem that torture is far from being a straightforward clinical category, and they are forced to read their clients’ minds and bodies for often highly ambiguous signs.
In immigration cases involving claims of torture, the key issue is not past incidents but events that have not yet taken place. The question asked by judges is not simply whether someone has been tortured in the past, but whether that person might be tortured in the future. In Chapter 4, therefore, I examine attempts to protect people from future acts of torture. I do so by exploring the efforts of the British government to deport a number of terror suspects to Algeria and the claims by their lawyers that they will be tortured on return to that country. I argue that the ways in which the courts attempt to speculate about the future leads to a focus on formal structures rather than on the often contingent and political causes of violence. An absolute prohibition is made much more ambiguous when it is projected into the future.
The other half of the definition of torture is the specific intent of the perpetrator. If torture is widely understood as a crime so horrific that it transcends boundaries, what type of person can be found guilty of torture? In Chapter 5, I explore the successful prosecution in 2005 of an Afghan “warlord,” the first person ever to be charged with torture in the United Kingdom. Given the events of the last ten years, as well as Britain’s record in its struggles against anticolonial insurgency, this seems a little surprising. The trial of the Afghan “warlord” is therefore compared to the largely unsuccessful prosecution of British soldiers for the abuse and beating to death of detainees after the invasion of Iraq. I argue that there is a structural prejudice, inherent in the law, to seeing torture as a crime committed by other people in other places.
Torture is understood as a uniquely international issue, subject to international conventions and monitored by international organizations. In Chapter 6, I shift focus again to examine the international human rights monitoring mechanisms that oversee the United Kingdom’s compliance with the human rights obligation to prohibit torture. In particular, I focus on the use of internationalized shame as a device to prevent torture. I argue that, as a result of the technical ways in which obligations are interpreted, the shame of torture is dispersed into arguments about procedure. By the end, there seems little to be ashamed of.
The internationally recognized legal prohibition of torture has brought many things with it. The focus on individual suffering has meant that the experience of victims cannot be totally forgotten, either politically or legally. The creation of international conventions means that there is a new language by which states can be held accountable for their actions. More precise definitions have created the possibility, still largely unfulfilled, of criminal prosecution for perpetrators. However, the political, legal, and ethical priority given to torture also raises its own questions. Torture is not simply a neutral category but inevitably favors some and disadvantages others, and it obscures particular political relationships while revealing alternatives. By stressing the contingencies and contradictions in the use of the legal category, I seek to tread a path between dismissing human rights claims as a veil that hides other forms of domination and treating those claims as a product of a transcendent moral realm, which no social or political inquiry “can hope to illuminate” (Haskell 2000, 236).19 The aim is to examine how one of the most powerful elements of our contemporary moral economy has been made possible and how it creates particular distributions of sympathy, indignation, and entitlement.
