“We Tortured Some Folks”

I was listening to a radio broadcast about El Chapo Guzman, and it was discussing the prison conditions that he will face in solitary confinement at the Supermax facility in Colorado. As described by a former prisoner and a former prison guard, solitary entails a constant battle to remain human.

And it reminded me of our post-9/11 conversations about things like "enhanced interrogation," “extraterritorial rendition,” and “targeted killing.” So many of us were drawing on people like George Orwell to note the way that language was being used to disguise the truth. Torture wasn’t torture, kidnapping wasn’t kidnapping, and assassination wasn’t assassination.

That moment was a political education for many of us, because we were collectively witnessing the way that truths could be falsified through language. It’s one thing to read about these phenomenon and another to watch them unfold. But this radio broadcast made me think about how it’s much easier to notice the way that language can be manipulated as the manipulation is taking place, and much harder to notice this after we’ve already accepted these manipulations.

So, we were up in arms about how the United States started torturing people after 9/11, but we’re still not up in arms about the fact that we’ve doing the same in prisons for decades—if not centuries.