ABSTRACT
In this article, we argue that the government's post 9-11 torture program was a big lie, in that the designers, executors and enablers knew all along that torture does not elicit reliable information. We review the government's own research on the matter, and we discuss the ways in which methods known to be unreliable were implemented, most saliently at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. We review the secrecy and propaganda surrounding the scope and horror of the torture program at Guantánamo and black sites around the world, and the painful truth of how the government knowingly adopted the terror policies of the torture program, against their own knowledge, against international human rights, and against the law. On January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. became the 46th President of the United States, following what might very well have been the most chaotic election in the recent history of the United States. The turmoil reached a peak on Jan 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC. At the center of this extended and ongoing political upheaval is what has been labeled "The Big Lie" - the completely disproven notion that Biden's win was based on fraudulent grounds, and that the election was stolen from Trump because of a corrupted voting process. President Biden has consistently rejected reality warping and presents himself on the national stage as a man of reason, and a strong supporter of science. He has proclaimed "Science is discovery. It's not fiction", as he announced that his team of scientific advisors would summon "science and truth" to combat climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges facing his new administration, adding "The same laws apply, the same evidence holds true regardless of whether you accept them." President Biden can show his self-proclaimed commitment to truth by following through on his words with action. In particular, he can fulfil the task which his two predecessors, Trump and Obama, both failed to do: Closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. The same United States law and international law apply; the same evidence, or lack thereof holds true for those remaining 38 prisoners being held within the confines of a US-run concentration camp in the Caribbean. The laws of science apply, the rules of evidence apply, and the rule of law applies. Science and truth cannot be situationally applied to suit political agendas, especially not within the confines of a facility once called a "Battle Lab" (Leopold, 2015), where the military touts phrases like "honor bound" and "defend freedom" at the entrance, yet the truths of what goes on inside are withheld from the public record, via the government's complex layers of secrecy, including classification, redactions, and obfuscations. There can be no justice without truth. The system has derailed every effort to bring the suspected 9/11 terrorists to justice before tribunals that have failed and have been derailed by torture. While President Biden can't remove the stain of the national torture policies, he can show that the Constitution endures; that the rule of law prevails, by illuminating the shadowland of the torture regime. Joe Biden needs to demonstrate that truth matters - even painful truths. In this article, we will describe that through a painstaking and laborious process of discovery, we now know that behind the gates of Guantánamo Bay and its related archipelago of black sites there were prisoners, often held on dubious grounds or no reasonable grounds at all. We know that these prisoners were submitted to treatments aimed squarely at generating complete psychological disintegration. As we will lay out in the article, prisoners captured during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom were subjected to physical violence, sexual violence, and an astonishing array of psychologically abusive tactics under the misnomer 'interrogation'. We also know that the torture program metastasized into a monster, as if lifted from the pages of the most absurd of postmodern fictions, and that the United States has never held anyone accountable, nor faced any reckoning for this disaster of human rights (Senate Select Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency Detention and Interrogation Program, 2014). And we know that the disaster that was the torture program was all based on lies, one big lie in particular - that torture worked to break through to truth. The chief argument, which we will defend below, is that the schemers behind the system of torture knew all along that this was bogus; that torture does nothing to produce truth, that what it breaks is a person's autonomy and very selfhood, rendering them compliant in the extreme. Indeed, the CIA and United States military, who both committed war crimes, knew all along that they propagated falsehoods - our main argument is that the historical record shows that the CIA itself has a long history of studying precisely the effect of techniques like those employed post 9/11. As we shall see, the so called architects had no interrogation experience, but were well-versed in communist-based methodologies known to produce false information.