Don’t even get me started on music videos. If you judge by our entertainment media, Americans find torture jazzy and titillating. Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But what’s truly weird about it is that we love watching depictions of an experience less likely to happen to us than to almost any other population in the world. Americans are not crueler than other people, or even more sadomasochistic. Why do we so like to fantasize about the terrible things that the rest of the world — oh, for example, Central Americans, Africans, and Bangladeshis — can readily undergo without the benefit of fantasy?

Part of it is the nature of torture itself, which breeds obsessive horror in all persons, everywhere — including Africans and Bangladeshis. Like us, those most likely to be its victims also spend long hours wondering what it might be like to have mice inserted into their bodies or to rationally, hopefully wish to die.

But in this country, most of us are so distant from torture as an everyday reality that our imaginings of it have the quality of a Sensurround thrill. The poet Carolyn Forche (who was, years ago, a human-rights observer in El Salvador), wrote that the only way to get entertainment-oriented Americans interested in news about that country was:

” … to give
them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez,
who after years of confinement did not
know what year it was, how she walked
with help and was forced to shit in public.
Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
dry ice and concrete, grey rats, and above all
who fucked her, how many times and when.”

Dianna Ortiz is one American whose relationship to torture is different. That’s because she was tortured in 1989, during a two-year stint in Guatemala as a young, politically unsophisticated nun from a Kentucky convent, teaching children to read in a rural province. She was abducted from a convent garden one morning by a U.S.-trained Guatemalan army captain, a police intelligence officer and their campesino torture temp, and installed in the secret basement of a police training institute called the Politecnica. (This was a regular site for torture conducted on orders of the military high command.)

They took Ortiz not because she was any kind of radical but simply because she was a garden-variety Catholic missionary working with the poor at a time when the military wanted to seriously scare the church. (Priests and nuns, human-rights workers, doctors, labor activists and randomly chosen campesinos had been tortured in Guatemala for decades, not so much to get information as to terrorize entire trades and populations.)

Ortiz was held for only 24 hours, unlike many other torture victims, whose ordeals last, incredibly, for months or even years. But those 24 hours resulted in a complete loss of memory of everything in her life prior to being tortured. She had to be reintroduced to her own parents, and she still has almost no memory of her childhood, her college years, how she became a nun, or her pre-torture friendships.

But she has intense memories of everything from her abduction onward. Ortiz’s book, “The Blindfold’s Eyes,” is an extraordinary, moving, sharply focused account of what it is actually like to be tortured and what the experience does to the rest of your life.

Though the book credits a co-writer — Patricia Davis — “The Blindfold’s Eyes” has a strong flavor of coming direct from Ortiz, without the rounded sentences or empty flourishes that are the usual hallmark of ghostwriters. The first-person voice is mordant, self-aware, tender, often bitterly funny, the opposite of the common stereotype of the trauma victim as a soggy bladder-bag of ugly feelings, unable to control any part of herself or her world, traumatized into nothingness.

In fact, what Ortiz tells us later about her need to control the way her story is told makes it likely that she was intimately involved in the production of every sentence. (Of course, figuring out whether to think of oneself as in or out of control of one’s abuse is the painful dialectic of all victims. If you think of yourself as having been in control of it, you’re fucked because it’s your fault. But if you realize you were out of control, you’re even more fucked, because it’s much more painful to have been victimized and not have been able to do anything more about it than merely to have been victimized.)

Paradoxically, Ortiz is strong enough to show us the times that she was helpless — not just during her imprisonment, but through many occasions of frantic self-hatred, flashbacks and just being profoundly not OK in the years afterward. Sometimes, the torturers talk to her late at night in her bedroom, before she goes to sleep. What I really admire in this book is Ortiz’s willingness to show that although she was not damaged utterly and entirely by the torture, she was indeed damaged.

So: what happened to her. This is the hard part to write about, although it’s not the hardest part of the book to read. Part of the problem is the fear of re-creating Ortiz’s experiences by writing about them — as though torture could be enacted simply by being thought of — but the other part is the fear of diminishing them through the reviewer’s hurried paraphrase or, worse, making them into another piece of S/M porn.

Before it begins, when they’re alone, the campesino asks her to forgive him for all the people he’s tortured and killed. When she won’t, he says he could have saved her if only she’d come across with absolution. Then the head torturer starts things off by calling her “mi amor.” They burn her over her entire body — including her breasts and probably her genitals. They rape her, of course. Many times. One of them sticks his penis in her wounds. Is my account becoming pornographic already? I’m trying to resist it, but it’s difficult, for reasons I’ll go into below — which have nothing at all to do with Ortiz.

They force Ortiz, who entered the novitiate at the age of 17, to jerk them off and perform oral sex. They hurt her in other ways she won’t describe. (The most chilling line in the book is in a different section, where Ortiz, casually explaining her fear of dogs, says, “Dogs were used in my torture in a way that was too horrible to share with anyone. Even now, I don’t talk about that part of the torture.”) And they put her in a pit of dying and dead people who’ve already been tortured — including children. Most damaging of all, they position Ortiz’s hands around a machete and force the machete, in her hands, into another torture victim, murdering the woman.

Writing about this, I find my words keep turning lurid and winking, or fetishized like a horror movie — the way that Andrea Dworkin’s catalogs of violence and rape turn into ultra-graphic porn because of the obsessed and florid way she writes about them. Why is it hard to avoid this (probably for both writers and readers)? I’m not pornographizing because of some peculiarly American fascination with exotic sufferings (I figured out) but because of the very nature of torture and the effect it has on everyone — even “unaffected” observers like me.

We inevitably sexualize and sensationalize torture, because it is one of the few ways to make that recalcitrant experience fit in our brains. Torture does something to the minds of all who experience it — even fifth-hand, vicariously, through a report. (That’s why it’s such an effective means of controlling entire societies.) Making it sexual, or thrilling and distanced like a kill in a video game, is one of the few ways of making it safe enough to contemplate.

In America, we are so shielded from the real thing that many of us have forgotten the difference between torture and our adventure comix of it, or why it’s important to keep them sorted out. S/M porn can be perfectly dandy — there’s a fair amount of it on my bookshelf — but there would be no need for it if there were no violence.

And while there’s no real emotional pain in a masturbation fantasy, there’s little room for heroism, either. But in the middle of Dianna Ortiz’s torture, something distinctly inimical to torture happens. While her tormentors take a break, she finds herself alone in a room with a figure curled under a bloodstained sheet. When Dianna pulls back the sheet, there is a woman who “opens her eyes, and they are light brown in the black and blue of her face. Her teeth appear in the crack of her swollen lips. She is trying to smile. I catch a sob in my throat and gently take her hand. Her breasts have been cut, and maggots are crawling in them.” The woman asks Dianna’s name, and says “Dianna, be strong.” They hold hands. “For what seems like hours, we hold on to each other.”

Extraordinarily, even in the midst of what’s been done to them, Dianna and this woman resist the perpetrators’ attempts to make them feel and act inhuman.

For torture, as the most strategic and deliberate of all acts of abuse, tries to create a narrative in which the victim is completely ugly and impossible to identify with — if you will, a sort of hate movie in which the torturer is the only possible hero, the only role a viewer can comfortably relate to. The victim is made to seem completely animal, disgusting, inhuman. In Ortiz’s case, the torturers have the gall to make a video of what they do to her so that she can be controlled by the shame its release would cause her. (Astonishingly, they are not afraid that the video might shame them.)

And she is controlled by the shame, in many ways. After her ordeal, she spends years feeling guilty. Yes, guilty. You get angriest at the torturers when Ortiz exquisitely delineates how hard it is for her not to blame herself for her own attack. “Sometimes I wonder … if I fought hard enough,” she stammers to her mother superior. “I feel like I contaminate people.” The guilt is even more intense in her case: Ortiz also feels evil because of the secret abortion she has when she winds up pregnant from the rapes, because of her forced “murder” (with the machete) of the other victim, and because she unwittingly told the torturers some information that may have imperiled an activist.

The reality of torture is, in fact, so hard to look at that many non-victims unconsciously believe that victims indeed are to blame. Shortly after her release, Ortiz goes to an American shrink who tells her to stop going on about torture — “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.” A fellow nun from her order informs Ortiz that because she ignored death threats when she was in Guatemala, “If it’s anyone’s fault what happened to you there, it’s yours.”

But Ortiz finally does stop blaming herself. (You want to cheer when, near the end of the book, she comes to the conclusion that no one has a right to judge women who have abortions.) An entirely different side of this book details Ortiz’s battle — through two insanely brave lawsuits in Guatemala and one in the United States — to bring her abductors to justice and uncover U.S. government documents about her torture.

There are plenty. It turns out that federal investigators and State Department officials made an active effort to cover up her ordeal and to discredit her — understandably, as the United States is the major source of funding for the Guatemalan military. Her torture stopped when a man with an American accent entered the room and said in English, “Shit.” Then he said, in Spanish, to the torturers, “You idiots! Leave her alone. She’s a North American, and it’s all over the news.” To Ortiz he says, “You have to forgive those guys … they made a mistake.”

After 9/11, our government turned to torture, seeking information about the terrorists who committed the atrocity and others who might follow after them. Senior officials ordered the torture of men at military bases and detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe, and in other countries – including Libya and Egypt — where abusive regimes were asked to do Washington’s dirty work.

The best known of all the prisons remains Guantanamo on the southeast coast of Cuba. For years, the United States naval base there seemed like an isolated vestige of the Cold War – defying the occasional threat from Fidel Castro to shut it down. But since 9/11, Guantanamo – Gitmo – has been a detention center, an extraterritorial island jail considered outside the jurisdiction of US civilian courts and rules of evidence. Like the notorious Room 101 of George Orwell’s “1984,” the chamber that contains the thing each victim fears the most to make them confess, Guantanamo’s name has become synonymous with torture. Nearly 800 people have been held there. George W. Bush eventually released 500 of them, sometimes after years of confinement and cruelty. Barack Obama has freed 67, but 169 remain, even though the president pledged to close the Guantanamo prison within a year of his inauguration. Now, forty-six are so dangerous, our government says, they will be held indefinitely, without trial.

We almost never see the detainees. Were it not for the work of human rights organizations and the forest of lawsuits that have arisen from our actions, the prisoners would be out of sight, out of mind. Five of the Guantanamo prisoners were recently arraigned before a military commission for their role in the attacks. One of them is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who says he was the mastermind behind 9/11. He was waterboarded by interrogators 183 times. Pentagon officials predict it will be at least another year before the five go on trial.

Earlier this month, lawyers for Mohammed al-Qahtani – the so-called “20th hijacker” who didn’t make it onto the planes — filed suit in New York federal court to make public what they described as “extremely disturbing” videotapes of his interrogations.  He was charged in 2008 with war crimes and murder but the charges were dropped after the former convening authority for the Guantanamo military commissions, Susan Crawford, told journalist Bob Woodward that al-Qahtani’s treatment “met the legal definition of torture.”

He remains in indefinite detention, as does Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi citizen alleged to have run terrorist training camps. He was waterboarded at least 83 times in a single month.  Just this week a federal appeals court refused to release information on the interrogation methods the CIA used on Abu Zubaydah and other terrorist suspects.

You may also have seen the flurry of action this month around a section of the new National Defense Authorization Act that allows the military to detain indefinitely not only members of al Qaeda, the Taliban and “associated forces” but anyone who has “substantially supported” them.  A federal court struck down that provision in response to journalists and advocates who believe it could be so broadly interpreted it would violate civil liberties.  Nonetheless, two days after the court’s decision, the House of Representatives reaffirmed the original provision.

The other day, eight members of the Bush Administration – including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld – were found guilty of torture and other war crimes by an unofficial tribunal meeting in Malaysia.  The story was played widely in parts of the world press, with reports that the judgment could lead the way to proceedings before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It received almost no mention here in the United States.

This summer, it’s believed that the United States Senate’s intelligence committee finally will release a report on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” that euphemistic phrase for what any reasonable person not employed by the government would call torture. The report has been three years in the making, with investigators examining millions of classified documents. The news service Reuters says the report will conclude that techniques such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation do not yield worthwhile intelligence information.

So here we are, into our eleventh year after 9/11, still at war in Afghanistan, still at war with terrorists, still at war with our collective conscience as we grapple with how to protect our country from attack without violating the basic values of civilization — the rule of law, striving to achieve our aims without corrupting them, and restraint in the use of power over others, especially when exercised in secret.

In future days and years, how will we come to cope with the reality of what we have done in the name of security? Many other societies do seem to try harder than we do to come to terms with horrendous behavior commissioned or condoned by a government. Beginning in 1996, in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings at which whites and blacks struggled to confront the cruelty inflicted on human beings during apartheid.

And perhaps you caught something said the other day by the president of Brazil, Dilma Roussef.  During the early seventies she was held in prison and tortured repeatedly by the military dictators who ruled her country for nearly 25 years. The state of Rio de Janeiro has announced it will officially apologize to her. Earlier, when she swore in members of a commission investigating the dictatorship, President Roussef said: “We are not moved by revenge, hate or a desire to rewrite history. The need to know the full truth is what moves us.”

In other words, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

The memo argues that the Convention Against Torture, and the Constitution’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, do indeed apply to the CIA’s use of “waterboard[ing], walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement.” Zelikow further wrote in the memo that “we are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here, even when the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants.” According to the memo, the techniques are legally prohibited, even if there is a compelling state interest to justify them, since they should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and “shock the conscience.”

Chillingly, the memo notes that “corrective techniques, such as slaps,” may be legally sustained, as might be “[C]ontrol conditions, such as nudity, sleep deprivation, and liquid diets…depending on the circumstances and details of how these techniques are used.” However much distress Zelikow’s memo caused the White House, it was not an ACLU briefing paper.

“I’m pleased the memo is now part of the historical record and available for study,” Zelikow wrote Salon in an email. The White House had determined that the memo — which was not binding since Zelikow’s was a bureaucratic position without legal authority — was too dangerous to exist. “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed,” he said in a May 2009 congressional hearing.

At that hearing, before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, Zelikow said he had “no view on whether former officials should be prosecuted,” a decision he thinks should be left to “institutions.” However, he did call for a thorough inquiry and a public report examining how the U.S. came to employ torture.

Of course, no such inquiry was ever launched. The Obama administration declined to revisit the U.S. employment of torture, with the president saying he didn’t want to “look back.” Zelikow believes this was a mistake. “I still believe an inquiry would be useful, though less so as time passes and more information becomes available, especially after the 9/11 trials conclude, hopefully this year,” he says in an email.

During his congressional testimony, Zelikow declined to say whether Department of Justice lawyers acted improperly or immorally, conceding only that their opinions were “unsound, even unreasonable.” But in a 2007 lecture in Houston, he had no problem saying “the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”

The importance of the memo lies in its revelation that there was real, serious debate inside the Bush administration about how to interrogate captured terrorist suspects. The members of the White House declined to enter that debate — indeed, they did their best to squash it. The destruction of Zelikow’s carefully reasoned memo suggests the White House did not want any record of alternative views even existing, lest they be considered reasonable or people get the idea that the torture policies were thought controversial even by members of the administration.

The records from this lawsuit between two sub-contractors involved in the renditions will eventually be taught in an undergrad history course titled “America: Where It All Went Wrong.” Detainees were transported by the same companies that fly billionaires on private jets to their resort vacations. (The CIA doesn’t have an air force, so they relied on massive government contractor DynCorp, which… just rented some private planes.)

We learn that the CIA provided the flights with letters from a fictional State Department official (the State Department was almost certainly not involved in the rendition program) providing diplomatic cover.

We learn that one the planes used to transport a suspect (Abu Omar, captured in Italy and tortured in Egypt) was owned by the co-owner of the Boston Red Sox. The plane sported a Red Sox logo on the tail. I mean a Yankees plane might’ve been more poetically apt but either way it seems like such a pat symbol of America’s behavior in the wretched first decade of the 21st century that I’d roll my eyes at it if it turned up in a piece of fiction. An executive’s private plane, sporting the logo of a rich baseball team and carrying an Imam captured overseas by the CIA, touches down in Egypt, a nation led by an American-backed strongman, where the Imam is to be tortured. What preachy liberal hack dreamed up that one? (The executive also owns part of Liverpool FC, because we can’t forget Great Britain’s help in all this.)

Then the hedge funds took an interest in privatized torture:

DynCorp was purchased in 2003 by Computer Sciences Corp., another leading federal contractor, in a $940 million merger. Computer Sciences Corp. then took on a supervising role in the rendition flights through 2006, according to invoices and emails in the court files. CSC sold three DynCorp units in 2005 to Veritas Capital Fund, a private equity firm, for $850 million, but retained ownership of other parts of the old company. Veritas in turn sold the restructured DynCorp — now known as DynCorp International — for about $1 billion in 2010 to Cerebrus Capital Management, another private equity fund.

So at least a couple rich people got even richer off of our national shame. There’s an upside to everything.

Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill discussed the issue with Keith Olbermann Thursday. He recalled an incident he had investigated (which would not be classified as waterboarding) of a former Guantanamo detainee having a high pressure water hose fixed up a nostril. Water would be forced up his head until suffocation.

Scahill noted President Obama’s “extremely poor record” at holding people accountable for torturous acts and expressed concern that little has changed at Guantanamo.

Rumsfeld currently faces a lawsuit over the alleged use of torture, bought by a former military translator held in Iraq for nine months, but Scahill emphasized that the U.S. administration always tends to get its people off the hook.

Watch the clip for “Countdown” below: