What Shakespeare knew that Bush & Co. don't

In case readers haven't noticed, Jan writes about a great, broad array of subjects that pop into her mind. I admire that catholicity. I, on the other hand, am stuck barking at the moon over our current American nightmare--the depressing saga of the Bush administration's rape of America.

So be it. It doesn't take watching the evening news or reading the daily papers to set me off; nearly everything I read or observe gets me to frothing. This past weekend--ironically a holiday dedicated to a couple presidents of certain stature--it was going to the movies to see the recent film of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons that set me reflecting at how tragically little these vandals in Washington know about how to do their jobs

It doesn't take a very long association with Shakespeare's plays and poems to notice that he was able to clearly articulate how people and the world in general operate. And one doesn't have to be particularly perceptive to notice that our current president and his cronies haven't a clue about anything important.

So, whether you know the intricacies of Shakespeare play or not, understand that there comes a point in the play where a young man of limited means and borrowed array comes to court a beautiful young heiress. The courtship, though, is not quite the normal sort: Portia's suitors are all required by her father's will to play out a little game of chance in which they must select from among three ornate jewel boxes--one made from gold, one of silver and one of lead--to find Portia's portrait and thereby win her hand in marriage. Ignore for the moment that were he around today Shakespeare could have had a career cooking up game shows or reality schemes for TV. Anyway, Portia has already survived two rounds of this sort of Russian roulette, and now the man she really craves, Bassanio, has come to take his chances at Let's Make a Deal. Though Portia is reluctant to get down to business, Bassanio knows that no amount of loving chatter on her part can change the requirement that he must play the game. He wants to get down to business:
BASSANIO
Let me choose
For as I am, I live upon the rack.

PORTIA
Upon the rack, Bassanio! then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.

BASSANIO
None but that ugly treason of mistrust,
Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love:
There may as well be amity and life
'Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love.

PORTIA
Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak anything.

BASSANIO
Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth.

PORTIA
Well then, confess and live.

BASSANIO
'Confess' and 'love'
Had been the very sum of my confession:
O happy torment, when my torturer
Doth teach me answers for deliverance!
But let me to my fortune and the caskets.

Now, I've read and watched this scene literally dozens of times. But it's always been just clever word play to me. After all, these scenes at Belmont are clearly intended as fairy tale counterpoint to the somber plot line developing in downtown Venice, where smug, self-righteous Christian businessmen bait and bully the city's Jews, even as they seek to borrow a few thousand ducats of gold. Now, though, suddenly Shakespeare's words ring a bell with a disturbing article I'd just finished from the current New Yorker magazine. Senior staffer Jane Mayer has written a powerful piece on a deeply secret, on-going U.S. intelligence procedure known as "extraordinary rendition." In essence this is our government's end-run around America's squeamishness about torturing political prisoners for information.

There's no substitute for Mayer's precise research, but here's the deal: for about a decade now U.S intelligence operatives have been capturing foreigners--both in the U.S. and elsewhere--with suspected terrorist connections, and immediately flying them by private jet to countries like Egypt, Morocco, Syria, or Jordan, where American operatives or local authorities proceed to torture them into confession.

What started out in the mid-90s as a rare, "extraordinary" solution to the C.I.A's problem of what to do with, for instance, suspects from the first WTC bombing in 1993 whom they had already questioned so roughly that they could not be usefully brought to justice in the U.S., has since 9/11 become a course of action for hundreds of suspects. Our "final solution" now is simply to seize suspects off the streets abroad or as they pass through an American airport, stuff them secretly on a Gulfstream V jet and send them, usually via U.S. overseas military bases, to one of these countries--all of which have been cited for human rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture prisoners--and dig deeper for information. This, of course, is just a shaded alternative to our relatively "open" torture chambers at Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

All this, of course, despite President Bush's recent proclamation in a New York Times interview that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture."

The "ah-hah" moment with Shakespeare came, though, when Portia says, "I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything." This is exactly the point Mayer makes when she quotes from former F.B.I and C.I.A. agents who remind us that the information we are getting from tortured prisoners is generally worthless; after being tortured, they confess to anything and everything they sense their tormentors want to hear. Experienced intelligence agents know that successful interrogators build relationships with even the most despicable suspects. Just contemplating the concept of "due process" can make a suspect more compliant, they say. Bottom line: as one former F.B.I. agent puts it "Brutalization doesn't work. We know that."

So did Shakespeare. When he has characters speak of being "upon the rack" it isn't necessarily a metaphor, as it is here for Bassanio and Portia, for romantic angst. Shakespeare lived in an era when the rack had a literal place in the affairs of church and state. Elizabethan and Jacobean protestants were quite experienced at using this sort of device to wrest confession of Popish plots from Catholic activists, Guy Fawkes and his demolition crew being only the most famous.

But Shakespeare knew the limitations of physical torture, and he can have even a pampered young woman of little or no experience of the world like Portia speak the obvious: a person enduring torture will tell some real whoppers to gain release from pain and humiliation. Bassanio, though clearly no traitor to Portia, is quick to appreciate the interrogator's tendency to provide the answers sought through inflicting agony. "O happy torment," he says, "when my torturer doth teach me answers for deliverance!" Of course, in this context, it is a matter of clever lovers playing with words, but the kernel of truth is what gives their banter its bite on stage.

Our current problem is that the Bush clan keeps ignoring this ancient insight, to the point where Mayer can cite case after case of our intelligence community falling for ridiculous lies extracted from tortured detainees. Perhaps the most embarrassing of these came when Secretary of State Colin Powell went in front of the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 and spoke authoritatively about Saddam Hussein's offer to train Al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

This information, it turns out, came from an Al Qaeda operative who ran a training camp in Afghanistan and had virtually no knowledge about Iraq operations at all, but had been sent under the U.S. rendition program to Egypt for a few months of outsourced torture. He gave his interrogators the kind of information they where looking for--later discovered to be entirely untrue--and thus even though imprisoned had his full measure of revenge upon his embarrassed enemy.

The New Yorker piece goes on to note that our British allies have already learned this lesson from their long-running nightmare with the Irish Republican Army. For years they tried to get the upper hand through subjecting detainees to brutality. Eventually, though, they came to the conclusion that it simply doesn't work. A former M.I.5 officer says he discovered that it was far more effective to simply be more "creative" about traditional intelligence gathering techniques such as infiltration and eavesdropping.

Mayer quotes this agent saying, "The U.S. is doing what the British did in the nineteen-seventies, detaining people and violating their civil liberties. It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You'll end up radicalizing the entire population."

The Brits seem to have rediscovered what their national poet knew 400 years ago, so why haven't George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and the rest? Don't they read?