A Long View of the Torture Memos
I had some misgivings as my trip to Trondheim, Norway approached. I was scheduled to speak to students and faculty at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology about the Torture Memos and detainee treatment at Guantanamo — not comfortable topics for an American abroad. How I would have preferred to discuss some of the other, more positive topics covered in this blog — how US mayors are stepping up to implement human rights norms locally, or how the social movement for marriage equality succeeded in changing the law and lives. But the Norwegian students had just read Guantanamo Diary, and they were anxious to talk with an American lawyer about the range of issues raised by that book — torture, indefinite detention, censorship and so on.
I touched on all of those topics, but framed my remarks around the legal ethics issues that I’m most familiar with, and argued that on top of everything else, the organized bar failed to adequately respond to the Torture Memos. The audience was knowledgeable and tough, and asked more than once why there was so little accountability for the torture policies at the highest levels of US government.
The day after my talk, I had the opportunity to visit the Falstad Memorial and Human Rights Centre about an hour’s train ride outside of Trondheim. Falstad was built as a special school for delinquent boys but starting in 1941, it served as the Falstad SS prison camp during the German occupation of Norway. Political prisoners en route to concentration camps, Jews headed for Auschwitz and others passed through the camp. Not everyone left. Some were tortured. Hundreds of prisoners were shot point blank and buried in unmarked, mass graves in the stately pine forest nearby.
The Falstad Centre is open about its history. Its original function, our guide told us, could be characterized as a work house for low income children. When it became an SS camp, it was not only occupying Germans who carried out the barbaric acts there; some of the guards and collaborators were local Norwegians. And of course, on a national scale, the Norwegian puppet government provided cover for German policies during the war.
When the Falstad Centre formally opened in 2006, the foreign Minister of Norway suggested that Falstad could served as a counterweight to the already internationally notorious US torture and detention policies. The Falstad Centre, he argued, by marking the graves and naming those who passed through the camp, attempts to restore the identity and humanity of the otherwise faceless victims. It shows, he said, why no individual or government should be excused from honoring basic human rights and permitted to torture or suspend the Geneva Conventions.
While I certainly agree, I took a slightly different lesson from my visit — and that is, the importance of speaking out about human rights violations, even when it is uncomfortable to do so. The Falstad Centre’s impact is all the more powerful because it confronts the reality of Norwegian collaboration and collective responsibility, as well as the humanity of the occupying forces, though it cannot be a popular to do so — and indeed, the Falstad exhibit has provoked a wide-ranging debate in Norway. Though I had mixed feelings about hosting a frank conversation about the Torture Memos in Trondheim, I came away from Falstad feeling that holding such uncomfortable conversations in all quarters is an important aspect of addressing human rights abuses and, in the long run, finally relegating the violations of the Torture Memos and Guantanamo detentions to history.