Civilizing Steps
The impression of pain, then, may increase to such a degree
that, occupying the mind entirely, it will compel the
sufferer to use the shortest method of freeing himself from
torment....He will accuse himself of crimes of which he is
innocent so that the very means employed to distinguish the
innocent from the guilty will most effectually destroy all
difference between them.
Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, 1764
At the beginning of the eighteenth-century the open and
official use of torture by Europe’s governments was
widespread. It was deemed necessary to affirm guilt through
confession in criminal cases (guilt almost always being
assumed prior to trial) and to determine the identity of
accomplices. It was also thought to serve as a deterrent to
other potential offenders. Then, Cesare Beccaria, Voltaire,
and other Enlightenment figures began to say publicly what
some of the torturers might have known for a long time—none
of these justifications were consistently true. Torture did
not, in any reliable fashion, bring forth truthful
confessions or other trustworthy information, nor did it
deter others, in any significant way, from breaking the
law. Using these facts, a small but well-known number of
intellectuals were able to exercise influence over
selectively progressive rulers in an era of non-democratic
government. Through forceful lobbying and popular writing
the Enlightenment philosophers promoted a new set of
beliefs—the importance of critical intelligence, the merit
of objective evidence, and the value of tolerance and common
decency—to government leaders and other important personages
who respected their opinions and wanted to be identified
with their “enlightened” way of thinking. As a result,
states began to abolish the official use of torture.
Prussia did so in 1754, Baden in 1767, Sweden in 1772,
France in 1780, Austria in 1781, Tuscany in 1786, and so
on.
Nonetheless, it is doubtful whether these decrees stopped
torture by government officials altogether. Torture had
been practiced for a very long time and traditions are hard
to put aside. Also, as we will see, there are other,
psychological reasons for its persistence. It must also
have persisted at those times and places deemed
exceptional—that is when the rule of law was thought not to
apply. The most common example in this category is when
waging war. It would take another hundred or so years until
something like Enlightenment good sense was applied in the
form of “rules of war.”
This second step began in 1859 with the work of Henry Dunant,
the man who founded the International Red Cross. His
efforts, and those who kept up his work, have resulted in a
series of Geneva Conventions that have crafted
internationally applicable laws for how warring parties
treat civilians, medical personal, and prisoners of war,
among other groups. Under the Third Geneva Convention,
which came into effect in 1950, prisoners of war “must be
humanely treated.” Thus, “prisoners of war must at all
times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or
intimidation . . . ” In 1985, a United Nations Convention
Against Torture extended this protection to all individuals,
stating in Article 2 that “no exceptional circumstances
whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war,
internal political instability or any other public
emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
In addition, the Convention’s Article 3 states that, “no
State or Party shall expel, return or extradite a person to
another State where there are substantial grounds for
believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to
torture.” The United States has signed and ratified the
Third Geneva Convention as well as the Convention Against
Torture. It is now in open violation of both of them.
About Face
The nature of the new war places a high premium on...the
ability to quickly obtain information from captured
terrorists in order to avoid further atrocities against
American civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm
renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning
of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions
. . .
White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, Memorandum for the
President , January 25, 2002.
Americans were profoundly shocked when the Twin Towers were
brought down by hijacked commercial airliners on September
11, 2001. More deadly than Pearl Harbor, this attack was
seen as an unprovoked terrorist assault on a country, the
foreign policy of which had only the best intentions for the
rest of the world. That this assessment reflected a
widespread ignorance of the real consequences of American
foreign policy made no difference to the reaction that now
evolved. Righteous indignation reigned supreme and the
shadowy enemy that had launched the attack was portrayed as
irrational, fanatical, and unworthy of any humanitarian
regard. This assumption was to be a prime attribute of
“the new war on terror.”
In order to categorize the enemy in a fashion that would
allow representatives of the United States military and
intelligence services to “quickly obtain information” that
might prevent further attack, the administration of
President George W. Bush invented the category of “enemy
combatants.” That is, they created a category of prisoners
who, they claim, fall outside of the protection of any laws
or treaty obligations and therefore can be tortured. In
turn, this policy was and is based on the assumption that
such an abusive approach to interrogation is the most
effective and efficient way to quickly get intelligence that
is accurate and useful.
It has now become apparent that there has always been a
segment of society (all societies) who never believed
Beccaria’s assertion that torture was not a good way of
producing reliable information. When modern experts such as
Darius Rejali tell us (as he does in his recent book, Torture and Democracy),
that “the available evidence
[against the efficacy of torture] is conclusive” and alludes
to the fact that, for 250 years, researchers,
criminologists, and psychologists have been pointing this
out, the self-styled “pragmatic” doubters react
incredulously. When an ex-intelligence officers such as
Colonel John Rothrock, who headed a combat interrogation
team in Vietnam, tells the Washington Post that, given the
Vietnam experience, “he doesn’t know ‘any professional
intelligence officers of my generation who would think this
[torture] is a good idea,” the self-proclaimed “realists”
refuse to listen. The evidence against torture appears
counter-intuitive and just does not “feel right” to what are
essentially a warrior caste and its fellow travelers. The
present administration falls wholeheartedly into this class
of skeptics. Thus, on January 18, 2002 President Bush
issued a “finding” to the effect that prisoners suspected of
being members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban were to be regarded
as “enemy combatants” and therefore beyond the protection of
the Third Geneva Convention. Having thus stripped them of
any rights, Bush would subsequently (and disingenuously)
order that prisoners were to be treated humanely “to the
extent . . . consistent with military necessity.” Everyone
down the chain of command now knew that torture was allowed.
President Bush did not dream up this gambit on his own. He
had been convinced of its permissibility by his legal
staff. Bringing discussions to a close that had been
on-going since the September 11th attacks, White
House Counsel Alberto Gonzales told the president in a
memorandum dated January 25, 2002 that the Third Geneva
Convention “does not apply to the conflict with Al-Qaeda” or
“with respect to the conflict with the Taliban.” In
addition he supplied the president with arguments that could
be used to insulate from prosecution American personnel who
might be accused of criminal acts such as torture. Deputy
Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Special Counsel
Robert Delahunty later argued the same points, including the
assertion that “the Taliban was not a government and
Afghanistan was not . . . a functioning State.” Finally, an
additional report prepared in August 2002 by Assistant
Attorney General Jay Bybee asserted that the president’s
authority under the constitution freed him from all
international law, even ratified treaties (which Article VI
of the Constitutions makes “the supreme law of the land”),
and such statutory law that “interferes with the President’s
direction of core matter such as detention and interrogation
of enemy combatants.” Any restrictions were deemed
“unconstitutional” because they got in the way of defending
the country.
On January 19th, on the strength of Bush’s
presidential findings, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
told the Joint Chiefs to inform members of the military that
prisoners suspected of being Al-Qaeda or Taliban were not
protected by the Geneva Convention. President Bush
reaffirmed Rumsfeld’s order on February 7, 2002. This
resulted in the preparation of “wish lists” by intelligence
units in Afghanistan and Iraq as to what sort of coercive
methods they would like cleared for use. Rumsfeld may have
used these requests when he drew up a list of permissible
interrogation tactics in December of 2002. Also, Major
General Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantanamo Bay,
where abuse amounting to torture was already routine, was
sent to Iraq in September 2003 to share his techniques with
interrogators in places like Abu Ghraib. His job was to
“Gitmoize” the process. What did this mean in practice? As
one former military intelligence officer, familiar with
Miller’s directives, put it, “it means treat the detainees
like shit until they will sell their mother for a blanket,
some food without bugs in it and some sleep.” The same
month Miller showed up in Baghdad, General Ricardo Sanchez,
Commander of American troops in Iraq, authorized
interrogation techniques tantamount to torture. These
quickly became standard US practice and, according to a
Human Rights Watch report; prisoners started dying during
interrogation sessions almost immediately thereafter. (As
of February 2005 some 37 prisoners are known to have died in
US custody.) In 2004, in an action that cannot be regarded
as unusual for members of the Bush administration, Sanchez
swore before Congress that he had never issued these
(clearly documented) orders. Soon there was the full-blown
scandal of Abu Ghraib, which only constitutes “the tip of
the iceberg of US mistreatment of Muslim prisoners.”
This mess, involving not only the physical torture of “enemy
combatants” and others, but also the an increasingly
tortuous tangle of lies and deceptions, is the result of an
ideologically inbred President of the United States (one
who prides himself on making decisions “from the gut”)
ordering the violation of international and US law by making
a “finding” based on dubious opinions and false assumptions
rather than hard evidence. As to the facts of the matter:
1) No competent body has investigated or
rendered a finding on the status of prisoners being taken in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Were they Al-Qaeda
operatives or Taliban or were they not? In the 1991 Gulf
War, where case by case reviews were held of those detained,
it was found that 75% were innocent civilians. In the
present conflict the International Red Cross estimates that
between 70 and 90% of all detainees are innocent civilians.
The Third Geneva Convention explicitly states that if there
is any doubt as to the status of a prisoner, he or she must
be accorded the protection of the Convention until such
status is determined “by a competent tribunal.”
2) The argument made by Gonzales, Yoo and
Delahunty that the Taliban did not function as an
established government had little basis in fact. At the time
of the American invasion the Taliban regime controlled 90%
of Afghanistan, enacted and enforced laws, filled government
posts, fielded an organizationally intact army and police
force, and sent out diplomatic envoys some of whom had been
received by the United States.
3) The notion that presidential power overrides
ratified treaties and statutory law would leave the Founding
Fathers turning in their graves. After all, a principle aim
of the constitution is to keep governmental figures acting
within the law. In addition it should be remembered that
most of the men who founded the United States worked and
thought within the Enlightenment vein. They sought
restraint of the arbitrary exercise of power and, when it
came to torture and similar techniques of coercion, they
agreed with Thomas Jefferson when he remarked that such
practice only served to “support roguery and error all over
the earth.” Overriding the law in order to allow for
torture is a manifest betrayal of the civil and political
goals of those who risked their lives and fortunes to
establish the United States.
4) As the evidence piles up that Bush, Rumsfeld,
Sanchez and others consciously ordered the use of illegal
interrogation methods, they become vulnerable to the charge
that they have committed war crimes. Unfortunately, the
likelihood of anyone coming to Washington, slapping on the
handcuffs, and hauling these transgressors off to the Hague
seems remote. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, showing his
characteristic callousness, has dismissed the allegations of
human rights organizations as “isolated pockets of
international hyperventilation.” Then again, there happens
to be no statute of limitations when it comes to war crimes.
It is questionable if the Bush administration’s policy on
torture and abuse has done anything substantial to actually
protect either the country or its troops. It has, however,
cast shame on the name of America and, at least for some
Americans, has been a real eye-opener. However, what shock
there is, is really a function of the general ignorance of
history of American use of torture. What is new and
different about the Bush administration is not that they are
willing to violate the law and torture people, but rather
that they are willing to do so more or less openly.
The Concept of “No Touch Torture”
The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination
of torture and we are leading this fight by example.
Statement by President George W. Bush, June 26, 2003
At the beginning of Cold War the Central Intelligence Agency
decided that there might be something to the claim that
traditional forms of torture led to unreliable information.
However, instead of following in the footsteps of the 18th
century governments which forbade its official practice, the
CIA proceeded to spend fifty years and over a billion
dollars trying to figure out new torture methods that might
work. Some of their experiments went awry, the most
infamous one being the giving of LSD to unsuspecting
subjects. Other lines of inquiry, however, appeared to show
promise. These included sensory deprivation, forcing
subjects to assume stress-inducing positions for long
periods, and sexual humiliation. As a group, they are known
to the trade as “no touch” tortures. Looking at the
pictures from Abu Ghraib, it is not hard to recognize CIA
research transformed into practice.
This means that Abu Ghraib is no novelty. The CIA and the
American military have not only employed various torture
techniques throughout the last half of the 20th
century, but they also have actively taught others how to do
the same. Americans have instructed the thugs employed by
some of the world’s worst, but assuredly anti-communist,
dictators. These included Ferdinand Marcos of the
Philippines and the Shah of Iran, the right wing dictators
of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, etc. All of
these dictatorships got instruction in torture techniques
from American instructors working for the US Agency for
International Development’s Public Safety Program (a very
Orwellian name indeed). In 1963 the CIA developed a how-to
guide to torture known as the “Kubark Counterintelligence
Interrogation manual.” It was initially to be used on
captured Soviet operatives. But then came Viet Nam and by
1967 the Agency was running forty interrogation camps in
that country as part of its infamous Phoenix Program.
Thousands of Vietnamese were tortured in these centers.
Just so, the CIA began using its torture methods in Kabul in
2002. Then came Iraq and the subsequent torture of
thousands of Iraqis as well as Afghanis. It all went
smoothly until someone leaked the facts of Abu Ghraib to
Seymour Hersh.
The Bush administration’s reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal
was to deny that the photos and stories reflected present or
historical American policy. On the contrary, President Bush
was quick to tell Al-hurra TV (the feeble American answer to
Al-Jazeera) on May 5, 2004 that the United States was a
compassionate country interested in the well-being and
freedom of every individual in Iraq and elsewhere. That
meant that, according to Mr. Bush, torture at Abu Ghraib was
just the “wrongdoing of a few,” or as the Army’s Inspector
General, Paul Mikolashek put it in April of 2004, all cases
of abuse are simply “an individual failure to uphold Army
values.” On the other hand, FBI personnel present at many
of the interrogations carried on in 2003 and 2004 at
Guantanamo Bay filed no less then 26 complaints alleging
abuse and mistreatment of detainees, and the International
Committee of the Red Cross, which did unannounced
inspections of many US interrogation facilities in
Afghanistan and Iraq, has documented widespread and
consistent interrogation techniques that are “tantamount to
torture.” This practice was (and still is) so widespread
and so consistent that one must speak of a policy of
torture, which now works itself out in a system of
hellish prisons and interrogation centers stretching from
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to Kabul in Afghanistan and Baghdad
in Iraq. This policy has subsequently been confirmed by
investigations carried out by Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch. The past and present pattern of
behavior is so manifestly obvious that one must conclude
that both the President and the Inspector General were
either totally ignorant of decades of CIA and military
interrogation practice, as well as the consequences of their
own on-going “enemy combatant” policy, or they were lying.
Did President Bush happen to recall his own findings of
January 2002 removing the protection of the Third Geneva
Convention from the prisoners taken in Afghanistan and
Iraq? What did he think the result would be?
The popular American reaction to Abu Ghraib, led forward
with gusto by the Republican Party leadership, has been to
minimize its meaning (the few bad apples argument) and, more
brazenly, to justify it (as Senator Trent Lott put it, “you
don’t get information that will save American lives by
withholding pancakes.”) Nonetheless, in an attempt to
minimize the risks of any more politically embarrassing
revelations, the government has adopted the (equally
illegal) policy of out-sourcing torture. That is, shipping
those they want interrogated in this fashion to foreign
countries that have no domestic public relations problems to
worry about. (In Uzbekistan, one of countries who receive
alleged terrorists from the CIA, they may choose to boil you
alive.) In January 2005 Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,
in sworn testimony to Congress, denied that such transfers
were US policy—an answer described by Michael Ratner of the
Center for Constitutional Rights, as “a clear, absolute
lie.” This well documented policy of out-sourcing is a
violation of the Convention Against Torture and has been
denounced by some Americans as despicable. However, not by
many. As in the 1970s, when Congress (under an entirely
different leadership) investigated CIA and military torture
practices in Vietnam and Latin America, the general public,
after a bit of tut-tutting, seem little moved. A USA
Today/CNN/Gallop Poll taken on January 7-9, 2005 shows that
39% of Americans were willing to have “terrorists” tortured
if they were believed to have knowledge of impending
attacks. That is, of course, what the US military said it
was doing at Abu Ghraib.
The Realpolitik Majority
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you
commit atrocities.
Francois Marie Arouet (Voltaire)
According to Amnesty International, torture and abuse has
been recorded in 130 countries (including the United States)
in recent years and occurs regularly in 70 of these
countries. It is therefore highly questionable whether
there is any less torture in our own age than in 1800. Just
as in the time of the Enlightenment, the laws and treaties
that have attempted to outlaw such practices are a
reflection of the efforts of a relatively small number of
people who have strongly lobbied to establish rules of
civilized behavior. Today, within an increasingly
democratic environment, this heightened standard of behavior
is welcomed by the majority when times are peaceful, when
citizens are sitting in church, are feeling secure within
their homes, or answering poll questions on the phone. That
is, the majority agree in theory. Yet in practice,
particularly in times of real or imagined danger, this
civilized standard of behavior is abandoned.
At the level of the intellectuals, we have traded Beccaria
and Voltaire for the likes of Alan Dershowitz who argues
that torture is sometimes necessary and, in any case, is an
inevitable practice. This, of course, smoothes the way from
humane theory to barbaric practice. According to
Dershowitz’s argument torture should be made official via
“torture warrants” so as to preserve openness and respect
for the law. As illogical as such an argument is, it has a
lot of Americans nodding in agreement. Indeed, torture has
become ubiquitous in our “war on terror” and new revelations
of its use are frequently reported. All pretenses have
largely been dropped in the public mind and an unspoken
acceptance now prevails. Why is it that most people accept
this violation of their own standards of civilized behavior
so readily?
It may be that many people, looking beyond their own family
circle, have an a priori Hobbesian perception of the world.
They constitute a “Realpolitik majority” who assume
that “it is a tough world out there,” that “nice guys finish
last,” and as to “playing rough,” well, “c’est la guerre.”
As a consequence of this point of view, when it comes to
issues such as “defense,” and even “fighting crime” the
assumption of most people is that toughness, the willingness
to “do what needs to be done,” necessitates giving
government authorities a relatively free hand in policy
making. Or, as Bill Clinton once observed, Americans prefer
a leader who is “strong and wrong” to one who might be right
but seems to be weak. Like children relying on their
parents, many people want a father figure who will “crush
those who would hurt us.”
Over the last century, with its two world wars, genocides,
numerous proxy wars, the Cold War, the possibility of
nuclear annihilation, the conjuring of “weapons of mass
destruction” and now the “war on terror,” uncertainty and
fearfulness have become the norm. The authorities
and the media fill the world with real, or more often
imaginary enemies. Sometimes they are domestic—racially
defined criminals who prey on the upright and affluent.
Sometimes they are foreign—citizens of states that are
“evil” or shadowy terrorists who “hate freedom,” a world
full of Muslim fanatics, commies, gooks, japs, huns, ad
nauseam. But always most people (and not only Americans)
are going to assume the threatening nature of such “others”
simply because the informational environment in which they
live instructs them to do so. Allegedly threatening
individuals who fall into the hands of the authorities are
assumed guilty by virtue of having been seized.
Once in the custody of state officials a prisoner’s fate is
not just a function of the prevailing rules, but also a
function of the public’s interest in maintaining those
rules. That, in turn, is influenced by the degree of
insecurity felt by the citizenry. Requiring civilized and
humane behavior from those charged with our defense makes
sense to most people only when they are not in a state of
fear. In other words, if a feeling of threat is high, the
enforcement of the rules underlying human rights will be
low. The fact that, after September 11, 2001, polls showed
that “only” around 39% of the American population was
willing to endorse the torture of suspects known to have
life saving information is just the proverbial tip of the
iceberg. Beyond that tip is the willingness of a much
larger percentage of people to accept the government’s
general assertion that “tough interrogation,” “stress and
duress,” and “fear up” techniques (all of which are official
euphemisms for torture and abuse) are sometimes necessary to
protect the nation. This is demonstrated repeatedly by that
fact that frequent revelations of abuse and torture not only
of foreigners alleged to be enemies, but also of those
arrested for domestic crimes, fail to engender any long term
reaction on the part of the vast majority of citizens.
Indeed, when in July 2005 the Bush administration
successfully blocked a Senate vote to “prohibit cruel,
degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners” there was no
noticeable public outcry and something less than a hiccup in
the press. It is not that the public “likes what is being
done,” it is rather that the majority believes the
officially reinforced message that the world (including
aspects of their own society) is a dangerous place. This in
turn creates a more or less permanent sense of anxiety, and
the result is a standing conviction that “strong but wrong”
actions are, periodically, necessary for the sake of
society’s survival.
In addition, we should be honest and admit that racism plays
a significant role in the acceptance of torture when it is
used against people we do not identify with. From the 18th
through the 20th centuries the evolving rules of
conduct that impacted the use of torture were most easily
and consistently ignored when practiced against
non-Europeans. This was the case in Europe’s extensive
imperial holdings, as well as the abuse of non-white
minorities in American jails. It is now the case with
Iraqis, Afghanis, and Arabs in general.
As to those able and willing to commit torture, we must
recognize that there has always been a subset of the
population who actually like to abuse others and not all of
them operate outside the law. The likelihood of an abuse of
power is increased by the fact that those who self-select
for police and military careers in which torture may become
officially possible are sometimes personalities who find it
easy to perform such acts. Conditions of war and crisis
give such men and women license to act out in ways that,
under normal circumstances, would be deemed criminal. The
Bush administration, filled as it is with neo-Prussian
personalities who certainly see the world in “ends justify
means” terms, has been particularly good at funneling such
miscreants into Iraq. Department of Corrections personnel
from at least four states who lost their jobs due to a
record of abuse have been hired by the Bush administration
and sent off to Iraq as “prison advisers.” On the other
hand, scholars who have studied the nature of torturers
insist that it is also possible for “ordinary people” to
find themselves within an environment that leads them to
such action. So, first you mix ordinary people with those
with a penchant for abuse and put them in an environment in
which they are told that the “gloves are coming off” so that
American lives can be saved. Then you give them the
Pentagon’s “72 point matrix of stress” as a guide to the
interrogation of “prisoners with high intelligence value who
are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.” In such a
scenario it is not those with the highest ethical standards
who will lead the way. Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford scholar
who did research on the willingness of “average” people to
inflict pain on others, tells us that, “in my study we put
good people into a bad barrel, they came out bad apples.”
Conclusion
In the midst of the Vietnam War, Paul Blackstock wrote an
essay on the “Moral Implications of Torture and Exemplary
Assassination” for the Carnegie Council On Ethics and
International Affairs. He described the widespread use of
torture and assassination by the CIA and Special Forces and
said that this policy had created a situation wherein “for
the majority of private individuals” the “intolerable has
become tolerable.” He then concluded that, “general
acceptance of the rule of law is rightly regarded as a major
step forward in the history of Western Civilization. For
the US to scrap this achievement, even for the sake of an
elusive ‘victory’ in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia,
would be the height of unreason and folly.” Well, there was
no elusive victory in Southeast Asia and now, thirty-five
years later, the scene of action has shifted half way around
the world. In just about all other ways, the situation is
exactly the same.
Where Blackstock got it wrong was in the assumption that
Western Civilization has assimilated a consistent,
hypocrisy-proof sense of the rule of law. It has not. The
application of the rule of law has always been subject to
class, racial/ethnic and other sorts of criteria. In as
much as it reflects a demand for humane and civilized
behavior, the rule of law functions one way during peace and
another during war. That is, it is context contingent and
an important part of that context is the sometimes paranoid
and fear filled perceptions of “realpolitik
majorities.”
The fact is that people react to their societal environments
in both rational and emotional ways and that these
environments are subject to warmongering, and the political
use of hysteria. Such manipulation accentuates the
emotional and leads to popular support of such policies as
the official use of torture and abuse. This realization may
be frustrating for those who identify themselves with the
Enlightenment’s principles and goals, but progressives too
must deal with reality. While this susceptibility to
manipulation may never go away, it can be fought against and
contained. Here we must take encouragement from the
Enlightenment philosophers and those who gave us the Geneva
Conventions and their like. It is the obligation of
progressives to carry on this struggle by the constant
demand that “reason be used to influence the passions.” In
other words, a demand for adherence to the very standards
that the 18th century philosophers insisted upon:
critical thinking, objective evidence, tolerance and common
decency. Indeed, what the world needs is a permanent,
on-going Enlightenment movement wherein an increasing number
of “philosophers” seek to shape the popular environment of
our societies. Such an undertaking is the benign equivalent
of a permanent revolution—a task that never ends.
