In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the United States found it had no intelligence assets; it had no way to contain the insurgency, and they -- the U.S. military was in a state of panic. And at that moment, they began sweeping across Iraq, rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib
prison. At that point, in late August 2003,
General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. He brought his techniques with him, the manual of his techniques. He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.
In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452. He orders in essence, a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions, sensory disorientation, cultural attacks and the use of BISCUIT teams with psychologists.
And it was Rumsfeld in the margins of a memo he wrote, "I stand at my desk eight hours a day." he has a specially made podium desk,"How come we're limiting these stress techniques to four hours?"An with that... our
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld opened the door to the hideous torture images we again see today.
Of course he is not liable and as his ministers of propaganda all say "The bad apples have been brought to justice.... America should not be subjected to seeing these aggredious images... they only serve to stir discontent." But in April 2004 when the photos first went public CBS news and the Times wrote this was the work of creeps, just abuse by a few people on the night shift. “Recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” In other words, we could blame these bad apples.
But these photos clearly show all the textbook trademarked and newly revised C.I.A. psychological interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain, sensory disorientation,and cultural psyche attacks.
You might be interested to know only seven low-ranking soldiers have been charged and found guilty of these acts. Lindy Englund and Charles Grainer will serve less than ten years in prison for their roles in this scandal.
The latest release of photos show thousands of examples of abuse and torture.... not just a few bad apples.
And just last week, while American peace activist Teresa Grady and four others, known as the St. Patricks Four, were sentenced to four months in prison each for spilling their own human blood at a military recruiting station in upstate New York to protest
the Iraq war, a military jury in Colorado decided not to jail an Army interrogator even though he was found guilty of negligent homicide in the torturing and killing of an Iraqi detainee.
Today's news reported that a judge has thrown out the case against Maher Arar, the Canadian-Syrian who was arrested while on lay-over at JFK airport. Who became our first case of known "extraordinary rendition" a man who was secretly flown to Syria, kept in an under-ground “grave-like” cell, subject to sensory disorientation for almost a year. Clearly,this administration is laying the groundwork for a system that operates above the law and without regulation. From torture to invasion of privacy. Now that the highest court in the land has been seeded with justices that have proven records against civil rights in favor or corporate or government rule, we can expect to see many more such abuses to human rights.
"Torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. There's an absolute ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control."—Alfred McCoyWhen the Bush administration gave those orders for, basically, techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on terror, one could only hope it was their intention that these be limited to top al-Qaeda suspects. But within months, we were torturing hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in 2003, through these techniques, we were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis. And you can see in those photos, beyond the details of the techniques that have been described, you can see how once it starts, it becomes this Dantesque Hell, this kind of play-palace of the darkest recesses of human consciousness.
That’s why it’s necessary to maintain a no-torture policy. There is no such thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical torture, that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country came up with, that's impossible. That cannot operate. It will inevitably spread.
But, one of the problems of talking about this topic in the US, is that we've been conditioned to regard all of this as “torture light,”— not really torture. And we're the only country in the world that does that. The U.N. Anti-Torture Convention defines torture as the infliction of severe psychological or physical pain.
The U.N. convention in 1994 banning torture gave equal weight to psychological and physical techniques. But we alone, as a society, somehow exempt all of the psychological techniques.
The reasons date back to the way we ratified the U.N. convention in the first place, and who did the drafting.Back in the early 1990s, when the US was emerging from the Cold War, we began a process of disarming ourselves and getting beyond all of these cold war techniques, trying to sort of bring ourselves in line with rest of the international community. When President Clinton sent the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention to the U.S. Congress for ratification in 1994, he included four detailed paragraphs of reservations that had, in fact, been drafted by the Reagan administration, and when he adopted them without so much as changing a semicolon. He basically outlawed only physical torture. The reservations were carefully written by
then Department of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, to avoid one word —in the 26 printed pages. The word, "mental" was exempted allowing psychological torture.
Now, another problem for the United States, as well, was when the U.S. Army, again under the watchful eyes of
Dick Cheney, re-wrote the Army Field Manual in 1992, with the intention of strictly observing the letter and the spirit of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention and other similar treaties.
So what happened is that when the Defense Department gave orders for extreme techniques, when General Sanchez gave orders for his techniques beyond the Army Field Manual, what that meant is when the soldiers like Grainer, were actually investigated, they had committed crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They were prosecuted, and sent to jail. No ties up the ladder... except to Cheney?
Most Americans think that it's over, that in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the McCain Torture Ban (Detainee Treatment Act), barring all inhumane or cruel treatment. Written, at least the first draft, by Sen John McCain who endured torture while a POW in Korea. Most people think that’s it, that it’s over, right?
In reality, the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Dick Cheney went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain refused. The National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, went to McCain and asked for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. Again, he refused. So they started amending it introducing loopholes.
The Bush ordered torture right at the start of the War On Terror... President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation saying, “I don't care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.” Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles.
One, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. —The Unitary Executive Theory.
Two, plausible defenses for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture. There were two, first they played around with the word "severe," that torture is the infliction of severe pain. That's when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, “’severe’ means equivalent to organ failure,” in other words, right up to the point of death. The other, was that they came up with the idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty.
The
third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts.
Now, in the process of passing the McCain torture prohibition, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said “I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do
to defend America.”
The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that's a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A. torturers.
The third principle was – is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory,
and last month -- the
Bush administration has gone to federal courts and said, “Drop all of your habeas corpus suits from Guantanamo.” There are 160 of them. They've gone to the Supreme Court and said, “Drop your Guantanamo case.”
They have, in fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their actions.Just like that shown by Canadian Citizen, Maher Arar, wrongfully imprisoned for a year in a secret Syrian torture prison, subjected to textbook C.I.A. counterintelligence techniques, and now, powerless to do anything about it.
Welcome to the new United States of America.
