Volunteers for a Better America

Why "Some" Torture Can't Work

Senator McCain has proposed legislation that would ban any cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment by any U.S. persons of any U.S. prisoners anywhere around the globe at any time.  But inside the Beltway has been abuzz with rumors of a "compromise" with the Cheney-Bush position that torture is sometimes ok, at least if it's done by the CIA. 

Our view is clear--there can be no compromise here.  If we participate in, arrange for, or make possible treatment of prisoners that involves "waterboarding", naked pyramid schemes, dog baiting, shackling from the ceiling in untenable positions for hours on end, starving or other treatment that degrades humans, we have not only violated international and U.S. law but we have betrayed the very essence of the values we stand for. 

Surely John McCain knows this, after his time as a torture victim.  Surely he will not yield to the demands of the likes of Dick Cheney, who said he had "more important things to do" than go to war in Vietnam, or George Bush, who managed to convert a cushy job in the national guard into an even cushier political job and legacy appointment.

The military and intelligence forces' abusive practices under the Bush Administration are something we will be ashamed of as a nation for decades to come.  Think of the way we've used the power of the state against individuals since 9/11.  Thousands of immigrants were held in New York prisons for months without process and then deported, without process.  Thousands of people were (and are) detained in Iraq and Afghanistan, in much the same way that Saddam's forces had detained people in the past, by entering their homes and taking them in the middle of the night to prisons where their relatives might eventually locate them, or not, months later.  Thousands of those declared by one prone-to-error person, George W. Bush, to be "enemy combatants" were shipped to wire enclosures on the island of Cuba and held there for years without due process.  Korans were desecrated.  Deaths took place in suspicious circumstances; beatings, shacklings, waterboarding and other techniques were approved.  The practices developed at Guantanamo were shipped to Iraq, and Abu Ghraib was one result.  The military has acknowledged at least 29 murders of detainees, and of course we have no way to know how many more there may have been.  We know that at least two U.S. citizens were held in military brigs as "enemy combatants" without any of the rights to which citizens are entitled under the Constitution.  Do we know for sure that no other citizens are being held incognito, without access to counsel, in a military brig or "black site" somewhere around the globe?  Can we trust anything this administration tells us about the treatment it provides to any detainee anywhere, given this administration's awful track record on forthrightness?  Two years after Abu Ghraib, we continue to practice "extraordinary rendering" of suspected terrorists--they are merely suspects, and at least some of them have proven to be entirely innocent.  We maintain secret "black sites" around the globe where U.S. personnel may well be committing war crimes of the most grievous nature against suspected terrorists (also not proven guilty through any legitimate process).   

Meanwhile, the Iraqis have picked up where Uncle Sam and Dictator Saddam left off.  In mid-November, a secret prison was discovered in the Interior Ministry building in Baghdad with 169 badly treated "inmates" victims of the "new" "democratic" "Iraqi" regime.  Now we learn about another secret torture center in Iraq with more than six hundred poorly treated detainees.  Read the Knight Ridder story here.  A sampling of the information from the report follows.

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi:  "People are doing the same thing as Saddam's time and worse."  Allawi has indicated that these are primarily Shiite death squads who have taken up the activities formerly handled by Saddam's Sunni henchmen.

An unnamed interrogator who "punched several people in front of the reporter":  "Don't talk to me about human rights.  When security settles down, we'll talk about human rights.  Right now, I need confessions."

Gen. Al-Samaraaee, formerly of the Interior Ministry, "said torture and extrajudicial killings were rampant while he was at the ministry" and "secret prisons ... are run by militia groups."

Abu Saad, a prisoner, showed a fingernail that had been torn off and said he had been hung upside down, blindfolded for 40 days, allowed to use a toilet only once every three days, and saw seven other detainees die.

Is this the legacy of freedom and democracy that thousands of young Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis are dying for?   

Cheney's Dark Side

As we all know now, we hold many prisoners at Guantanamo, where they have little redress and little hope of a decent life.  We hold many others in prisons in Iraq, where there have been stories of people getting lost in the bureaucracy, and stories of prisoners being murdered.  We've seen the pictures of abuse in Abu Ghraib, and heard tales of similar abuse at Guantanamo, including desecration of the Koran, and at other prisons we run (or our hired mercenaries run) throughout our Middle Eastern colonies.  We ordinary Americans have said that it must stop, but the White House and military chiefs claim it is just a few rotten bad apples.  They continue to claim this, despite the abundant evidence of a policy permitting torture and encouraging sadistic treatment of prisoners.  Waterboarding has turned up as a sanctioned activity in every military prison for terrorist suspects that we know anything about.

Dana Priest's Washington Post story revealed even more about our treatment of prisoners during this period of undermining the due process that is the foundation of our country.  Read about the CIA's "black sites" at an earlier post here.

Congress is finally facing up to the shame that the United States has brought upon itself through its treatment of prisoners taken in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  John McCain and 89 other Senators have sent a clear message to Rumsfeld and Bush that torture will no longer be tolerated.   The bill provides a blanket ban against "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States government."

But Bush and Cheney have refused to accept that verdict.  Cheney, in fact, is actively campaigning against Congress' anti-torture bill.  He wants to be sure that at least the CIA is exempted.  Cheney, that is, believes that the CIA should have the right to commit torture--inhumane treatment of prisoners--whenever it wants to.  He believes Americans should "work, though, sort of the dark side ... in the shadows in the intelligence world."  See this Nov. 7 Washington Post story by Dan Fromkin.  Cheney's argument, apparently, is that the bad guys do bad things so we should to, using "any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."  Id.

We might have hoped that after Abu Ghraib Mr. Bush would have recognized the American people's disgust with the idea of American torturers.  Or at least that he would acknowledge the advice of experts in interrogation that information obtained through torture is inevitably less credible than information obtained through more patient, legal methods of questioning.  Or at a minimum that he would see that his stance favoring torture garners negative attention throughout the Arab world.  If he has any doubts, he should read Richard Cohen's editorial in the November 8 Washington Post about the views of a Muslim driver in Jordan named Bassam.  Cohen calls Cheney "the unashamed lobbyist for torture." Id.

Mr. Bush, however, seems as usual to be under the influence of his powerful VP.  The Nov. 7 Washington Post story by Dan Fromkin reports this response to a query about holding prisoners in secret prisons, without Red Cross access, and Mr. Bush's general support for a CIA exemption from the proposed ban on torture. (he has threatened to veto the McCain bill).

"The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people.  And we are aggressively doing that.  We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice.  We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding.  We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans.  Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law.  We do not torture."

There was a time when the phrase "bringing them to justice" meant that people who were suspected of having committed heinous crimes would be brought to trial so that their case, and the case against them, could be heard in an impartial tribunal and judged according to clear principles of law.  Mr. Bush appears to use the phrase to imply mere capture and detention on his say-so. 

Furthermore, Mr. Bush makes it clear that he thinks "anything we do...any activity we conduct" is automatically within the law.  It is as though Mr. Bush believes the defensive arguments devised several years ago by his counsel's office, suggesting that as Commander-in-Chief he can take any actions whatsoever and those actions will be per se lawful.  With that world view, it is easy to see how he can utter such an apparently contradictory statement of being able to "do anything" yet "not commit torture."  It is clear that Mr. Bush thinks that the anything he is entitled to command done includes torture, whenever he thinks it appropriate.  Why else would he and Cheney seek an exemption from a ban on "cruel and degrading treatment" unless they thought they might use it.  Yet he can in the same breath aver that nothing illegal will be done, since his underlings have convinced him that any action he takes during war is legal.

No wonder he appears to want us to be in a perpetual state of war.  In his view of things, that apparently means perpetual power for the military-industrial complex.  And no one asking those pesky questions about how the military and the CIA are treating the people they have locked up in brigs and prison camps around the world.

Detainees and Torture: investigation is overdue

by Linda M. Beale

It’s frightening how easily we can forget images of horror. Not so long ago, we saw those few photographs that made it past the military censors who control information about our occupation of Iraq as though it were a Forbidden City. The photos that got out demonstrated indecencies and abuses performed by American soldiers on prisoners in Abu Ghraib—dogs, nudity, sexual humiliation, chaining of detainees for days in their own urine and feces, and, yes, murders, acknowledged in official reports. We heard about some trials, and then everything was quiet. No commanders were punished. The Bush White House and the military claimed it was just a few rotten apples.

Then information started coming in that painted a different picture.  The same techniques were used in Quantanamo. The same military commander that used those techniques there was sent to Iraq to show the interrogators how to get more information out of the thousands of Iraqi “disappeared” that we have imprisoned there. Stories of similar abuses surfaced at other military prisons in Afghanistan and around the globe. Worse still (if possible), we learned that the United States has been engaging in a policy of “rendering” detainees to Egypt, Syria and other countries known to engage in torture—of course, with the farce of our claim that they promised not to torture. Remember, these are detainees, people who may well be completely innocent, people who have been arrested by the military and imprisoned without due process, literally on the say-so of the White House.

When the courts said that detainees at Quantanamo have a right to a hearing, the military finally began processing some of them through the military “tribunals” set up by the same people who wrote the legal memoranda defending executive violation of the Geneva Conventions. Defense lawyers complained about the process and claimed that the tribunals were “done deals” with no chance for a fair hearing and justice. The military brass and the White House scoffed, telling us this was all just an active defense lawyer’s legal maneuvering and there was no truth to it.

Well, wrong again. As with so many of this Administration’s denials, information is now surfacing that shows that the Administration again misrepresented the facts. Two prosecutors were convinced that the military’s process was unfair, and in fact viewed the process as a set up with only one conclusion possible.

Congress should act, and it should act now, to establish adequate procedural protections for all military detainees and to ensure that those who have breached the law—including the highest military brass and civilian chiefs—are sanctioned for their misconduct. It is time to enact a bill providing the freedom from unjust imprisonment that is the hallmark of a true democracy. It is time to open a real investigation into the rendition of prisoners to other countries and the allegations of tortured and “disappeared” detainees. If we are silent, we are complicit.