Abu Ghraib is structureel

Wed Dec 20 00:02:20 CET 2006

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

En nog steeds worden mensen, zelfs ook Nederlanders uitgeleverd aan de
VS, net alsof het een rechtstaat zou zijn. Hoe kunnen de Nederlandse
rechters zichzelf zozeer tot instrument van onrecht degraderen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1970084,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329660017-103390,00.html

Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America's war on terror

In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has
embraced the very evils it claims to confront
George Monbiot
Tuesday December 12, 2006

Guardian
After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every
possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you
should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United
States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of
destroying a human being.

Last week, defence lawyers acting for JosÃ© Padilla, a US citizen
detained as an "enemy combatant", released a video showing a mission
fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison dentist. A group of
masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him
with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then
marched him down the prison corridor.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him
as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a piece of
furniture". The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the
regime under which he had lived for more than three years: total sensory
deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or
hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact,
except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his
interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't
mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "does not
appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him,
is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in
reasoning as the result of a mental illness, ie, post-traumatic stress
disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged
isolation". JosÃ© Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not
medically, but socially.

If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the
authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then,
threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims
that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him
with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism. He
is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another
"enemy combatant", Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same
total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in
South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have
disappeared into the CIA's foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting
its "war on terror" can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee
Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and
human-rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates
of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at GuantÃ¡namo Bay.
This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will
remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse
themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions", and subjected to
prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at
Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with
their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep.
The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were
"commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions,
subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep" while kept, like Padilla
and the arrivals at GuantÃ¡namo, "in black hoods or spray-painted goggles".

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: "stress
positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation". The famous
picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his
fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to
see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming
next. He stands in a classic stress position - maintained for several
hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if
he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib
is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat
in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been
imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most
cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to
prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to
account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear
to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each
other.

But Padilla's treatment also reflects another glorious American
tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently
held in isolation - a punishment only rarely used in other democracies.
In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are
kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being
for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people
have been kept in solitary confinement in the US for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the
isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22 and a half
hours a day, then released into an "exercise yard" for "recreation". The
yard consists of a concrete well about 3.5 metres in length with walls 6
metres high and a metal grille across the sky. The recreation consists
of pacing back and forth, alone.

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio
reveals, more than 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now
in the psychiatric ward, and there's a waiting list. Prisoners in
solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist
who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to severe anxiety to
hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases of sensory
deprivation, people go crazy." People who went in bad and dangerous come
out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far - in Texas and
Washington state - both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners
held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed
to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the US by its penal
policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that
believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

 From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have
extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive
him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with
obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical or mental -
produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is
about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions
one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which
turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to
the "values of civilised nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and
extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these
evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to
have succeeded.

www.monbiot.com

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