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Volume 51,
Number 11 á June 24,
2004
The Logic of
Torture
By Mark Danner
1.
We've now had fifteen of the highest-level officials involved in
this entire operation, from the secretary of defense to the generals in
command, and nobody knew that anything was amiss, no one approved anything
amiss, nobody did anything amiss. We have a general acceptance of
responsibility, but there's no one to blame, except for the people at the very
bottom of one prison.
-Senator Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), Armed Services Committee, May 19,
2004
What is difficult
is separating what we now know from what we have long known but have mostly
refused to admit. Though the events and disclosures of the last weeks have
taken on the familiar clothing of a Washington scandal-complete with full-dress
congressional hearings, daily leaks to reporters from victim and accused alike,
and of course the garish, spectacular photographs and videos from Abu
Ghraib-beyond that bright glare of revelation lies a dark area of
unacknowledged clarity. Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded
in Abu Ghraib, and the multiple tangled plotlines that will be teased out in
the coming weeks and months about responsibility, knowledge, and culpability,
lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in Washington:
that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the United States,
at various locations around the world, from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo
in Cuba to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have been torturing prisoners. They did this, in
the felicitous phrasing of General Taguba's report, in order to "exploit
[them] for actionable intelligence" and they did it, insofar as this is
possible, with the institutional approval of the United States government,
complete with memoranda from the President's counsel and officially promulgated
decisions, in the case of Afghanistan and Guantanamo, about the
nonapplicability of the Geneva Conventions and, in the case of Iraq, about at
least three different sets of interrogation policies, two of them modeled on
earlier practice in Afghanistan and Cuba.[1]
They did it under
the gaze of Red Cross investigators, whose confidential reports-which, after
noting that "methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by
the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract
information," then set out these "methods" in stark and
sickening detail[2] -were handed over to American military
and government authorities and then mysteriously "became lost in the
Army's bureaucracy and weren't adequately addressed."[3] Or so three of the highest-ranking military officers in
the land blandly explained to senators on the Armed Services Committee on May
19. On that same day, as it happened, an unnamed "senior Army officer who
served in Iraq" told reporters for The New York Times that in fact the Army had addressed the Red Cross report-"by
trying to curtail the international organization's spot inspections of the
prison":
After the International Committee of the Red Cross observed abuses
in one cellblock on two unannounced inspections in October and complained in
writing on Nov. 6, the military responded that inspectors should make
appointments before visiting the cellblock. That area was the site of the worst
abuses. . . . Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military
Police Brigade, whose soldiers guarded the prisoners, said that despite the
serious allegations in the Red Cross report, senior officers in Baghdad had
treated it in "a light-hearted manner."[4]
Why had these
"senior officers" treated the grave allegations of the Red Cross, now
the subject of so much high-level attention, in "a lighthearted
manner"? The most plausible answer is that they did so not because they
were irresponsible or incompetent or evil but because they were well aware that
this report-like the others that had been issued by the Red Cross, and by
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and other wellknown
organizations-would have no bearing whatever on what the American military did
or did not do in Iraq.
The officers
almost certainly knew that, whatever the investigators of the Red Cross
observed and wrote, American policies in Abu Ghraib prison were governed by
entirely different concerns, and were sanctioned, even as the insurgency in
Iraq gained strength and the demand for "actionable intelligence"
became more urgent, by their most senior commanders- among others, by
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander in Iraq, who on
October 12 (about the time Red Cross investigators were making their two
unannounced inspections) signed a classified memorandum calling for
interrogators at Abu Ghraib to work with military police guards to
"manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses" and to assume
control over the "lighting, heating . . . food, clothing, and
shelter" of those they were questioning.[5]
Six weeks later,
Brigadier General Karpinski herself wrote to Red Cross officials to say that
"military necessity" required the isolation of prisoners of
"significant intelligence value" who were not, she asserted, entitled
to "obtain full [Geneva Convention] protection," despite the Bush
administration's stated position that the conventions would be "fully
applicable" in Iraq.[6] We now have a good deal of evidence about
how military policemen at Abu Ghraib, who had been ordered (according to
Sergeant Samuel Provance, one of the first soldiers in military intelligence to
speak to reporters) to "strip down prisoners and embarrass them as a way
to help 'break' them,"[7] attempted, whether enthusiastically or
reluctantly, to fulfill these orders.
2.
We can begin with
the story of the as-yet-anonymous prisoner who on January 21, 2004, gave a
sworn statement-obtained by The Washington Post- to the military's Criminal Investigation
Division about his time in Abu Ghraib:
The first day they put me in a dark room and started hitting me in
the head and stomach and legs.
They made me raise my hands and sit on my knees. I was like that
for four hours. Then the Interrogator came and he was looking at me while they
were beating me. Then I stayed in this room for 5 days, naked with no clothes.
. . . They put handcuffs on my hand and they cuffed me high for 7 or 8 hours.
And that caused a rupture to my right hand and I had a cut that was bleeding
and had pus coming from it. They kept me this way on 24, 25, and 26 October.
And in the following days, they also put a bag over my head, and of course,
this whole time I was without clothes and without anything to sleep on. And one
day in November, they started different type of punishment, where an American
Police came in my room and put the bag over my head and cuffed my hands and he
took me out of the room into the hallway. He started beating me, him, and 5
other American Police. I could see their feet, only, from under the bag.
A couple of those police they were female because I heard their
voices and I saw two of the police that were hitting me before they put the bag
over my head. One of them was wearing glasses. I couldn't read his name because
he put tape over his name. Some of the things they did was make me sit down
like a dog, and they would hold the string from the bag and they made me bark
like a dog and they were laughing at me. . . . One of the police was telling me
to crawl in Arabic, so I crawled on my stomach and the police were spitting on
me when I was crawling and hitting me. . . .
Then the police started beating me on my kidneys and then they hit
me on my right ear and it started bleeding and I lost consciousness. . . .
A few days before they hit me on my ear, the American police, the
guy who wears glasses, he put red woman's underwear over my head. And then he
tied me to the window that is in the cell with my hands behind my back until I
lost consciousness. And also when I was in Room #1 they told me to lay down on
my stomach and they were jumping from the bed onto my back and my legs. And the
other two were spitting on me and calling me names, and they held my hands and
legs. After the guy with the glasses got tired, two of the American soldiers
brought me to the ground and tied my hands to the door while laying down on my
stomach. One of the police was pissing on me and laughing on me. . . . And the
soldier and his friend told me in a loud voice to lie down, so I did that. And
then the policeman was opening my legs, with a bag over my head, and he sat
down between my legs on his knees and I was looking at him from under the bag
and they wanted to do me because I saw him and he was opening his pants, so I
started screaming loudly and the other police starting hitting me with his feet
on my neck and he put his feet on my head so I couldn't scream. . . . And then
they put the loudspeaker inside the room and they closed the door and he was
yelling in the microphone. . . .
They took me to the room and they signaled me to get on to the
floor. And one of the police he put a part of his stick that he always carries
inside my ass and I felt it going inside me about 2 centimeters, approximately.
And I started screaming, and he pulled it out and he washed it with water
inside the room. And then two American girls that were there when they were
beating me, they were hitting me with a ball made of sponge on my dick. And
when I was tied up in my room, one of the girls, with blonde hair, she is
white, she was playing with my dick. . . . And they were taking pictures of me
during all these instances.[8]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is one to make of this Dantesque
nightmare journey? The very outlandishness of the brutality might lead one to
think such acts, if not themselves fantasies, must be the product of a
singularly sadistic mind-and that indeed, as the Army has maintained, we are
dealing here with the abuses of a half-dozen or so unstable personalities, left
unsupervised, their natures darkened and corrupted by the stresses of war and
homesickness and by the virtually unlimited power that had been granted them.
That the abuse reported by many other Abu Ghraib detainees in their affidavits,
and depicted in the photographs, is very similar does not of course disprove
the Army's "few bad apples" defense; on the contrary, perhaps these
half-dozen or so miscreants simply terrorized their cellblock, inflicting similar
abhorrent acts on anyone they pleased. But then we come upon the following
report, written by the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad and published in the
magazine Editor and Publisher, about the treatment of three Iraqi employees of Reuters-two
cameramen and a driver-who were filming near the site of the downing of a US
helicopter near Fallujah in early January when troops of the 82nd Airborne
Division arrived:
When the soldiers approached them they were standing by their car,
a blue Opel. Salem Uraiby [who had worked for Reuters as a cameraman for twelve
years] shouted "Reuters, Reuters, journalist, journalist." At least
one shot was fired into the ground close to them.
They were thrown to the ground and soldiers placed guns to their
heads. Their car was searched. Soldiers found their camera equipment and press
badges and discovered no weapons of any kind. Their hands were cuffed behind
their backs and they were thrown roughly into a Humvee where they lay on the
floor. . . .
Once they arrived at the US base (this was [forward operating
base] Volturno near Fallujah) they were kept in a holding area with around 40
other prisoners in a large room with several open windows. It was bitterly
cold. . . .
Bags were alternately placed on their heads and taken off again.
Deafening music was played on loudspeakers directly into their ears and they
were told to dance around the room. Sometimes when they were doing this,
soldiers would shine very bright [flashlights] directly into their eyes and hit
them with the [flashlights]. They were told to lie on the floor and wiggle
their backsides in the air to the music. They were told to do repeated press
ups and to repeatedly stand up from a crouching position and then return to the
crouching position.
Soldiers would move between them, whispering things in their ear.
. . . Salem says they whispered that they wanted to have sex with him and were
saying "come on, just for two minutes." They also said he should
bring his wife so they could have sex with her. . . .
Soldiers would whisper in their ears "One, two, three . .
." and then shout something loudly right beside their ear. All of this
went on all night. . . . Ahmad said he collapsed by morning. Sattar said he
collapsed after Ahmad and began vomiting. . . .
When they were taken individually for interrogation, they were
interrogated by two American soldiers and an Arab interpreter. All three
shouted abuse at them. They were accused of shooting down the helicopter.
Salem, Ahmad, and Sattar all reported that for their first interrogation they
were told to kneel on the floor with their feet raised off the floor and with
their hands raised in the air.
If they let their feet or hands drop they were slapped and shouted
at. Ahmad said he was forced to insert a finger into his anus and lick it. He
was also forced to lick and chew a shoe. For some of the interrogation tissue
paper was placed in his mouth and he had difficulty breathing and speaking.
Sattar too said he was forced to insert a finger into his anus and lick it. He
was then told to insert this finger in his nose during questioning, still
kneeling with his feet off the ground and his other arm in the air. The Arab
interpreter told him he looked like an elephant. . . .
Ahmad and Sattar both said that they were given badges with the
letter "C" on it. They did not know what the badges meant but
whenever they were being taken from one place to another in the base, if any
soldier saw their badge they would stop to slap them or hurl abuse.[9]
Different
soldiers, different unit, different base; and yet it is obvious that much of
what might be called the "thematic content" of the abuse is very
similar: the hooding, the loud noises, the "stress positions," the
sexual humiliations, the threatened assaults, and the forced violations-all
seem to emerge from the same script, a script so widely known that apparently
even random soldiers the Reuters staffers encountered in moving about the
Volturno base knew their parts and were able to play them. All of this,
including the commonly recognized "badge," suggests a clear program
that had been purposely devised and methodically distributed with the
intention, in the words of General Sanchez's October 12 memorandum, of helping
American troops "manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses."
3.
I think what happened is that you took a sophisticated concept at
Gitmo, where the Geneva Convention did not apply . . . and you put it in the
hands of people [in Iraq] who should have been driving trucks, or doing something
else instead of guarding prisoners. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
-Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Armed Services Committee
What
"sophisticated concept" does Senator Graham have in mind? How can
what seems to be random and bizarre brutality possibly be described as
"sophisticated"?
Though we are
limited here to what is publicly known, as Senator Graham with his security
clearances is not, it is still possible to chart, in the history of
"extreme interrogation" since the late Fifties, a general move toward
more "scientific" and "touch-less" techniques, the
lineaments of which are all too evident in the morbid accounts now coming out
of Iraq. The most famous compilation of these techniques can be found in the
CIA's manual KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, produced in 1963, and in particular its
chapter "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant
Sources," which includes the observation that
All coercive
techniques are designed to induce regression. . . . The result of external
pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently
acquired by civilized man. . . . "Relatively small degrees of homeostatic
derangement, fatigue, pain, sleep, loss, or anxiety may impair these
functions."[10]
The intent of
such "homeostatic derangement," according to the CIA manual, is to
induce "the debility-dependence-dread state," causing the prisoner to
experience the "emotional and motivational reactions of intense fear and
anxiety."
The circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within
the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring,
and of being plunged into the strange. . . . Control of the source's environment permits the
interrogator to determine his diet, sleep pattern and other fundamentals.
Manipulating these into irregularities, so that the subject becomes
disorientated, is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.
[emphasis added]
Thus the hooding,
the sleep deprivation, the irregular and insufficient meals, and the exposure
to intense heat and cold. As a later version of the manual puts it, the
"questioner"
is able to manipulate the subject's environment, to create
unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and
sensory perception. . . . Once this disruption is achieved, the subject's
resistance is seriously impaired. He experiences a kind of psychological shock,
which may only last briefly, but during which he is far . . . likelier to
comply. . . . Frequently the subject will experience a feeling of guilt. If
the "questioner" can intensify these guilt feelings, it will increase
the subject's anxiety and his urge to cooperate as a means of escape.[11]
[emphasis added]
Viewed in this
light, the garish scenes of humiliation pouring out in the photographs and
depositions from Abu Ghraib-the men paraded naked down the cellblock with hoods
on their heads, the forced masturbation, the forced homosexual activity, and
all the rest-begin to be comprehensible; they are in fact staged operas of
fabricated shame, intended to "intensify" the prisoner's "guilt
feelings, increase his anxiety and his urge to cooperate." While many of
the elements of abuse seen in the reports from Iraq, particularly the sensory
deprivation and "stress positions," resemble methods used by modern
intelligence services, including the Israelis and the British in Northern
Ireland, some of the techniques seem clearly designed to exploit the particular
sensitivities of Arab culture to public embarrassment, particularly in sexual
matters.
The American military, of course, is well aware of these cultural sensitivities; last fall, for example, the Marine Corps offered to its troops, along with a weeklong course on Iraq's customs and history, a pamphlet which included these admonitions:
Do not shame or humiliate a man in public. Shaming a man will
cause him and his family to be anti-Coalition.
The most important qualifier for all shame is for a third party to
witness the act. If you must do something likely to cause shame, remove the
person from view of others.
Shame is given by placing hoods over a detainee's head. Avoid this
practice.
Placing a detainee on the ground or putting a foot on him implies
you are God. This is one of the worst things we can do.
Arabs consider the following things unclean:
Feet or soles of feet.
Using the bathroom around others. Unlike Marines, who are used to
open-air toilets, Arab men will not shower/use the bathroom together.
Bodily fluids. . . .[12]
These precepts,
intended to help Marines get along with the Iraqis they were occupying by
avoiding doing anything, however unwittingly, that might offend them, are
turned precisely on their heads by interrogators at Abu Ghraib and other
American bases. Detainees are kept hooded and bound; made to crawl and grovel
on the floor, often under the feet of the American soldiers; forced to put
shoes in their mouths. And in all of this, as the Red Cross report noted, the public nature of the humiliation is absolutely
critical; thus the parading of naked bodies, the forced masturbation in front
of female soldiers, the confrontation of one naked prisoner with one or more
others, the forcing together of naked prisoners in "human pyramids."
And all of this was made to take place in full view not only of foreigners, men
and women, but also of that ultimate third party: the ubiquitous digital camera
with its inescapable flash, there to let the detainee know that the humiliation
would not stop when the act itself did but would be preserved into the future
in a way that the detainee would not be able to control. Whatever those taking
them intended to do with the photographs, for the prisoners the camera had the
potential of exposing his humiliation to family and friends, and thus served as
a "shame multiplier," putting enormous power in the hands of the
interrogator. The prisoner must please his interrogator, else his shame would
be unending.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
If, as the manuals suggest, the road to
effective interrogation lay in "intensifying guilt feelings," and
with them "the subject's anxiety and his urge to cooperate as a means of
escape," then the bizarre epics of abuse coming out of Abu Ghraib begin to
come into focus, slowly resolving from what seems a senseless litany of sadism
and brutality to a series of actions that, however abhorrent, conceal within
them a certain recognizable logic. Apart from the Reuters report, we don't know
much about what went on in the interrogation rooms themselves; up to now, the
professionals working within those rooms have mostly refused to talk.[13] We do know, from the statements of several of the military
policemen, that the interrogators gave them specific instructions: "Loosen
this guy up for us. Make sure he has a bad night. Make sure he gets the
treatment." When one of these soldiers, Sergeant Javal S. Davis, was asked
why he didn't protest the abusive behavior, he answered that he "assumed
that if they were doing anything out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines,
someone would have said something. Also, the wing belongs to [Military
Intelligence] and it appeared that MI personnel approved the abuse." He
went on, speaking about one of the other accused policemen:
The MI staffs, to my understanding, have been giving Graner
compliments on the way he has been handling the MI holds [i.e., prisoners held
by military intelligence]. Example being statements like "Good job,
they're breaking down real fast"; "They answer every question";
"They're giving out good information, finally"; and "Keep up the
good work"-stuff like that.[14]
As a lawyer for
another of the accused, Staff Sergeant Ivan Fredericks, told reporters,
The story is not necessarily that there was a direct order. Everybody is far too subtle and smart for that. . . . Realistically, there is a description of an activity, a suggestion that it may be helpful and encouragement that this is exactly what we needed.
These statements
were made by accused soldiers who have an obvious motive to shift the blame.
Though few in military intelligence have spoken, and three have reportedly
claimed the equivalent of Fifth Amendment protection,[15] one who has talked to journalists, Sergeant Samuel
Provance, confirmed Sergeant Davis's assertion that the policemen were
following orders:
Military intelligence was in control. Setting the conditions for interrogations was strictly dictated by military intelligence. They weren't the ones carrying it out, but they were the ones telling the MPs to wake the detainees up every hour on the hour. . . .
Provance told the
reporters that "the highest ranking officers at the prison were involved
and that the Army appears to be trying to deflect attention away from the
military intelligence's role."[16]
One needn't
depend on the assertions of those accused to accept that what happened in Abu
Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq was not the random brutality of "a few bad
apples" (which, not surprisingly, happens to be the classic defense
governments use in torture cases). One needn't depend on the wealth of external
evidence, including last fall's visit to Abu Ghraib by Major General Geoffrey
Miller, then the commander of Guantanamo (and now commander of Abu Ghraib), in which,
according to the Taguba report, he "reviewed current Iraqi Theater ability
to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence"[17] ; or Lieutenant General Sanchez's October 12 memorandum,
issued after General Miller's visit, instructing intelligence officers to work
more closely with military policemen to "manipulate an internee's emotions
and weaknesses"; or statements from Thomas M. Pappas, the colonel in
charge of intelligence, that he felt "enormous pressure," as the insurgency
increased in intensity, to "extract more information from prisoners."[18] The internal evidence-the awful details of the abuse
itself and the clear logical narrative they take on when set against what we
know of the interrogation methods of the American military and intelligence
agencies-is quite enough to show that what happened at Abu Ghraib, whatever it
was, did not depend on the sadistic ingenuity of a few bad apples.
This is what we
know. The real question now, as so often, is not what we know but what we are
prepared to do.
4.
Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer "yes," then
you must accept all the necessary consequences.
-Colonel Philippe Mathieu, The Battle of Algiers (1965)
When, as a young intelligence officer, the late General Paul Aussaresses arrived in war-torn Algeria a halfcentury ago and encountered his first captured insurgent, he discovered that methods of interrogation were widely known and fairly simple:
When I questioned them I started by asking what they knew and they
clearly indicated that they were not about to talk. . . .
Then without any hesitation, the policemen showed me the technique
used for "extreme" interrogations: first, a beating, which in most
cases was enough; then other means, such as electric shocks . . . ; and finally
water. Torture by electric shock was made possible by generators used to power
field radio transmitters, which were extremely common in Algeria. Electrodes
were attached to the prisoner's ears or testicles, then electric charges of
varying intensity were turned on. This was apparently a well-known procedure. .
. .[19]
Aussaresses remarks that "almost all the French soldiers who served in Algeria knew more or less that torture was being used but didn't question the methods because they didn't have to face the problem directly." When as a responsible officer he gives a full report to his commander on his methods- which are yielding, as he notes, "very detailed explanations and other names, allowing me to make further arrests"- he encounters an interesting response:
"Are you sure there aren't other ways of getting people to
talk?" he asked me nervously. "I mean methods that are . . ."
"Faster?" I asked.
"No, that's not what I mean."
"I know what you mean, Colonel. You're thinking of cleaner
ways. You feel that none of this fits in with our humanistic tradition."
"Yes, that's what I mean," answered the Colonel.
"Even if I did agree with you, sir, to carry out the mission
you've given me, I must avoid thinking in moral terms and only do what is most
useful."
Aussaresses's
logic is that of a practical soldier: a traditional army can defeat a
determined guerrilla foe only through superior intelligence; superior
intelligence can be wrested from hardened insurgents in time to make it
"actionable" only through the use of "extreme
interrogation"-torture; therefore, to have a chance of prevailing in
Algeria the French army must torture. He has nothing but contempt for superior
officers, like his colonel, who quail at the notion of "getting their
hands dirty"-to say nothing of the politicians who, at the least sign of
controversy over the methods he is obliged to employ, would think nothing of
abandoning him as "a rotten apple."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It has long since become clear that
President Bush and his highest officials, as they confronted the world on
September 11, 2001, and the days after, made a series of decisions about
methods of warfare and interrogation that General Aussaresses, the practical
soldier, would have well understood. The effect of those decisions-among them,
the decision to imprison indefinitely those seized in Afghanistan and elsewhere
in the war on terror, the decision to designate those prisoners as
"unlawful combatants" and to withhold from them the protections of
the Geneva Convention, and finally the decision to employ "high pressure
methods" to extract "actionable intelligence" from them-was
officially to transform the United States from a nation that did not torture to
one that did. And the decisions were not, at least in their broad outlines,
kept secret. They were known to officials of the other branches of the
government, and to the public.
The direct
consequences of those decisions, including details of the methods of
interrogation applied in Guantanamo and at Bagram Air Base, began to emerge
more than a year ago. It took the Abu Ghraib photographs, however, set against
the violence and chaos of an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, to bring
Americans' torture of prisoners up for public discussion. And just as General
Aussaresses would recognize some of the methods Americans are employing in
their secret interrogation rooms-notably, the practice of
"water-boarding," strapping prisoners down and submerging them until
they are on the point of drowning, long a favorite not only of the French in
Algeria but of the Argentines, Uruguayans, and others in Latin America[20] -the general would smile disdainfully at the
contradictions and hypocrisies of America's current scandal over Abu Ghraib: the
senior American officers in their ribbons prevaricating before the senators,
the "disgust" expressed by high officials over what the Abu Ghraib
photographs reveal, and the continuing insistence that what went on in Abu
Ghraib was only, as President Bush told the nation, "disgraceful conduct
by a few American troops, who dishonored our country and disregarded our
values." General Aussaresses argued frankly for the necessity of torture
but did not reckon on its political cost to what was, in the end, a political
war. The general justified torture, as so many do, on the "ticking
bomb" theory, as a means to protect lives immediately at risk; but in
Algeria, as now in Iraq, torture, once sanctioned, is inevitably used much more
broadly; and finally it becomes impossible to weigh what the practice gains
militarily in "actionable intelligence" against what it loses
politically, in an increasingly estranged population and an outraged world.
Then as now, this was a political judgment, not a military one; and those who
made it helped lose the generals' war.
A half-century
later, the United States is engaged in another political war: not only the
struggle against the insurgency in Iraq but the broader effort, if you credit
the administration's words, to "transform the Middle East" so that
"it will no longer produce ideologies of hatred that lead men to fly
airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington." We can't know the
value of the intelligence the torturers managed to extract, though top commanders
admitted to The New York
Times on May 27 that
they learned "little about the insurgency" from the interrogations.
What is clear is that the Abu Ghraib photographs and the terrible story they
tell have done great damage to what was left of America's moral power in the
world, and thus its power to inspire hope rather than hatred among Muslims. The
photographs "do not represent America," or so the President asserts,
and we nod our heads and agree. But what exactly does this mean? As so often,
it took a comic, Rob Corddry on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, to point out the grim contradiction in this:
There's no question what took place in that prison was horrible.
But the Arab world has to realize that the US shouldn't be judged on the
actions of a . . . well, we shouldn't be judged on actions. It's our principles
that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: Just because torturing
prisoners is something we did, doesn't mean it's something we would do.
Over the next
weeks and months, Americans will decide how to confront what their fellow
citizens did at Abu Ghraib, and what they go on doing at Bagram and Guantanamo
and other secret prisons. By their actions they will decide whether they will
begin to close the growing difference between what Americans say they are and
what they actually do. Iraqis and others around the world will be watching to
see whether all the torture will be stopped and whether those truly responsible
for it, military and civilian, will be punished. This is, after all, as our
President never tires of saying, a war of ideas. Now, as the photographs of Abu
Ghraib make clear, it has also become a struggle over what, if anything, really
does represent America.
-May 27, 2004
(This is the
second of two articles.)
Notes
[1] "In Abu Ghraib prison alone, senior
officials have testified that no less than three sets of interrogation policies
were put in play at different times- those cited in Army field manuals, those
used by interrogators who previously worked in Afghanistan and a third set
created by Iraq's commanding general after policies used at Guantanamo
Bay," from Craig Gordon, "High-Pressure Tactics: Critics Say Bush
Policies- Post 9/11-Gave Interrogators Leeway to Push Beyond Normal
Limits," Newsday,
May 23, 2004.
[2] See my "Torture and Truth," The
New York Review, June 10,
2004, the first part of the present article, which takes up the Red Cross
report in detail.
[3] See Edward Epstein, "Red Cross
Reports Lost, Generals Say: 'The System Is Broken,' Army Commander Tells Senate
Panel about Abu Ghraib Warnings," San Francisco Chronicle, May 20, 2004.
[4] See Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt,
"Officer Says Army Tried to Curb Red Cross Visits to Prison in Iraq,"
The New York Times,
May 19, 2004.
[5] See R. Jeffrey Smith, "Memo Gave
Intelligence Bigger Role: Increased Pressure Sought on Prisoners," The
Washington Post, May 21,
2004.
[6] See Douglas Jehl and Neil A. Lewis,
"US Disputed Protected Status of Iraq Inmates," The New York Times, May 23, 2004.
[7] See Josh White and Scott Higham,
"Sergeant Says Intelligence Directed Abuse," The Washington Post, May 20, 2004.
[8] See "Translation of Sworn Statement
Provided by ________, Detainee #_______, 1430/21 Jan 04," available along
with thirteen other affidavits from Iraqis, at "Sworn Statements by Abu
Ghraib Detainees," www.washingtonpost. com. The name was withheld by The
Washington Post because
the witness "was an alleged victim of sexual assault."
[9] See Greg Mitchell, "Exclusive:
Shocking Details on Abuse of Reuters Staffers in Iraq," Editor and
Publisher, May 19, 2004,
which includes excerpts from the Baghdad bureau chief's report.
[10] See KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation-
July 1963, archived at
"Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past," National Security Archive
Electronic Briefing Book No. 122, p. 83;
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122. "KUBARK" is a CIA codename.
[11] See Human Resource Exploitation
Training Manual-1983,
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 122, "Non-coercive
Techniques"; www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122.
[12] See "Semper Sensitive: From a
Handout That Accompanies a Weeklong Course on Iraq's Customs and History,"
Marine Division School, Harper's, June 2004, p. 26. For a discussion of shame and the American
occupation of Iraq, see my "Torture and Truth."
[13] Though we do know something of what has
gone on at other American interrogation centers, for example, the American air
base at Bagram, Afghanistan. See Don Van Natta Jr., "Questioning Terror
Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World," The New York Times, March 9, 2003, and my "Torture and
Truth."
[14] See Scott Higham and Joe Stephens,
"Punishment and Amusement," The Washington Post
[15] Richard A. Serrano, "Three Witnesses
in Abuse Case Aren't Talking: Higher-ups and a Contractor Out to Avoid
Self-incrimination," San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 2004.
[16] See White and Higham, "Intelligence
Officers Tied to Abuses in Iraq."
[17] See General Antonio M. Taguba,
"Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade"
(The Taguba Report), page 7.
[18] See Douglas Jehl, "Officers Say US
Colonel at Abu Ghraib Prison Felt Intense Pressure to Get Inmates to
Talk," The New York Times, May 18, 2004.
[19] See Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the
Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955-1957, translated by Robert L. Miller (Enigma,
2002).
[20] See James Risen, David Johnston, and Neil
A. Lewis, "Harsh CIA Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations," The
New York Times, May 13, 2004.
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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