see NY Review of Books article on US torture

[bobbieinok]

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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:


(quote from Reuters' report)

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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>

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(back to NYReview article)
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."

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more....

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17190

[bobbieinok]

1. additional quote READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
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Feature
The Logic of Torture
By Mark Danner


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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.

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[bobbieinok]

2. more

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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.

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