[Peace-discuss] torture responsibility extends to the top

[Paul Patton]

* Tracing the Trail of Torture
Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq
 *
  *by Dahr Jamail*


They told him, "We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell."

Ali Abbas, a former detainee from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was filling me
in on the horrors he endured at the hands of American soldiers, contractors,
and CIA operatives while inside the infamous prison.

It was May of 2004 when I documented his testimony in my hotel in Baghdad.
"We will take you to Guantanamo," he said one female soldier told him after
he was detained by U.S. forces on September 13, 2003. "Our aim is to put you
in hell so you'll tell the truth. These are our orders -- to turn your life
into hell." And they did. He was tortured in Abu Ghraib less than half a
year after the occupation of Iraq began.

While the publication of the first Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004 opened
the floodgates for former Iraqi detainees to speak out about their treatment
at the hands of occupation forces, this wasn't the first I'd heard of
torture in Iraq. A case I'd documented even before then was that of 57
year-old Sadiq Zoman<http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/275>.
He was held for one month by U.S. forces before being dropped off in a coma
at the general hospital in Tikrit. The medical report that came with his
comatose body, written by U.S. Army medic Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, listed
the reasons for Zoman's state as heat stroke and heart attack. That medical
report, however, failed to mention anything about the physical trauma
evident on Zomans' body --- the electrical point burns on the soles of his
feet and on his genitals, the fact that the back of his head had been bashed
in with a blunt instrument, or the lash marks up and down his body.

Such tales -- and they were rife in Baghdad before the news of Abu Ghraib
reached the world -- were just the tip of the iceberg; and stories of
torture similar to those I heard from Iraqi detainees during my very first
trip to Iraq, back in November 2003, are still being told, because such
treatment is ongoing.

*Institutionalizing Torture: Abu Ghraib*

While President Bush has regularly claimed -- as with reporters in Panama
last November -- that "we do not torture," Janis Karpinski, the U.S.
Brigadier General whose 800th Military Police Brigade was in charge of 17
prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib back in 2003, begs to
differ. She knows that we do torture and she believes that the President
himself is most likely implicated in the decision to embed torture in basic
war-on-terror policy.

While testifying this January 21 in New York City at the International
Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush
Administration, Karpinski told us: "General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of
coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed the eight-page
memorandum<http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/10098>authorizing
literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations
to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific
permission."

All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who
had been "specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to
Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operation," was dispatched to Iraq
by the Bush administration to "work with the military intelligence personnel
to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques."

Karpinski met Miller on his tour of American prison facilities in Iraq in
the fall of 2003. Miller, as she related in her testimony, told her, "It is
my opinion that you are treating the prisoners too well. At Guantanamo Bay,
the prisoners know that we are in charge and they know that from the very
beginning. You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. And if they think or
feel any differently you have effectively lost control of the
interrogation."

Miller went on to tell Karpinksi in reference to Abu Ghraib, "We're going to
Gitmo-ize the operation."

When she later asked for an explanation, Karpinski was told that the
military police guarding the prisons were following the orders in a
memorandum approving "harsher interrogation techniques," and, according to
Karpinski, "signed by the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld."

That one-page memorandum "authorized sleep deprivation, stress positions,
meal disruption --serving their meals late, not serving a meal. Leaving the
lights on all night while playing loud music, issuing insults or criticism
of their religion, their culture, their beliefs." In the left-hand margin,
alongside the list of interrogation techniques to be applied, Rumsfeld had
personally written, "Make sure this happens!!" Karpinski emphasized the fact
that Rumsfeld had used two exclamation points.

When asked how far up the chain of command responsibility for the torture
orders for Abu Ghraib went, Karpinski said, "The Secretary of Defense would
not have authorized without the approval of the Vice President."

Karpinski does not believe that the many investigations into Abu Ghraib have
gotten to the truth about who is responsible for the torture and abuse
because "they have all been directed and kept under the control of the
Department of Defense. Secretary Rumsfeld was directing the course of each
one of those separate investigations. There was no impartiality whatsoever."


Does she believe the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib has stopped?

"I have no reason to believe that it has. I believe that cameras are no
longer allowed anywhere near a cellblock. But why should I believe it's
stopped? We still have the captain from the 82nd airborne division [who]
returned and had a diary, a log of when he was instructed, what he was
instructed, where he was instructed, and who instructed him. To go out and
treat the prisoners harshly, to set them up for effective interrogation, and
that was recently as May of 2005."

 Karpinski was referring to Captain Ian
Fishback<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701527.html>,
one of three American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Forward
Operating Base Mercury<http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0905/4.htm#_Toc115161403>near
Fallujah who personally witnessed the torture of Iraqi prisoners and
came forward to give testimony to human rights organizations about the
crimes committed.

Karpinski, who was made the scapegoat for the atrocities which occurred at
Abu Ghraib, went public as a whistle-blower, and retired with a demotion in
rank after serving a quarter of a century in the Army. General Sanchez, on
the other hand, was transferred to Germany where he is continuing his tenure
as commander of the V Corps. However, he was reportedly relieved of his role
and not promoted to a fourth star due to the fact that the Abu Ghraib
scandal first broke during his watch.

But Abu Ghraib was -- and remains -- only a symptom of a much deeper
problem.

*The Guantanamo Treatment*

"Since the start of the war on terror, the intelligence community, led by
the CIA, has revived the use of torture, making it Washington's weapon of
choice," writes Alfred McCoy in his new book, A Question of
Torture.<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805080414/nationbooks08>

When the infamous Abu Ghraib photo of the prisoner on a box draped in black,
head covered with a sack, arms outstretched with electrical wires attached
to his fingers, was made public, it had a deeper resonance for McCoy than
simply documenting a war crime of the present moment.

"In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of CIA torture,"
McCoy told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now!
interview<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228>.
"It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are
extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple
fundamental techniques" that, as his book makes vividly clear, the CIA
pioneered in breakthrough research on torture, funded to the tune of
billions of dollars in the
1950s<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1795>.
In his book, he adds: "The photographs from Iraq illustrate standard
interrogation practice inside the global gulag of secret CIA prisons that
have operated, on executive authority, since the start of the war on
terror."

Rather than placing blame merely on the handful of guards in Abu Ghraib who
were reprimanded (and in a few cases jailed) for their crimes against
humanity, McCoy believes that they -- and the interrogators there -- were
simply "following orders" and, like Karpinski, considers that
"responsibility for their actions lies higher, much higher, up the chain of
command."

When I interviewed Ali Abbas in Iraq, his descriptions from Abu Ghraib bore
a remarkable similarity to those given by detainees released from the
American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and from the little noticed American
mini-gulag<http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1440836,00.html>in
Afghanistan.

"They shit on us, used dogs against us, used electricity and starved us," he
told me. "They cut my hair into strips like an Indian. They shaved my
mustache, put a plate in my hand, and made me go beg from the prisoners, as
if I was a beggar."

Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York in a
statement<http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=4bUT8M23lk&Content=424>on
the detention experiences of three men they represent who were held in
both Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay reveal, for example, similarly
over-the-top treatment. And such treatment long preceded anything recorded
at Abu Ghraib. Starvation rations were common and, in Sherbegan Prison in
Afghanistan in December, 2001, one of the detainees, Shafiq Rasul, described
the situation as follows: "We all had body and hair lice. We got dysentery
and the toilets were disgusting. It was just a hole in the ground with shit
everywhere. The whole prison stank of shit and unwashed bodies."

He would not be allowed to wash for at least six weeks. He would be
transferred to a U.S. base in Kandahar and endure a "forced cavity search"
while he was hooded, then go on to suffer countless beatings. When he was
later transferred to Guantanamo Bay, he would witness the "Guantanamo
haircut" where men would either have their heads shaved completely or have a
cross shaved into their head in order to insult their faith. Denial of
medical care and long stays in solitary confinement, along with sleep
deprivation tactics, were the norm.

Other forms of treatment included:


   - Gratuitous violence: Prisoners would be punched, kicked, and slammed
   to the ground.
    - Exposure to the elements: Prisoners were locked in cage-like
   structures located in hangers with no heating.
    - Denial of nourishment.
    - Denial of religious rights including purposeful desecration of the
   Quran.
    - The use of dogs to threaten prisoners.

 And keep in mind, this was the norm. The extreme we know from the recorded
deaths of at least 98
prisoners<http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/2006_alerts/etn_0222_dic.htm>in
American hands in these years.

*Outsourcing Torture*

Extraordinary renditions -- the kidnapping of terror suspects and their
transport to countries willing to torture them for the Bush administration
-- have been the rage (for the CIA) in Europe in recent years and have
enraged European publics. But far less is often known about what happens to
those kidnappees on the other end of the process. Craig Murray, however,
knows more than most of us. He was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from
2002 to 2004, a time when that country's strong man, Islam Karimov, was
described by Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld as an
"important ally" of George Bush in his war on terror. Murray was dismissed
by the British government in October 2004 when he made public his findings
on extraordinary renditions to Uzbekistan and the torture by Uzbek security
personnel of those rendered into their hands by the CIA.

Murray describes Karimov as having longstanding ties with Bush. These seem
to have begun in 1997 when Bush was still governor of Texas. He then met
with Uzbek Ambassador Sadyk Safaev, a meeting (for which there is documented
evidence<http://www.globalecho.org/usrdir/3/images/NewGreatGame.jpeg?visitID=71c4b6d8a19a5f8fe83893de02ea0675>)
organized by Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, in order to enlist the governor in
brokering a two billion-dollar gas deal between the corporation and that
oil-rich country. Karimov, says Murray, "was a guest in the White House in
2002. It's very easy to find photos of George Bush shaking Karimov's hand."
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was, he added, "particularly chummy
with Karimov" back then and, at the time, the administration was making use
of the Karshi-Khanabad air base, also known as K2, in that country.

Murray is not alone in considering Karimov one of the most vicious dictators
on the planet, a man personally responsible for the death of thousands. The
ambassador helped uncover evidence of one detainee who "had had his
fingernails extracted, he had been severely beaten, particularly about the
face, and he died of immersion in boiling liquid. And it was immersion,
rather than splashing, because there is a clear tide mark around the upper
torso and arms, which gives you some idea of the level of brutality of this
regime."

While not certain that detainees who had been rendered were boiled alive,
about extraordinary rendition Murray said, "There is no doubt that George
Bush and Condoleezza Rice have been lying through their teeth about
extraordinary rendition for some time." As he put it, "The United States, as
a matter of policy, is willing to accept intelligence got by torture by
foreign agencies. I can give direct firsthand evidence of that and back it
up with documents."

When asked why he decided to go public with his information, Murray replied,
"I think it's just what any decent person would do. I mean, when you come
across people being boiled and their fingernails pulled out or having their
children raped in front of them, you just can't go along with it and sleep
at night."

The U.S. vacated the K2 base as the result of political fallout from the
massacre of over 600 demonstrators by Karimov's security forces in May 2005.
Karimov has since moved back under Russian protection.

Nevertheless, Murray is convinced that the U.S. continues to rendition
people to other grim and willing regimes around the globe to be tortured.

In addition to the degradation and inhumanity involved in torture, which
afflicts those meting it out as well as those on the receiving end, both
intelligence officials and law enforcement personnel believe that
information obtained by torture is almost invariably useless. In addition,
torture policies, seldom kept secret for long, invariably produce outrage
and opposition on a large scale.

Here, for instance, is a typical response a rebel in Fallujah offered a
colleague of mine in Iraq in January 2005:

"We are fighting in Fallujah first because we are defending our religion.
Because they desecrate our Holy Quran. They put the Quran in the sewage.
They rape our women. They rape them in Abu Ghraib. The raiding, the burning,
the detentions, the evictions, the killing it is continuous, everyday and
night. These are the reasons we resist the Americans."

*"George Bush is the law"*

Testimony from Afghan prisons and Guantanamo, the
photos<http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444>and video from Abu
Ghraib<http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=sbs_dateline_abu_ghraib_torture_photos_images_iraq_documentary_australia_february_16_2006&page=1>,
evidence of extraordinary renditions to the far corners of the planet -- all
of this doesn't even encompass the full reach of Bush administration torture
policies or the degree to which they have been set in motion at the highest
levels of the American government. But what simply can't be clearer is this:
horrific methods of torture have been used regularly against detainees in
U.S. custody in countries around the globe, while an American President,
Vice President and Secretary of Defense, among others, openly advocated
policies <http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=57336> that, until
recently, would have been considered torture in any democratic country. In
the meantime, the Bush Administration has twisted the law just enough to
allow authorities to potentially pick up more or less anyone they desire at
any time they want to be held wherever the government decides for as long as
its officials desire with no access to lawyer or trial -- and now, for the
first time, the possibility has arisen, at least in the military trials in
Guantanamo, that testimony obtained by torture will be
admissible<http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060302/pl_afp/usattacksrightstrialguantanamo_060302072952>.


All of this can also be seen as part of a desperate attempt by a failing
superpower to ratchet up the use of force in the service of subjugation, as
has happened time and time again in the past.

In *A Question of Torture*, McCoy quotes one CIA analyst, whose expertise
was in the now long-departed Soviet Empire, this way: "When feelings of
insecurity develop within those holding power, they become increasingly
suspicious and put great pressures upon the secret police to obtain arrests
and confessions. At such times police officials are inclined to condone
anything which produces a speedy 'confession,' and brutality may become
widespread."

Testifying at the same commission of inquiry as Karpinski, Michael Ratner,
once head of the National Lawyers' Guild, now president of the Center for
Constitutional Rights and an expert on international human rights law,
caught the essence of our present situation:

"Let there be no doubt this administration is engaged in massive violations
of the law. Torture is an international crime. What [George Bush] has done
is basically lay the plan for what has to be called a *coup-d'état* in
America. [His Presidential Signing Statement attached to the McCain
anti-torture amendment] makes three points… First, speaking as the
President, my authority as commander in chief allows me to do whatever I
think is necessary in the war on terror including use torture. Second, the
Commander in Chief cannot be checked by Congress. Third, the Commander in
Chief cannot be checked by the courts. In other words… George Bush is the
law."

Torture is usually defined as "infliction of severe physical pain as a means
of punishment or coercion," or as "excruciating physical or mental pain,
agony." No civilized society can accept laws which justify the use of
torture. So it's not surprising that Ali Abbas was astonished to discover
Americans willing to inflict such humiliating and inhumane treatment on him
while he was in their custody in Abu Ghraib. "They cannot be human beings
and do these things," was the way he put it. He concluded: "This, what
happened to me, could happen to anybody in Iraq."

Unfortunately, what happened to him can now conceivably happen to anyone,
anywhere in the world, according to George Bush.

One of the last things Abbas said as our interview ended was: "Saddam
Hussein was a cruel enemy to us. Once I made it to Abu Ghraib though, I
wished I had been killed by him rather than being alive with the Americans.
Even now, after this journey of torture and suffering, what else can I
think?"

*Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting
from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq at the
International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by
the Bush Administration in New York City this January. He maintains his own
website dahrjamailiraq.com <http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/>.*
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