[Peace-discuss] Obama & torture

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From today's News-Gazette & elsewhere. It's worth noting that Washington et al. 
were not so concerned about "such conduct" when they practiced it against native 
Americans during the War of Independence. --CGE]

	Nat Hentoff
	Prisoner abuse continuing,
	but with Obama's backing
	February 19, 2010

Some of the increasing number of critics, from the
left and the right, of President Obama's abuses of
civil liberties and human rights make an exception
by praising his executive order in the first month of
his term banning torture as a form of interrogation
on matters of national security. There is credible
reason, however, to dispute the credibility of that
presidential pledge.

"Torture's Loopholes" (New York Times, Jan. 20) is
by Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the U.S.
Air Force and Air Force Reserves. In 2006, he led
the U.S. interrogation team that tracked and found
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insatiable killer who
commanded al-Qaida in Iraq and was then
terminated by coalition forces. Alexander went on to
write a book that was not endorsed by Dick Cheney:
"How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators
Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the
Deadliest Man in Iraq."

This is what Alexander, who describes himself as
"an investigator turned interrogator," has to say
about Obama allegedly banning torture — and the
accompanying decision last August by Attorney
General Eric Holder to remove responsibility for
interrogating detainees to a new FBI-directed High-
Value Detainee Interrogation Group that will
constrain itself to use only "noncoercive" methods
or those approved by the Army Field Manual.

Unequivocally, Matthew Alexander states: "If I were
to return to one of the war zones today...I would
still be allowed to abuse prisoners." How come? In
August, Holder's task force on interrogation,
commissioned by the president, "recommended no
changes" to the Army Field Manual, thereby
retaining the torture loopholes focused on now by
the tracker of al-Zarqawi.

To begin, an Appendix to the Manual allows a
detainee (a.k.a. prisoner) to be kept in solitary
confinement indefinitely. As Alexander point out,
"extended solitary confinement is torture, as
confirmed by many scientific studies." And the
prestigious Manual allows suspects just four hours
sleep in 24 hours. "As if this wasn't enough,"
Alexander continues, a loophole permits
interrogators, Mr. President, 'to give a detainee four
hours of sleep — and then conduct a 20-hour
interrogation, after which they can 'reset' the clock
and begin another 20-hour interrogation followed
by four hours of sleep."


You certainly keep physically fit, Mr. President, but I
wonder what your definition of torture is if you
allowed yourself, as part of a clinical test, to be
interrogated for 40 hours straight?

Until this change in the Army Field Manual,
Alexander points out, an interrogator going beyond
20 straight hours of interrogation (as if that weren't
inhumane enough) was referred to as "monstering"
in that line of work.

Well, Barack Obama did campaign as a much-needed
agent of change.

Matthew Alexander, who is also a historian of
military interrogation, notes that "the United States
has a rich history of military ethics dating back to
General George Washington during the
Revolutionary War. According to General
Washington, 'Should any American soldier be so
base and infamous as to injure any prisoner ... by
such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin
to themselves and their country.'"

What Washington meant by "such conduct" was the
brutal, vicious ways the British army was
interrogating their American prisoners. George
Washington was The Army Field Manual during our
Revolutionary War. But history isn't taught much in
the schools anymore, or in the military.

With regard to the systemic torture policy of the
Bush-Cheney administration and its effect on
recruiters for terrorist forces, Matthew Alexander
says ("The Daily Beast" on April 20, 2009, www.
thedailybeast.com):

"I listened time and again (in Iraq) to captured
foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for
coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of
the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign
fighters and you can easily conclude that we have
lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives
because of our policy of torture and abuse."

I do not expect any Obama "transparency" (another
broken pledge) uncovering what lawless abuses are,
under his own administration's watch, taking place
through the "loopholes" in the Army Field Manual,
and elsewhere. This is not for us low-level citizens
to know.



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