[Peace-discuss] Message from Senator Durbin

[C. G. Estabrook]

Senator Durbin:

Your complicity with torture is a blot on your character. Here (from a British 
publication) is an account of what you have failed to protest against.

     Why Bradley Manning is fighting for his sanity
     Coercion and humiliation seep through American culture, writes Alexander 
Cockburn
     By Alexander Cockburn
     LAST UPDATED 10:23 AM, JANUARY 6, 2011

For the past seven months, 22-year-old US Army Private Bradley Manning, first in 
an army prison in Kuwait, now in the brig in Quantico, Virginia, has been held 
23 hours out of 24 in solitary confinement in his cell, under constant 
harassment. If his eyes close between 5am and 8pm he is jolted awake. In 
daylight hours he has to respond "yes" to guards every five minutes. For an hour 
a day he is taken to another cell where he walks figures of eight. If he stops 
he is taken back to his other cell.

Manning is accused of giving documents to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks. He has 
not been tried or convicted. Visitors report that Manning is going downhill 
mentally as well as physically. His lawyer's efforts to improve his condition 
have been rebuffed by the Army.

Accusations that his treatment amounts to torture have been indignantly 
denounced by prominent conservatives calling for him to be summarily executed. 
After the columnist Glenn Greenwald publicised Manning's treatment in 
mid-December, there was a moderate commotion. The UN's top monitor of torture is 
investigating his case.

Meanwhile Manning faces months, if not years, of the same. Will he end up like 
accused Chicagoan Jose Padilla, four years in total isolation and silence before 
his trial in 2007? Padilla was convicted as a terrorist and given 17 years, but 
only after his lawyer had been informed by prison staff that he had become 
docile and inactive to the point that he resembled "a piece of furniture".

Just over the edge of 2011, torture is now solidly installed in America's 
repressive arsenal. Not in the shadows where it used to lurk, but up front and 
central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians. Coercion and humiliation 
seep through the culture, to the extent that before Christmas American travelers 
began to rebel at the invasive pat-down searches, conducted by the TSA's airport 
security teams. They complained of being groped around bosoms and crotches.

Covertly, there was always plenty of torture, just as there were assassinations. 
After World War Two, the CIA's predecessor, OSS, imported Nazi experts in 
interrogation techniques. But this was the era of Cold War competition: Uncle 
Sam the Good against the dirty Russians and Chinese. The US government would go 
to desperate lengths to counter accusations that its agents in the CIA or USAID 
practised torture.

One famous case was that of Dan Mitrione, working for the US Agency for 
International Development, teaching refinements in torture techniques to 
Brazilian and Uruguayan interrogators.

Mitrione was ultimately kidnapped by the Tupamaro guerillas and executed, 
becoming the subject of Costa Gavras's movie State of Siege. The CIA mounted 
major cover-up operations to try to discredit the accusations against Mitrione, 
quoted as having once told his students: "The precise pain, in the precise 
place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect."

The American liberal conscience began to make its accommodation with torture in 
June 1977, which was the month the London Sunday Times published a major expose 
of the torture of Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces and the security 
agency, Shin Bet. Suddenly American supporters of Israel were arguing that

certain techniques – sensory deprivation, prolonged stress positions while 
hooded, incarceration in ‘cells' the size of packing crates, etc – somehow 
weren't really torture, or were morally justifiable torture under the "ticking 
time bomb" theory.

Ahead lay the spectacle of Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, a 
supposed liberal defender of civil rights, recommending to Israel the notion of 
"torture warrants". The targets of the warrants would be "subjected to 
judicially monitored physical measures designed to cause excruciating pain 
without leaving any lasting damage". One form of torture recommended by the 
Harvard professor was "the sterilised needle being shoved under the fingernails".

With the Great War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 World Trade Center attack 
in 2001, torture made its march into the full light of day. Presiding over this 
journey was George Bush's secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

At Guantanamo Bay, it was Rumsfeld who gave verbal and subsequently written 
approval to torture suspects, using the notorious techniques of isolation, sleep 
deprivation and psychic degradation, with the Defence Secretary himself 
micro-managing the humiliations, some of them involving women's underwear.

In the case of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, there is again a trail of evidence showing it 
was Rumsfeld who personally decreed and monitored stress positions, individual 
phobias, such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

One US army officer, Janis Karpinski, has described finding in Abu Ghraib a 
piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the 
interrogators. It was a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld, authorising techniques 
such as use of dogs, stress positions, starvation. On the paper, in Rumsfeld's 
handwriting, was the terse instruction, "Make sure this happens!!"

On the home front, torture as a drastic mode of social control flowered 
luxuriantly in the American prison system, whose population began to rocket in 
the 1970s to its present 2.5 million total. Informally, licensed male rape went 
hand in hand with increasingly sadistic solitary confinement and prolonged 
sensory deprivation – a condition in which some 25,000 prisoners are currently 
being driven mad.

As the Bush years drew to a close, liberals dared hope that the rule of law 
would return and with it respect for internationally agreed prohibitions on 
torture and treatment of combatants. Anticipation grew that the torturers, with 
the Bush high command at the apex, would face formal charges. Candidate Obama 
fanned that hope.

On January 21, 1977, on his first day in office, President Jimmy Carter 
fulfilled his campaign pledge, issuing a pardon to those who avoided serving in 
the Vietnam war by fleeing the US or not registering. If he'd waited a month or 
two, the honeymoon was already turning tepid and he might well have lost his nerve.

On his second full day in office, President Obama signed a series of executive 
orders to close the Guantanamo detention centre within a year, ban the harshest 
interrogation methods and review military war crimes trials. In his first State 
of the Union address a week later, Obama declared to the joint session of 
Congress: "I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation 
that the United States of America does not torture. We can make that commitment 
here tonight."

Within days of this false guarantee, Obama's Justice Department lawyers were 
telling US judges in explicit terms that the new administration would not be 
moving on from Bush's policies on the legal status of renditions and of supposed 
enemy combatants.

Lawyers from Obama's Department of Justice emphasised to judges that they, like 
the DoJ lawyers instructed by Bush's men, held that captives seized by the US 
government and conveyed to secret prisons to be tortured had no standing in US 
courts and that the Obama regime had no legal obligations to defend or even 
admit its actions in any US courtroom. "Enemy combatants" would not be afforded 
international legal protections, whether on the field of battle in Afghanistan 
or, if kidnapped by US personnel, anywhere in the world.

The torture system is flourishing, and the boundaries of the American empire are 
marked by overseas torture centres such as Bagram. There are still detainees in 
Guantamo – as of November last year, 174 of them. They are supposedly destined 
for a Supermax in Illinois. Manning fights for his sanity in Quantico.

Memo to David Cameron. Resist all extradition requests by the US government, on 
the grounds that those accused of terrorism cannot possibly expect anything but 
torture and a kangaroo trial.



http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/73357,news-comment,news-politics,alexander-cockburn-why-bradley-manning-is-fighting-for-his-sanity-wikileaks-julian-assange