'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Has the torture actually stopped?

I have been thinking intensively about the effects the widespread pattern of tortures in Abu Ghraib and othe parts of the United States' global gulag has had on two distinct groups of people: the survivors of those acts, and the U.S. Army.

But first, a very important but seemingly innocent question to which I have seen as yet, no clear answer:

Has the practice of administering torture at many locations inside the U.S. gulag actually been definitively brought to a halt yet?

How would we know that it has? What kind of evidence would it take for us to convince ourselves and the rest of the world that it has?

I know one thing. The fact that Gen. Geoffrey Miller is still in charge of the Abu Ghraib branch of the gulag is distinctly not reassuring. Miller is the Marines General and former commander of the Gitmo branch of the gulag who was the one who institutionalized the "conditioning", i.e. torture, of suspects over at the Abu Ghraib branch back last October.

... And now we're supposed to believe that this old fox can successfully be the one to "clean up" the abuses in that hen-house? What do they take us for-- dummies?

Indeed, given (1) the distinct possibility that permission for the "conditioning" to occur was given at the very highest levels of both the military command in Iraq the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, and (2) the lengthy record of these leaderships in trying to sweep all the evidence about the tortures under the rug for many months till Sy Hersh and Dan Rather forced it into the open, there is almost nothing that those leaderships by themselves could do at this point that would provide me with the necessary level of reassurance that the torture has actually stopped.

Which brings me back to a suggestion I made here last June, to the effect that in the case of our earlier, very lively concerns about Saddam Hussein's terrible record of rights abuses, people in the global human rights movements should-- in the years before the war-- have been aggreessively promoting the idea of the UN forming a robust, intrusive 'Human Rights Monitoring, Verification , and Inspection Commission' to investigate all the suspected abuses inside the country. You know, a sort of 'Human Rights UNMOVIC' analogous to the WMDs UNMOVIC that governments that had concerns/allegations about Saddam's WMDs program were able to form back in the fall of 2002...

(I also formalized my expression of that idea into the chapter I contributed to the book on The Iraq War and its Consequences .)

Maybe it's time to resurrect that idea now, and call for the UN to establish an emergency Human Rights UNMOVIC to investigate the rights situation inside all branches of the US gulag.

Starting with Iraq, yes. But moving beyond there, too, to Afghanistan--where the presence and actions of all the US forces are occurring under an explicit mandate from the U.N. Security Council. So the UN has a direct interest in robustly investigating the human-rights situation there. And moving, too, to Gitmo, which--as the Bushies continually claim--is not actually U.S. soverign territory, and where, therefore, claims about rights abuse should surely be a legitimate matter for UN concern.

What we urgently need to see now is:

1. Lawmakers and media people seeking a definitive and satisfactory answer from the top levels of the Bush administration to the two questions: "Has the use of crual, inhuman, and degrading treatment now been definitively ended inside all prisons and detention facilities run by the US military or 'other US government agencies' around the world'?" and "Describe to us in detail the safeguards now in place to ensure that such abuses never occur there again"; and
2. An exploration of different ways that the rights situation of detainees inside the United States global prison/detention system can continue to be satisfactorily monitored.

It may be that, for whatever reason, the proposal establish a Human Rights UNMOVIC for this purpose under UN auspices might not fly right now. But one alternative to that would be to seek a Rights Monitoring Mission for this task through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

OSCE is an experienced international body that grew out of the landmark 1974 Helsinki Accords. The US has always been a member of OSCE; and OSCE has considerable experience of monitoring rights situations within territories controlled by its member states... Actually, this wealth of experience probably means that an OSCE monitoring mission might be the better answer to our present need for reassurance...

The sooner, the better! We all, all of us, need to know that those practices have STOPPED.