'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope

What is the main reason why we need to press President Bush to make an unequivocal and verifiable commitment to ending the US government's use and toleration of torture?

Because any hint at all from the highest echelons of government that this kind of deeply abusive behavior is ever acceptable at all is a slippery slope down which it is all too easy for a government, its employees, and even a supposedly democratic citizenry to slide.

We now have two prime examples of this slippery slope phenomenon:

(1) In Israel, the legislature specifically allowed for the security services to apply "moderate physical pressure", at first in cases where there was good reason to suspect that a suspect had concrete informatin about a "ticking time-bomb" just about to explode...

Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!

"Moderate physical pressure" became a use of stress positions, dousing with cold water, and other means of inflicting pain so harsh that many survivors have had lasting side-effects. (See, for example, this 2002 Amnesty International report.)

As for "ticking time bombs"?

That got reconfigured along the way to mean not actual "bombs" that were literally already "ticking", but anything that could, well, just possibly might, and maybe not this month but some months down the pike, cause some kind of harm--well, y'know, generally, some kind of something fairly bad--to Israelis; basically, that is, anything that a particular Israeli soldier or prison guard didn't want to happen. I've even heard Israelis talking seriously about the danger from "ticking infrastructure"...

The bottom line? Torture--that is, deliberately cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment-- is okay if you can think of any reason to fear anything bad might ever happen.

And indeed, the well-respected human rights groups like B'tselem of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights report that some 90% of the thousands of detainees whom the Israelis have put into their prison camps in recent years have been subjected to some form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

(2) Here in the U.S. I guess the first place where the administration stated explicitly that it would be breaking with the norms of international humanitarian law (IHL) was Guantanamo. IHL includes an explicit ban on meting out "cruel treatment and torture" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" to anyone who is either a civilian or who is a wounded or detained military adversary.

The Bush administration had spirited most of the detainees currently in Guantanamo out of Afghanistan--with this transfer itself being an act of highly dubious legality. It then claimed that in Gitmo, US domestic law did not apply, and neither did the laws regulating foreign military occupations. Therefore in Gitmo, the US could do what it darn well pleased with these hundreds of detainees. And what it darn well pleased involved giving them a designation with no standing whatsoever in international law: that of "unlawful combatants". And to people in this category, the Bushies asserted, none of the protections of IHL were relevant.

Meanwhile, of course, we had all kinds of people inside and outside the Bush administration arguing that, in the context of a "ticking time-bomb"-type situation, some special forms of torture might be permissible.

Not surprising that some advocates of this position were long-time friends of Israel. Alan Dershowitz immediately springs to mind. Since he has generally been considered politically very "liberal" (in US affairs, though not on matters Middle Eastern), his outspoken advocacy of a policy that explicitly allowed "torture" of very high-level suspects--provided it is carried out by very high-level, well-trained torture specialists--came as a surprise to many.*

So anyway, they started using physical-pressure techniques and disorientation techniques in Gitmo (and actually, even prior to that, inside Afghanistan) on some of these people suspected of being high-level al-Qaeda operatives, and then...

Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!

Part of this slippery slope of transmission of the culture of torture even had a name: it was that of General Geoffrey Miller. The guy who was sent in to Gitmo to "organize" the interrogation system there, and then was sent in to Iraq to duplicate a good part of that system, there.

Plus of course, even in Gitmo, by no means everyone they have had in there has been anything like a "high-level suspect". And once the techniques got transferred to Iraq, they were using them on large numbers--probably hundreds-- of people who weren't even suspected high-level insurgents at all, but rather, random detainees and a sprinkling of common criminals...

Today, the New York Times had an interesting article by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt titled, "Prison interrogations in Iraq seen as yeilding little data on rebels". In it, they write:

civilian and military intelligence officials, as well as top commanders with access to intelligence reports, now say they learned little about the insurgency from questioning inmates at the prison. Most of the prisoners held in the special cellblock that became the setting for the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently were not linked to the insurgency, they said.

Right next to that article is one on a linked subject: the fate of Lt. Col. Allen West, the commander of an artillery battalion in central Iraq last August who was told that one of the Iraqi police officers working with his units was a spy for the insurgents. West had some of his men bring in the police officer, Yehiya Hamoodi, for questioning, which was condicted pretty roughly.

When Hamoodi refused to confess, or to give details about his accomplices, West had his soldiers put his head in a barrel of sand, and then he himself shot one shot into the barrel, "angling his gun away from the Iraqi's head, he [later] testified."

The writer of this long piece, Deborah Sontag, has interviewed both West--who was later effectively booted out of the army for his action-- and Hamoodi. She wrote this about what happened next:

Mr. Hamoodi finally "admitted there would be attacks, and called out names." Mr. Hamoodi said that he was not sure what he told the Americans, but that it was meaningless information induced by fear and pain.

At least one man named by Mr. Hamoodi was taken into custody, according to testimony, and his home was searched. No plans for attacks on Americans or weapons were found. Colonel West testified that he did not know whether "any corroboration" of a plot was ever found, adding: "At the time I had to base my decision on the intelligence I received. It's possible that I was wrong about Mr. Hamoodi."

When the interrogation was over, a physician's assistant checked Mr. Hamoodi and found "swelling but no bruises," according to a hearing transcript. He was detained another 45 days and released without being charged, he said.

Mr. Hamoodi said he did not really blame the Americans for "arresting and torturing me." Obviously, someone had informed on him, he said, and they had to act on the information they obtained. Still, he trembles now when he sees a Humvee and he no longer trusts or works with the Americans.

So much for the effectiveness of cruel and inhuman treatment in extracting solid intel....

Well, anyway, the WaPo also has an interesting, lengthy article today about all the five or six different kinds of enquiries that various government bodies here have launched into different aspects of the prison torture revelations. This piece is by Brad Graham. He writes:

In response to mounting evidence that detainees in U.S. military custody were badly abused in Iraq and elsewhere, the Pentagon has launched an array of investigations, assessments and reviews aimed, officials have insisted, at exposing those responsible for the misdeeds and preventing recurrences.

But a close look at what is being investigated, and who is doing the investigating, reveals gaps in the web of probes as well as limitations on the scope, with none of the inquiries designed to yield a complete picture of what went wrong or address suspicions of a possible top-secret intelligence-gathering operation that may have helped set the stage for the misconduct.

"I can't tell if all the inquiries represent attempts to patch new holes opening in the boat every day, or if they're part of some carefully designed strategy to have lots of activity going on around the center of this thing without probing the center itself," said John Hamre, who served as deputy secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and now heads the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington...

Well, I applaud everyone who's asking serious, probing questions about all those past instances of troture and abuse. But still, I wish more people would start demanding the kind of clear-cut, "zero tolerance" policy that can keep us all off the slippery slope of tolerating torture from here on out.

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* Footnote: Check out what Dersho has been saying in response to the Abu Ghraib scandal, here .