'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Disposing of torture victims

If you're someone who does really bad torture, then there are times when you just can't let the "evidence" of what you have done to another human being survive--evidence, that is, in the form of a surviving person who can 'tell' others what happened to her/him, either verbally or through bodily 'inscriptions'.

So what do you do?

I've been reading the Report that South Africa's TRC presented to the government back in 1998. In Volume 2 there's a whole grisly section on the exhumations that the TRC undertook in 1997 of prisoners tortured to death by the apartheid regime.

For example, the first one was of the body of Phila Portia Ndwandwe, an ANC fighter of unknown age... In its dry way, the report says (p.545):

Durban Security Branch members abducted her from Swaziland [in 1988]. She was not prepared to co-operate with the police. They state that they did not have admissible evidence to prosecute here and that they could not release her, so they killed her and buried her on the Elandskop farm.

One of the TRC Commissioners noted that the people who killed her said she had been held naked and interrogated in a small concrete chamber near the burial place, for some time before her death. Then:

When we exhumed her, she was on her back in a foetal position... and had a single bullet wound to the top of her head, indicating that she had been kneeling or squatting when she was killed. Her pelvis was clothed in a plastic packet, fashioned into a pair of panties indicating an attempt to protect her modesty.

Aaaah, I won't go on. Page after page of it.

In most of those cases, the "goal" of the torturing had been either (1) to get information or (2) to "turn" the victim so he or she would become a double-agent for the benefit of the apartheid regime.

And in Abu Ghraib...

And in the US military/CIA torture operations in Afghanistan? And in Gitmo? (Well, in Gitmo, we already know they succeeded in "turning" one of the detainees--the one who turned up later in Canada.)

I haven't heard about anyone being tortured to death in Gitmo, though that has happened in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan. Of course, we don't know yet how many people have been tortured to death in either Iraq or Afghanistan. And we probably never will.

But I've been wondering about the effect of the "new rules" in Gitmo--namely, the fact that the detainees are all supposed to appear before a military "commission" soon. If some of them have been tortured so crazy that their minds are quite addled, will the military officers who run the commissions be on the ball to intervene and demand an investigation?

And aren't those detainees all supposed to be allowed to see civilian lawyers soon? I should imagine the people who've been running Gitmo are scared to death as to what those lawyers will learn about the treatment their clients have been receiving.

As a US citizen and taxpayer, I want to know about all these things, immediately. Specifically, I want to have a full accounting of how all those detainees at Gitmo have been treated. And I want to know exactly what rules and safeguards have been put in place in the US-run detention facilities there, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and anywhere else US forces might hold detainess, to ensure that nothing like what happened to Phila Ndwandwe or Abdul Wali (in Afghanistan) ever comes close to happening in the future.

Is that too much to ask, in a country that claims to be 'democratic'?