Torture as normalcy
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
May 8 — Torture’s back in the news, courtesy of those
lurid pictures of exultant Americans laughing as they torture their
Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib prison run by the US military outside Baghdad.
Apparently it takes electrodes and naked bodies piled in a simulated
orgy to tickle America’s moral nerve ends. Kids maimed by cluster
bombs just don’t do it any more. But torture’s nothing new.
One of the darkest threads in postwar US imperial history has been the
CIA’s involvement with torture, as instructor, practitioner or
contractor.
Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly
studying Nazi techniques and protecting their exponents such as Klaus
Barbie. The CIA’s official line is that torture is wrong and is
ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On countless occasions it has been
appallingly effective. Remember Dan Mitrione, kidnapped and killed by
Uruguay’s Tupamaros and portrayed by Yves Montand in Costa-Gavras’s
film State of Siege? In the late 1960s Mitrione worked for the US Office
of Public Safety, part of the Agency for International Development.
In Brazil, so A.J. Langguth (a former New York Times bureau chief in
Saigon) related in his book Hidden Terrors, Mitrione was among the US
advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply
to prisoners without killing them.
In Uruguay, according to the former chief of police intelligence, Mitrione
helped “professionalize” torture as a routine measure and
advised on psychological techniques such as playing tapes of women and
children screaming that the prisoner’s family was being tortured.
In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center
and Pentagon, “truth drugs” were hailed by some columnists
such as Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter for use in the war against al-Qaida.
This was an enthusiasm shared by the US Navy after the war against Hitler,
when its intelligence officers got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner’s
research into “truth serums” at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish
and Russian prisoners high doses of mescaline and then observed their
behavior, in which they expressed hatred for their guards and made confessional
statements about their own psychological makeup.
As part of its larger MK-ULTRA project, the CIA gave money to Dr. Ewen
Cameron at McGill University. Cameron was a pioneer in the sensory-deprivation
techniques. Cameron once locked up a woman in a small white box for
thirty-five days, deprived of light, smell, and sound. The CIA doctors
were amazed at this dose, knowing that their own experiments with a
sensory-deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe psychological reactions
in less than forty hours. Start torturing, and it’s easy to get
carried away.
Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions
it. Just like the FBI after Sept. 11, 2001 the CIA in 1968 got frustrated
by its inability to break suspected leaders of Vietnam’s National
Liberation Front by its usual methods of interrogation and torture.
So the agency began more advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized
three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in their
brains. They were revived, put in a room and given knives. The CIA psychologists
then activated the electrodes, hoping the prisoners would attack one
another. They didn’t. The electrodes were removed; the prisoners
shot; and their bodies burned. You can read about it in our book, Whiteout.
In recent years the United States has been charged by the UN and also
by human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International with tolerating torture in US prisons, by methods ranging
from solitary, twenty-three-hour-a-day confinement in concrete boxes
for years on end, to activating 50,000-volt shocks through a mandatory
belt worn by prisoners? Many of the Military Police guards now under
investigation for abuse of Iraqis earned their stripes working as guards
in federal and state prisons, where official abuse is a daily occurence.
Indeed, Charles Granier, one of the abusers at Abu Ghraib and the lover
of Linndie England the Trailer Park Torturer, worked as a guard at South
Carolina’s notorious Greene Correctional Unit and has since gone
back to work there.
And as a practical matter torture is far from unknown in the interrogation
rooms of US law enforcement, with Abner Louima, sodomized by a cop using
a stick in one notorious recent example. The most infamous disclosure
of consistent torture by a police department in recent years concerned
cops in Chicago in the mid-70s through early 80s who used electroshock,
oxygen deprivation, hanging on hooks, the bastinado, and beatings of
the testicles. The torturers were white and their victims black or brown.
A prisoner in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison was thrown
into boiling water. Others get 50,000-volt shocks from stun guns.
Many states have so-called “secure housing units” where prisoners
are kept in solitary in tiny concrete cells for years on end, many of
them going mad in the process. Amnesty International has denounced US
police forces for “a pattern of unchecked excessive force amounting
to torture.” In 2000 the UN delivered a severe public rebuke to
the United States for its record on preventing torture and degrading
punishment. A 10-strong panel of experts highlighted what it said were
Washington’s breaches of the agreement ratified by the United States
in 1994. The UN Committee Against Torture, which monitors international
compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture, has called for the
abolition of electric-shock stun belts (1,000 in use in the US) and
restraint chairs on prisoners, as well as an end to holding children
in adult jails.
It also said female detainees are “very often held in humiliating
and degrading circumstances” and expressed concern over alleged
cases of sexual assault by police and prison officers. The panel criticized
the excessively harsh regime in maximum security prisons, the use of
chain gangs in which prisoners perform manual labor while shackled together,
and the number of cases of police brutality against racial minorities.
So far as rape is concerned, because of the rape factories more conventionally
known as the US prison system, there are estimates that twice as many
men as women are raped in the US each year. A Human Rights Watch report
in April of 2001 cited a December 2000 Prison Journal study based on
a survey of inmates in seven men’s prison facilities in four states.
The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had experienced at
least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact since being
incarcerated, and at least seven percent had been raped in their facilities.
A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison system produced similar findings,
with 22 percent of male inmates reporting that they had been pressured
or forced to have sexual contact against their will while incarcerated.
Of these, more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least
once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives a total
of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.
Source: CounterPunch
Muzzling Michael, muzzling me
Hands off the fat guy in the chicken suit,
Mr. Mogul
By Greg Palast
May 6 — When the fattened cats at Disney put the kibosh
on Michael Moore’s new film, Fahrenheit 9-11, they did more than
censor an artist. Gagging Moore is only the latest maneuver in suppressing
some most uncomfortable facts: the Bush Administration’s killing
off investigations of Saudi Arabian funding of terror including evidence
involving a few members of the bin Laden family in the USA.
I know because with my investigative team at BBC television and The
Guardian of Britain, I wrote and filmed the original reports on which
Moore’s new documentary are based.
On Nov. 11, 2001, just two months after the attack, BBC Television’s
Newsnight displayed documents indicating that FBI agents were held back
from investigating two members of the bin Laden family, who were fronting
for a “suspected terrorist organization” out of Falls Church,
Virginia -- that is, until Sept. 13, 2001. By that time, these birds
had flown. We further reported that upper level agents in the US government
informed BBC that the Bush Administration had hobbled the investigation
of Pakistan’s Khan Laboratories, which ran a flea market in atomic
bomb blueprints. Why were investigators stymied? Because the money trail
led back to the Saudis.
The next day, our Guardian team reported that agents were constrained
in following the money trail from an extraordinary meeting held in Paris
in 1996. There, in the Hotel Monceau Royale, Saudi billionaires allegedly
agreed to fund al-Qaida’s “educational” endeavors. Those
stories ran at the top of the nightly news in Britain and worldwide
but not in the USA. Why?
Our news teams picked up several awards including one I particularly
hated getting: a Project Censored Award from California State University’s
school of journalism. It’s the prize you get for a very important
story that is simply locked out of the American press. And that hurts.
I’m an American, an LA kid sent into journalistic exile in England.
What’s going on here?
Why the heck can’t agents follow the money, even when it takes
them to Arabia? Because, as we heard repeatedly from those muzzled inside
the agencies, Saudi money trails lead back to George H.W. Bush and his
very fortunate sons and retainers. We at BBC reported that too, at the
top of the nightly news, everywhere but America.
Why are America’s media barons afraid to tell this story in the
USA? The BBC and Guardian stories were the ugly little dots connected
by a single theme: oil contamination in American politics and money
poisoning in the blood of our most powerful political family. And that
is news that dare not speak its name.
This is not the first time that Michael Moore attempted to take our
BBC investigative reports past the US media border patrol. In fact,
our joke in the London newsroom is that if we can’t get our story
on to American airwaves, we can just slip it to the fat guy in the chicken
suit. Moore could sneak it past the censors as “entertainment.”
Here’s an example of Moore’s underground railroad operation
to bring hard news to America: In the Guardian and on BBC TV, I reported
that Florida’s then Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, removed
tens of thousands of Black citizens from voter rolls just prior to the
2000 election. Her office used a list of supposed “felons”
-- a roster her office knew was baloney, filled almost exclusively with
innocents. I printed the first installment of that story in the Guardian
papers while Al Gore was still in the race. The Washington Post ran
my story seven months later. By then, it could be read with a chuckle
from the Bush White House.
The Black voter purge story would have never seen the light of day in
the USA, despite its front-page play over the globe, were it not for
Moore opening his book, Stupid White Men, with it. So go ahead, Mr.
Mickey Mouse mogul, censor the guy in the baseball cap; let the movie
screens go dark; spread the blindness that is killing us. Instead, show
us fake fly-boys giving the “Mission Accomplished” thumbs
up. It’s so much easier, with the lights off, for the sheiks, who
lend their credit cards to killers, to jack up the price of oil while
our politicians prepare the heist of the next election, this time by
computer. Let’s not kid ourselves. Tube news in the USA is now
thoroughly Fox-ified and print, with few exceptions, still kow-tows
to the prevaricating pronouncements of our commander in chief.
Maybe I’m getting too worked up. After all, it’s just a movie.
But choking off distribution of Moore’s film looks suspiciously
like a hunt and destroy mission on unwanted news, even when that news
is hidden in a comic documentary. Why should the media moguls stop there?
How about an extra large orange suit for Michael for the new Hollywood
wing in Guantanamo?
Source: Znet
This torture started at the very top
By Ahdaf Soueif
May 5 — The media in this country is politely shocked at
photos of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated by US and British soldiers.
A BBC1 news presenter says the pictures seem to have been “merely
mementos.” That’s all right, then. The folks at home will
have a good laugh and paste them into the family album.
In the first half of the last century, the French in Algeria and Morocco
used to send home postcards of prostitutes posing sullenly, with breasts
bared and skirts pulled up to their thighs, over captions like “Le
harem Arabe” or “Fille Mauresque.” The Americans have
pushed it further: their pornography of occupation is at once more childish,
playful, crude, and sinister than that of “old Europe.” Also,
we assume the prostitutes were paid.
BBC commentators and British politicians have been reminding us that
the soldiers’ activities “do not compare with Saddam Hussein’s
systematic tortures and executions.” Hussein is now the moral compass
of the west.
The media are fearful that these images will go down badly in the Arab
world because “they show Muslim men being humiliated by American
women.” Again the not-so-subtle reduction of the Arab world to
an entity that reacts only to religious prodding. Actually the photographs
have confirmed people’s belief that the US and Britain are not
in Iraq as an act of goodwill. They have strengthened the feeling that
there is a deep racism underlying the occupiers’ attitudes to Arabs,
Muslims and the third world generally.
It was only a matter of time. In the past year the world has seen photos
of many Iraqis stripped with their wrists tied behind their backs with
plastic cord. At first we could look into their eyes and bear witness
to what was happening. Then they were bagged. At no point was there
an outcry.
We have grown used to seeing Arab men bound and hooded in the occupied
territories and Gaza. Israel advises the US on how to control civilians
and interrogate them. Ariel Sharon has made the Israeli army’s
“rules of engagement” available to the US military. The world
notes the similarity between the practices of the US army in Iraq and
those of the Israeli army in Palestine. There is evidence that scenes
like the ones now shocking the world have been common in Facility 1391
(Israel’s secret prison), and some say in other jails. We just
haven’t seen the photos.
It is no use for US spokesmen to talk about “rogue elements,”
how “contractors” are not answerable to the military, and
how Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick had not read the Geneva conventions
before taking charge of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This abuse is going
to turn out to be widespread. Amnesty International has already said
it is systematic.
The acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not have
taken place but for the profound racism that infects the American and
British establishments. At squaddie level, Sarah Oliver reported in
the Mail on May 2 that “the British soldiers loathe the dirtiness
of Iraq and the native population’s slothfulness, kleptomania,
and determination to do as little as possible for themselves.”
There have been reports of US troops outside Falluja talking of the
fun of being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the
“rat’s nest” that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers
will be soldiers. But that language has been used by neocons at the
heart of the US administration; both Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz
have spoken of “snakes” and “draining the swamps”
in the “uncivilized parts of the world.” It is implicit in
the US administration’s position that anyone who does not agree
that all of history has been moving towards a glorious pinnacle expressed
in the US political, ideological, and economic system has “rejected
modernity;” that it is America’s mission to civilize and to
punish.
I’ve seen a photo of a young American soldier with two Iraqi boys.
There is no nakedness or torture, but it is no less nasty for that.
The boys are holding a cardboard sign. They and the soldier are smiling
and doing a thumbs up. He is pointing at the cardboard sign, on which
he’s written: “Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad. then he knocked
up my sister!” Imagine the scene: Lance Corporal Boudreaux, a soldier
on a liberating, civilizing mission, asks the natives to pose for a
“memento.” He gives them the sign to hold. What lie did he
tell them about its message? “Iraq is liberated,” or “Mission
accomplished?” And who, in this scene, is the more civilized?
The one good thing in all of this is that there are soldiers in the
US and British armies who could not live with what was happening and
who blew the whistle. The world needs to see the photos coming out of
Iraq not as “deviant” but as an authentic message from the
heart of the thought system that is seeking to control our planet.
Source: Guardian (UK)
