ENCYCLICAL ON
TORTURE
January 27, 2006
Recently, George W. Bush stared into a camera and firmly proclaimed, "We
do not torture." Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the
committee which drafted articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, has
pointed out that this Bush claim calls to mind the infamous "I am not a crook"
Nixon assertion. One might also recall that famous moment when Bill Clinton
looked the American people squarely in the eye and said, "I did not have
sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski."
These three examples by no means exhaust the instances which might be
cited to illustrate dishonesty by American leaders. But they all illustrate
a particular strategy of deception (and, perhaps, self-deception) which it
is important to acknowledge. In each of these cases, the speaker could tell
himself that he was being technically truthful because he was relying on
a definition of terms concocted to serve a purpose of convenience rather
than to facilitate communication. Clinton would later reveal that he did
not consider the particular activities he engaged in with "that woman" to
fall within the scope of "sexual relations" as he understood the matter.
Nixon later explained to David Frost, "If the President does it, that means
it's legal." Bush's rationale for his declaration about torture has not yet
fully emerged, but his lawyers and political operatives have been at work
on the issue and it now seems clear that his justification will contain elements
of both Clinton's hairsplitting and Nixon's steamrolling.
Each of these declarations of innocence represents an opportunity lost,
an occasion for possible reconsideration of error and the taking of corrective
action, a chance to exercise integrity thrown away. Each statement, and the
misdeeds underlying it, has seriously eroded trust and contributed to a corrosion
of the American community. Only Clinton has apologized; and his transgressions
(though certainly not insignificant) were the least damaging, as they involved
mostly private behavior. Nixon acknowledged some wrongdoing, but such admissions
got lost in self-pity or self-justification; and Nixon never seemed to realize
the harm he had done to the public life of the country he loved and had tried
to serve. Bush does not apologize, has a hard time taking responsibility
for mistakes, and often actually misconstrues the harm done by his policies
and actions as positive results (e.g. seeing a booming economy where the
actuality is an increasingly desperate struggle for survival for many
people).
Therefore it is hardly surprising that today the American people find
their political culture sliding into a quagmire of moral and spiritual distress.
This state of affairs has not come about because of the actions or words
of any individual, or as the result of any single policy initiative, or as
the product of any one administration or any unique set of circumstances.
In a sense, those who object to the "blame game" are right. We are all complicit;
everyone must take responsibility in whatever measure is appropriate for
each. But blame dispersion won't do either; it is well said that if everybody
is responsible then nobody is responsible. Some folks are obviously more
culpable than others, some agendas are more destructive than others, and
some ideas are more toxic than others. Also, it is necessary to name names
if for no other reason than to focus attention and to gain clarity of
understanding.
***
At the beginning of the Bush administration in 2001, a few observers noted
with alarm the re-emergence into government positions of some architects
of the Reagan-era war against the people of Central America. Chief among
these thugs was John Negroponte, who was appointed ambassador to the United
Nations in 2001, was later made ambassador to Iraq and in 2005 was named
the first Director of National Intelligence.
Under the cover of his duties as ambassador to Honduras in the Reagan
administration, Negroponte was involved in the illegal funneling of aid to
the Nicaraguan contras and in the promotion and protection of Honduran death
squads which tortured and murdered hundreds of people including American
missionaries. He ignored constant complaints about human rights violations
and denied knowledge of them even though the evidence of them (which he actively
suppressed whenever possible) was all around him. He oversaw construction
of the El Aguacate military base where Nicaraguan contras were trained and
which was suspected of being a secret detention and torture center during
the 1980s. Excavation of the base in August 2001 unearthed 185 corpses, including
two Americans, who were presumably killed and buried at the site. In 1982,
Sister Laetitia Bordes, a nun who had served in El Salvador for ten years,
led a delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran
nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras the previous year after Archbishop
Óscar Romero was assassinated. John Negroponte claimed he knew nothing
about the nuns. But it was revealed in 1996 that a group of Salvadorans,
including the women for whom Bordes had been looking, were taken prisoner
on April 22, 1981, savagely tortured by the Honduran secret police, and thrown
out of helicopters alive.
One could go on with the Negroponte resume or cite similar information
about some of his partners-in-crime (e.g. Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter),
but that might simply be redundant in this context. The point is that with
people of this sort of background working in the Bush administration, it
shouldn't have been surprising when rumors of torture by American personnel
in Iraq and Afghanistan began to circulate.
Journalist Seymour Hersh broke the can of worms wide open with the publication
of a major story about prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in April 2004.
The details of this story are too well-known and too accessible to require
that they be rehashed here. There followed the publication of numerous pictures
of disgusting activities in many news outlets, and a full-blown scandal was
under way. Senators conducted hearings; nothing of any consequence changed.
Resignations were demanded; nobody resigned. Editorialists pontificated.
Right-wing talk show hosts opined that mountains were being made out of
molehills, making reference to fraternity pranks and initiation rites for
Skull & Bones, and insisted that actions involved were not serious enough
to deserve the "torture" label. Administration officials vowed that "those
responsible" would be brought to justice. Attempting damage control, Bush
himself submitted to interviews with Arab media outlets in which he stated,
''First, the people in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as
abhorrent. They must also understand that what took place in that prison
does not represent the America that I know." But he failed to take the
opportunity to apologize. At about the same time, Major General Geoffrey
Miller, commander of US-run prisons in Iraq, declared, ''I would like to
apologize for our nation and for our military for the small number of soldiers
who committed illegal or unauthorized acts here at Abu Ghraib." Thus he managed
to vitiate his own apology by floating the "few bad apples" theory, which
was already emerging within the administration and "conservative" propaganda
machine as the preferred exonerative mantra.
Later in May came the word that there were more torture pictures --
eighty-seven photos and four videos. But this time the Pentagon managed to
intercept the material before it could get to the press and the citizenry.
Only a few government officials have been allowed to see this material, but
it is certain that these unreleased images are much more damning than those
which have found their way into public domain. We have this on the authority
of some decidedly pro-administration witnesses. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld characterized what he saw as "acts that can only be described as
blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman." Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
of South Carolina predicted that the scandal would "get worse" and warned
that the most "disturbing" revelations hadn't yet been made public. "The
American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder
here," he said. "We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating
experience; we're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
According to NBC News, the unreleased images show American soldiers beating
one prisoner almost to death, raping a female prisoner, behaving inappropriately
with a dead body and taping Iraqi guards who were raping young boys. Rumsfeld,
testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned, "If these
are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse."
The public reaction only got "worse" when, on June 8, John Ashcroft testified
before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the international ban against
torturing prisoners of war didn't apply to suspects detained in the war on
terror and furthermore denied Congress access to memos written in support
of such claims by Bush administration lawyers. On the following day, an editorial
in the New York Times observed that "Each new revelation makes it more clear
that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a morally dubious culture of
legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered at the top
of this administration."
But the worsening scandal predicted by Senator Graham did not materialize.
The government, determined to keep voters in the dark as much as possible
during a presidential election year, successfully fought off legal action
by civil liberties groups to have the new pictures made public and delayed
publication of the material until June 30, 2005. Without further graphics,
the media lost interest in a story that was no longer "hot" and moved on
to other matters, promarily the horse race aspects of the electoral season.
By the time June 30, 2005 arrived, public support for the Iraq war had declined
precipitously. Fearing further slippage, the administration went back to
court to block publication of the images again. As the result of legal skirmishes
fought throughout the summer, this material is concealed from public view
to this day and may remain so forever.
***
Not all was lost, however. Some of the select few who were permitted access
to the secret pictures in 2004 were deeply shocked by them and thereby moved
to take action. In particular, Senators Lindsey Graham, John Warner, and
John McCain (all Republicans) were determined to address the problem of torture
through legislation. More than a year later, their determination produced
what has come to be known as the McCain Amendment. This measure prohibits
"cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" of all detainees in the custody
of U.S. armed forces and establishes the rules set forth in the US Army Field
Manual on Interrogation as the standard for questioning prisoners.
This legislation received wide-ranging support and was eventually passed
in the Republican dominated Senate by a vote of 90 to 9 despite the emphatically
expressed opposition of the administration, which viewed the measure as an
unreasonable infringement on executive power. Bush declared that he might
veto the defense appropriation bill to which the anti-torture amendment was
attached. He has never vetoed a bill in the entire time he has occupied the
Oval Office, but he was threatening to use his legitimate constitutional
power to block a prohibition of torture. Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter
Goss were dispatched to Capitol Hill to lobby against the McCain Amendment,
insisting that, if it couldn't be squelched altogether, an exception should
be written into it to permit torture by the CIA.
Finally, despite administration arm-twisting, the legislation cleared
all Congressional hurdles in its full glory and was sent to the White House.
Bush did not carry through on his veto threat. He signed the bill into law,
but with the political equivalent of keeping his fingers crossed. At the
precise moment the McCain Amendment became law, it became toilet paper, because
Bush accompanied the signing of the defense appropriation bill with a "signing
statement" declaring his intention to ignore or violate the anti-torture
provision whenever he wants to.
The signing statement reads in part, "The executive branch shall construe
Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent
with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary
executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional
limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared
objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting
the American people from further terrorist attacks. Further, in light of
the principles enunciated by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2001
in Alexander v. Sandoval, and noting that the text and structure of Title
X do not create a private right of action to enforce Title X, the executive
branch shall construe Title X not to create a private right of action." In
plain English the assertion that "noting that the text and structure of Title
X do not create a private right of action to enforce Title X, the executive
branch shall construe Title X not to create a private right of action" means
that Bush recognizes no way to enforce the law, so it doesn't apply to him.
If the administration's bizarre claims for the legal force and validity
of signing statements are accepted, there will be absolutely no way to
constitutionally reign in "the unitary executive branch," no matter how vile
its actions may be, until the next presidential election. And what if "the
unitary executive branch" decides to cancel the next election in the interest
of national security?... Now consider Samuel Alito, who first advanced the
arguments for the legal force and validity of signing statements while working
for the Justice Department in the Reagan administration. Make no mistake
about it; what's happening here is that an unelected president is shredding
the Constitution, and he is so lacking in shame about it that he is willing
to use the issue of torture to advance his cause. What is conservative about
this? What is compassionate about this?
***
The disgraces being perpetrated by this administration, with the tax dollars
and the implicit approval of the American people, are not confined to a single
prison, or a single country. Abu Ghraib is only the tip of the iceberg. There
have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of reports of incidents of torture
and mistreatment of prisoners and other people by American troops, American
intelligence officers, civilian contract personnel, and allied forces at
other prisons and sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. New stories
surface constantly. Usually they are not covered by media in the United States,
and thus are easily dismissed by Americans who regard this nation and everything
about it as superior to anything else in the rest of the world. There is,
nonetheless, good reason to believe that foreign press sources are sometimes
more reliable than American news outlets. Even if it were possible to keep
up with the torrent of information, it would be extremely difficult to evaluate
all of the abuse claims for truthfulness and significance.
Consider that even in the case of Abu Ghraib, the most thoroughly reported
and investigated venue of misconduct, there are still enormous gaps knowledge
and disputes about what happened there and why. The chain of command at the
Iraqi prison, which may have been compromised by the murky authority of military
intelligence and civilian contractors, was not well understood by troops
and has never been adequately explained by officers. So the fact that soldiers
dragged into courts-martial over their abusive activities at Abu Ghraib cannot
identify the persons who gave them orders may signal something other than
their guilt. For a clearer understanding of these chain of command problems,
read the article "Line Increasingly Blurred Between Soldiers and Civilian
Contractors" from the Washington Post of May 13, 2004.
Several of the soldiers who have pled guilty or been convicted in
courts-martial, have complained with good cause about the unfairness of their
trials. Witnesses that they wanted to call in their defense were declared
unavailable or otherwise excused by the military tribunal. Some officers
availed themselves of their Article 31 rights, the military equivalent of
taking the fifth to avoid self-incrimination, and then denied the immunity
they required to provide information needed by defendants to buttress contentions
that they were just following orders. Recently, the military cover-up was
revealed to extend as high up as the aforementioned General Geoffrey Miller,
when he invoked his Article 31 protection against self-incrimination in
court-martial proceedings against two soldiers accused of using dogs to
intimidate captives at the Abu Ghraib prison. Note that Miller was transferred
from his post as supervisor of the Guantanamo prison to be commander of all
US-run prisons in Iraq. This appointment was made in recognition of his "success"
in the former post and in expectation that he would apply in Iraq the policies
and methods he had used in Cuba.
No reasonable person, looking at the courts-martial emanating from Abu
Ghraib, could fail to suspect that they were rigged to maintain darkness
rather than to shed light. Read, for example, "3 witnesses in abuse case
aren't talking: Higher-ups and a contractor out to avoid self-incrimination"
from the San Francisco Chronicle of May 19, 2004, an article about the
prosecution of the purported "ring leader" Charles A. Graner Jr.
Janis Karpinski, the commanding general at Abu Ghraib, was demoted to
colonel for failing to properly supervise the prison guards. But the guards
who committed the abuses worked on the night shift, and Karpinski claims
that she was never allowed to speak to the people who had worked on the night
shift. She recalls that she was "told by Colonel Warren, the JAG officer
for General Sanchez, that they weren't assigned to me, that they were not
under my control, and I really had no right to see them." Her boss didn't
allow her to enter the part of the prison where the torture took place. She
even was ordered not to release prisoners proven to be innocent. She admits,
with the benefit of hindsight, that she should have been more vigilant, but
it seems possible that she was simply not permitted to do her job. She says
that, because she was a reservist, her authority as a brigadier general and
a commander was not respected. She has speculated that the abuses at the
prison were instigated primarily by civilian contract interrogators under
pressure to extract actionable intelligence from detainees. To whatever extent
her statements are true, she must be considered a scapegoat, and the integrity
of the chain of command at Abu Ghraib is seriously called into question.
So the story of U.S. taxpayer-funded crimes at Abu Ghraib remains murky,
mainly because the government wants it that way. Although the murkiness obviously
increases with regard to offenses at other locations which have received
much less attention, it is absolutely certain that widespread abuses have
occurred. There have even been official government investigations and reports
which would be unlikely to exaggerate the problem and would indeed be expected
to give as much support as possible to denials and to the "few bad apples"
dodge.
In May 2005, a U.S. Army summary of mistreatment of American held prisoners
in Afghanistan and Iraq outlined a widespread pattern of abuse, including
least 37 (an estimate later increased to 127) deaths in US custody. Not much
by way of charges against and punishment of perpetrators has resulted from
these findings. In March 2005, despite recommendations by investigators that
they be charged, U.S. Army commanders decided not to prosecute 17 American
soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
***
More details are known about the recent court-martial of Chief Warrant
Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr. at Fort Carson, Colorado. Welshofer, a senior
interrogator with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Qaim, Iraq,
(inadvertently?) suffocated an Iraqi officer, Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush,
by inserting him head-first into a sleeping bag, tying the bag closed, sitting
on his chest, and placing his hands over his mouth during an interrogation
session on November. 26, 2003. Prosecutors asserted that Welshofer knew his
interrogation methods were potentially lethal and against Army standards.
Defense lawyers countered that Welshofer, a 19-year Army veteran, did
nothing illegal and was using a technique approved by his commanding officer
for use against uncooperative prisoners. They further argued that General
Mowhoush, 57, who weighed more than 250 pounds, died from an irregular heart
rhythm caused by pre-existing heart disease and stress.
The incident has drawn attention from human rights groups because the
general had been beaten shortly before his death by a team that included
one or more C.I.A. contract workers. Eric Schmitt of The New York Times reported,
"The case also underscores the confusion among military interrogators and
their superiors over the use of aggressive interrogation techniques in the
summer and fall of 2003, when the insurgency in Iraq was rapidly gaining
momentum and ferocity, and top Pentagon officials and commanders in Iraq
were demanding better intelligence with which to attack the militants."
At one point in the trial, defense lawyer Frank Spinner questioned a witness
whose identity was kept secret and who was hidden by a green tarp suspended
from the ceiling. The witness said that when he talked with Welshofer on
the day before the general died, Welshofer told him that the Army's guidelines
for interrogation were being broken routinely. At one point, Spinner asked
the witness, "and you didn't report it to the CIA?" but then stopped himself
and quickly apologized to the judge.
The defendant was convicted of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty.
He was acquitted of murder and assault charges. A military jury ordered a
reprimand but no jail time.
***
If it is difficult to obtain reliable and verifiable information on officially
recognized detention facilities (and it is), it is next to impossible to
gather such information concerning the secret prisons, the mere existence
of which is not even acknowledged by the government. The widely reported
practice of extraordinary rendition, an extra-judicial procedure of sending
criminal suspects, generally suspected terrorists, to countries other than
the U.S. for detention and interrogation (sometimes referred to as "torture
by proxy"), is also officially denied. The fact that, in June 2005, an Italian
judge ordered the arrest of thirteen CIA agents for illegally kidnapping
a Muslim cleric, Hassan Osama Nasr (a.k.a. Abu Omar), off the streets of
Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt where he was tortured, is only one
of many reasons to dismiss the denials. Other tales of similar instances
of rendition, some of them clearly credible, abound.
There is, for example, the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen born
in Syria. On September 2002, he was attempting to travel from Tunis, where
he was vacationing with his wife and two small children, through Zurich and
New York, to Montreal. The trip proved to be longer and less pleasant
than he had anticipated. At JFK International Airport, he was removed from
an immigration line, and subsequently detained for 12 days, questioned, forced
to sign documents he was not allowed to read, and bullied and mistreated
American officials. He asked for, but was refused, access to a lawyer.
Then he was taken by a circuitous route to Syria, where he was held in a
small "grave-like" cell for ten months and ten days and tortured until he
signed a false confession. Finally, he was allowed to travel on to Canada.
The Canadian government launched an investigation into the case and, for
some reason, Arar sued the United States. The Bush administration refused
to cooperate with the Canadian inquiry and the Department of Justice asked
a judge to throw out most of the lawsuit, saying that allowing it to proceed
would reveal classified information. The brief presentation here only skims
over the truly horrific details of Maher Arar's misadventure. For a
fuller and gut-wrenching treatment, including the explanation of why Maher
Arar was misidentified as a terrorist threat, see his site at
http://www.maherarar.ca/mahers%20story.php on
the web. Justice Department lawyers maintain that the Arar case was not one
of rendition but of deportation.
| American agents have sent renditioned individuals, along with lists
of questions to be asked of these victims, to countries including Egypt (the
most often used), Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan.
Uzbek leader, Islam Karimov, has been known to - literally - boil some
of his opponents in oil. It is difficult to understand why George
W. Bush is reluctant to release pictures of himself with criminal uberlobbyist
Jack Abramoff while he was pleased to pose for this photograph shaking hands
with Karimov on March 12, 2002 at the White House. Seven months after
this picture was taken, Karimov won a rigged referendum which extended his
presidential term indefinitely. |
 |
On November 2, 2005, the Washington Post broke the story of the CIA's
Gulag Archipelago, a covert network of internment facilities which included
a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe where top al Qaeda captives were
being hidden and interrogated. Journalist Dana Priest wrote, "The secret
facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four
years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including
Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well
as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current
and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents." She
went on to state, "Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the
facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions
are made about whether they should be detained or for how long."
In January 2006, a report on an investigation by Council of Europe into
secret CIA prisons contended that more than a hundred detainees have been
moved anonymously and illegally through Europe under the program and that
it was "highly unlikely" that European governments were unaware of the American
program of renditions, in which terrorism suspects were either seized in
or transferred through Europe to third countries where they may have been
tortured.
***
It is probably not a coincidence that those most prominently involved
in the preparation of torture memos in the Bush administration have subsequently
enjoyed great career success. David S. Addington, Counsel in the Office of
Dick Cheney 2001-2005, the leading advocate within the administration of
indefinite detention without charge or trial, contributed to the drafting
of torture memos and the composition of signing statements which gave Bush
the "legal" means to evade very measures he was ratifying into law. When
Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted for perjury, and obstruction of
justice, and forced out as Cheney's chief of staff, Addington was elevated
to that position.
Jay S. Bybee, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel
(OLC), gave his name to the Bybee memo which went into effect on August 1,2002.
The memo was later declared inoperative by the administration, the superseding
OLC opinion of December 20, 2004 noted that "while we have identified various
disagreements with the August 2002 Memorandum, we have reviewed this Office's
prior opinions addressing issues involving treatment of detainees and do
not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards
set forth in this memorandum." Bybee was later appointed to a seat on the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
John Yoo, former law clerk to Clarence Thomas, worked in the OLC from
2001-2003 before he left the Bush administration to become a law professor
at U.C. Berkeley. While at the Department of Justice, he wrote torture memos
and contributed to the development of the Patriot Act With the publication
of two books, War, Peace, and the Constitution (2004) and The Powers of War
and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (2005), Yoo has
become the foremost academic spokesperson for unrestrained executive power.
In a recent debate between Yoo and legal scholar Doug Cassel of Notre Dame,
the following exchange occurred:
Cassel:
If the President deems that he's got to torture
somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there
is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No
treaty.
Cassel: Also no law
by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo:
I think it depends on why the President thinks
he needs to do that.
In his capacity as White House Counsel during the first term of the Bush
administration, Alberto R. Gonzales contributed to the development of torture
policy and, famously, to the denigration of the Geneva Conventions. In the
second term, he was promoted to Attorney General and is now in the forefront
of the defense of warrantless domestic wiretapping, a policy which the
administration never intended to divulge to the American people.
It may be observed that this encyclical has not addressed the problem
of determining what is torture and what is something which falls short of
such a designation. Bybee, Yoo, and Gonzales obviously considered it important
to draw such distinction. Decent, people, however, need not bow to their
view that the application of pain must produce "injury such as death, organ
failure, or serious impairment of body functions-in order to constitute torture."
Nor is it necessary to agree that, if a mental anguish fails to endure for
a specified amount of time, the infliction of it does not qualify as torture.
These sorts of considerations, in which the Bush administration lawyers engaged,
may be appropriate for parlor games, but they should never be the stuff of
policy making. The sad fact is that, wherever a line may be drawn across
the continuum of abuse, any behavior along the continuum, if accepted, will
tend to elicit further depravities up and down the line. Consider also that,
by all accounts, many of the victims are innocent.
It should also be noted that, even if it is accepted that torture can
sometimes produce useful information (a very dubious assumption), it is painfully
clear that torture is at least equally likely to produce false information
or just what the torturer wants to hear. There is a very instructive recent
example of exactly this phenomenon. Belief in an operational link between
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, which served the administration well
in its drive to war in Iraq was based mainly on information obtained from
Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi under torture at Guantanamo. The information was wrong,
the belief was in error, and Libi later explained that he had said what he
said to please his tormentors just because he wanted to end his agony.
Unfortunately, a lot of lives have suffered and died as a result. So, using
torture may be stupid as well as immoral. It is certainly disgusting for
highly paid lawyers in plush offices to play at this game.
***
Finally, in examining the matter of inhumane treatment of detainees in
the conduct of United States foreign policy, attention must be paid to its
roots in the American prison context. The U.S. has the highest incarceration
rate of any nation on the planet. This statistical reality applies, not just
in reference to Western industrialized democracies, but to all countries,
including nations, such as China, Singapore, and Iraq, that we typically
cite as examples of totalitarian human rights abusers. Although many American
prisons are reasonably well-run, to the extent that such a thing can be said,
others feature rampant physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, a condition
that, just like the reports of prisoner abuse in foreign contexts, is not
of high interest to the domestic press. It should, likewise, be noted that
at least some of the individuals involved in the Abu Ghraib situation, notably
the previously mentioned Charles Grainer, Jr., have a personal history that
includes work in U.S. prison facilities, in fact, in particular prisons where,
curiously, abuses similar to those that took place at Abu Ghraib have been
reported.
***
For further reading, the following books are highly recommended.
Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History
and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture by Jennifer
Harbury
ˆTorture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib,
and the War on Terror by Mark Danner
ˆA Question of Torture : CIA Interrogation,
from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Alfred McCoy
ˆChain of Command : The Road from 9/11
to Abu Ghraib by Seymour M. Hersh
ˆThe Torture Papers: The Road to Abu
Ghraib edited by Karen Greenberg and Anthony Lewis
ˆOne Woman's Army: The commanding general
of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story by Janis Karpinski
ˆ