Has Torture Become Normalized in Our Culture It's Still Unbelievably
Inhumane
What should be horrifying to Americans has become old hat--or worse, with
Trump as torture’s new cheerleader.
By Silja J.A. Talvi
AlterNet, April 14, 2016
http://www.alternet.org/print/civil-liberties/torture-culture-normal-american-society-still-incredibly-inhumane
What if we called torture by another name Would torture begin to mean
something again
Torture sets out to break down the human spirit. Think about even a small
fraction of the ways torturers have destroyed minds, bodies and souls
throughout history. Narrow that down to what the United States has done in
the last several decades. If you can bring yourself to do it, try to picture
actual acts of torture. Not televised, fictionalized, made-for-entertainment
torture, but the real thing.
Imagine being wrenched, stretched, crammed, frozen, beaten, hung, drowned,
sexually violated, forced to defecate on yourself in the presence of others,
mocked, thrown, pushed, chained to the floor, chained to the ceiling, having
feeding tubes stuck down your throat or up your anus, being exposed to
ear-shattering volumes 247, not being allowed to sleep for days or weeks on
end to the point of hallucination and suicidal ideation, having electrodes
attached to your genitals, being forced to wear a hood while you are being
interrogated, sexually violated and photographed, being made to pose in
sexual positions with other men, being photographed in diapers, not being
allowed clothing or blankets in freezing temperatures, not being allowed to
urinate or defecate, not being allowed to eat or drink water for days, not
being allowed to see daylight or touch another person for months or years,
being shown pictures of your family and being told that your wife and
children will be raped, dismembered and killed.
All of that is American torture. Most Americans don't have the time nor
presence of mind to take it there. They have heard the word used so many
times that torture fatigue has set in. Tragically, many supported the use of
torture
to begin with, which is why the likes of Donald Trump win favor by
advocating for increased and expanded uses of torture, instead of suffering
losses at the polls.
By now, it is well-documented that the U.S. government and its varied
intelligence agencies, particularly in the post-911 era, have committed
egregious human rights violations in the form of torture against suspected
terrorists, many or most of whom have eventually been released from the CIA’s
secret prisons and places like Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib because little
or no evidence could be produced to support any charges of terrorist
activity.
All the while, we have learned more and more about how the people charged
with torturing other human beings have effectively turned grown men and
women into fragments, hollowed-out versions of their former selves.
Worst of all, the U.S. and its multitudinous intelligence, law enforcement
and corrections agencies have rarely been held accountable for this torture.
For most Americans, torture is not associated with punishment and long
prison sentences for violations of international human rights law. These
days, in fact, U.S. torture has a Teflon-coated wall of complacent
acceptance built up around it.
How else to explain the fact that Trump's proclamations about bringing back
and expanding torture have not completely doomed his candidacy His
proclamations (and those of other current or former Republican contenders
like Cruz and Rubio) have been met with the cheers and grins of die-hard
supporters, accompanied by hysterical shouts of approval and wild-eyed
enthusiasm.
Trump has made repeated statements calling for revisions in the law that
would allow for expanded torture techniques, vowing that "we have to beat
the savages" and that the U.S. current ban on waterboarding is a sign of
weakness. On occasion, Trump has tried to soften his statements and vow that
he would never instruct the military to break the law, but the March
terrorist attacks in Brussels had Trump back in fine form once again,
pronouncing that a captured suspect would have talked "a lot faster with the
torture." Even as European media was flush with reportage that it was not a
lack of torture but a lack of timely analysis and coordination on the part
of Brussels intelligence that helped the suicide bombers to unfurl their
deadly scheme, Trump's statement made it clear as to where he really stands
on torture. As the Washington Times reported, CIA director John Brennan is
against waterboarding and opposed these tactics and techniques [he's] heard
bandied about" by pro-torture presidential hopefuls such as Trump.
Make no mistake a Trump presidency would be a near-guaranteed return to
precisely those American torture tactics that have effectively served as one
of the best recruitment tools imaginable for extremist terrorist groups,
while removing any shred of credibility from the U.S. as it tries to exert
pressure on other countries to ban legal and unofficial forms of torture.
In reaction to the 911 attacks, the CIA jumpstarted a global program of
abduction, imprisonment and torture in secret detention sites known as black
sites.
In early December 2015, as most of the world was still consumed with news
reportage related to the November terrorist bombings in Paris, Human Rights
Watch released a phenomenal, 153-page report that received only a small
fraction of the attention it should have received.
"No More Excuses A Roadmap to Justice for CIA Torture" brought to light the
fact that absolutely not one person has been prosecuted in association with
the myriad forms of torture committed in worldwide CIA-run black sites as
well as the foreign prisons to which CIA abducted and forced people to
endure torture at the hands of other perpetrators.
"We would be in a very different situation today if anyone had been
prosecuted," said Laura Pitter, senior national counsel for Human Rights
Watch.
In December 2014, a great deal of new information about the CIA program came
to light, even after years of media coverage on the issue, in the form of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report. The report would have
been even more of a goldmine of information were it not for the fact that it
was so heavily redacted only 499 of 6,700 pages were eventually released to
the public. Still, Human Rights Watch was able to conduct a great deal of
analysis, highlighting such findings as the practice of "rectal feeding," by
which detainees were forced to endure a large tube forced into the rectum,
filled with pureed food, "without evidence of medical necessity." In
addition, HRW brought to light the practice of placing men in unchanged
diapers in order to heighten humiliation and helplessness; the use of
painful stress positions including being chained to the floor, wall or
ceiling, in some cases while enduring excruciatingly loud music and freezing
cold temperatures, and forcing some detainees to stand for hours or days on
end with broken bones in their legs and feet.
Mohamed Ben Soud, "US CIA Torture Is Unfinished Business," Human Rights
Watch.
Incredibly, even former Office of Legal Counsel Deputy Assistant Attorney
General John Yoo, the author of the infamous "torture memos" that gave the
greenlight for "enhanced interrogation techniques," has stated that many of
the abuses described in the Senate summary exceeded the authorizations set
out at that time.
The CIA black sites program operated from 2001 to 2009, which means that the
five-year time period for charging a person with a crime has expired.
However, there is no statute of limitations for the filing of "conspiracy
charges," which are commonly used to put low-level drug offenders in federal
prison for decades or lifetimes.
In addition, "it is not a bar to prosecutions for torture or conspiracy to
torture when there is a ‘foreseeable risk that death or serious bodily
injury’ (that) may result, or to prosecutions for the types of sexual abuse
allegedly committed by the CIA program personnel," according to HRW.
In the case of the CIA black sites, it could easily be established that a
cadre of U.S. officials played a conspiratorial role in creating and
implementing the CIA program. According to HRW, this long list of
co-conspirators includes, but is not limited to Vice President Dick Cheney,
President George W. Bush, Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, Asst.
Attorney General for Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Jay Bybee, OLC Deputy
Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, CIA director George Tenet, Attorney
General John Ashcroft, White House Counsel legal adviser Alberto Gonzales,
and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
In addition, said HRW's Laura Pitter, two CIA contractors should also be
investigated psychologists James Mitchell and John Jessen, who were
responsible for creating, enhancing and even personally implementing many of
the torture techniques used at CIA black sites. The CIA psychologist
contractors earned no less than $80 million for their efforts, which appear
to have pulled together interrogation, torture, humiliation and isolation
tactics and techniques from various military branches, intelligence
agencies, as well as U.S. supermaximum prisons.
Unfortunately, Pitter said, the Obama administration's Department of Justice
has effectively refused to prosecute anyone involved directly or indirectly
in the CIA black sites program. Former detainees have been unsuccessful in
bringing civil suits in U.S. courts because the Obama administration has
invoked grounds of state immunity and national security to make sure
lawsuits are dismissed even before plaintiffs are able to introduce evidence
of abuse. New civil suits are underway, including an ACLU case filed against
the Mitchell and Jessen.
To this day, the U.S. Justice Department maintains that its one and only
investigation into the CIA black sites program was "extraordinarily
thorough."
The investigation was led by U.S. Attorney John Durham, who looked into 101
cases of detainee abuse and decided not to file charges against any of the
alleged perpetrators. He closed all of the 101 cases between 2011 and 2012.
The assertion that Durham conducted a thorough investigation is absurd, said
Pitter. For one thing, there were severe limitations on the evidence
available to Durham’s team at the time, as this was before the publication
of the Senate summary. But one of the most glaring inadequacies of Durham’s
investigation was that no one on his team apparently bothered to speak to a
single detainee torture survivor. "We know that he never spoke to the
detainees themselves," said Pitter. "He was just content to rely on CIA
documents."
On the other hand, organizations like HRW, the ACLU and Center for
Constitutional Rights, in addition to individual attorneys representing
plaintiffs, have conducted actual interviews of these torture survivors.
Pitter was involved in interviewing some of the victims rendered by the CIA
to Libya for torture. "You see retraumatization in these men when they have
to recount what happened and remember the pain," she recounts. "Emotional
breakdowns can happen even years later, because many of these guys have
suppressed their memories for many years. They have severe anxiety and
flashbacks can overtake them at odd times."
A CIA cable included in the Senate Summary report described one detainee as
"clearly a broken man... on the verge of a complete breakdown."
Pitter noted that the victims of CIA torture are incredibly grateful that
anyone seems to care about what happens to them. "They are truly thankful
for our efforts to try to get them some kind of justice," she said.
Many torture survivors are plagued by flashbacks that can send them
spiraling into states of bleak despair, where memories of their torture and
humiliation play over and over in their minds. Post-traumatic stress
syndrome, which is common in survivors of torture, war and other traumatic
events, can leave survivors unable to function at even the most basic level.
Even more severe mental illnesses can develop in the aftermath of torture,
and average psychologists or psychiatrists are ill-equipped to treat them.
Specialists with in-depth knowledge of the treatment of severe torture
victims are even harder to come by in developing nations, from which many of
the victims were abducted.
The Open Society Foundation revealed in 2013 that 54 governments
participated in some fashion in the CIA’s rendition program, including
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark,
Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong
Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya,
Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan,
Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri
Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United
Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Zimbabwe. In some cases, an abducted suspect
would be transferred to a secret CIA prison in a country like Romania or
Afghanistan, complete with CIA interrogators. In other cases, the detainees
would be sent to prisons in Libya, where local police and intelligence
operatives would unleash their own forms of torture on the victims without
direct CIA "oversight."
In some cases, torture in the CIA’s black sites resulted in death, as in the
case of Gul Rahman, who died from hypothermia after being shackled in
Afghanistan, overnight, half-naked, to a concrete floor within a CIA site.
Permanent physical disability was common in many of the cases, as was also
true of Abu Ghraib.
In one of the more horrific cases reported, Abu Zubaydah was shot three
times during his capture. He was close to death, according to the CIA
officers at the detention site where he was held. The CIA officers wrote up
a what-if scenario describing the possibility of Zubaydah suffering a heart
attack or another serious life-threatening condition. "In the event that
[Abu Zubaydah] dies, we need to be prepared to act accordingly, keeping in
mind the liaison equities involving our hosts," noted the CIA officers, who
then went on to add that if Zubaydah died, he would be cremated. The memo
went on to note that "regardless
"... In light of the planned psychological pressure techniques to be
implemented, we need to get reasonable assurances that he will remain in
isolation and incommunicado for the rest of his life."
The CIA officers went on to waterboard Zubaydah, inducing convulsions and
vomiting. During one waterboarding session, he became "completely
unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." Zubaydah
survived, but it is hard to fathom that anyone who has undergone this kind
of torture would ever be able to live any semblance of a normal life again.
What is particularly ironic is that the U.S. was integrally involved in
creating the Convention Against Torture, but has failed to abide by its own
treaty.
The Convention Against Torture makes it mandatory for governments to
prosecute suspects who are in their territory, regardless of where the
torture took place. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 also contain similar
provisions related to war crimes.
As such, the victims of torture at CIA black sites, or any number of other
U.S.-operated detention facilities in the post-911 era, should have received
justice years ago in the form of compensation at the least-as well as
criminal charges filed against the perpetrators. Instead, they have been
left to suffer the emotional and physical consequences of the abuse they
endured without any compensation whatsoever from the United States. However,
several other countries, NGOs and international courts of justice have taken
action.
Most recently, in late February, the European Court of Human Rights
condemned Italy for the abduction of an imam by the CIA. Abu Omar, who had
received political asylum in Italy, was grabbed from a street in Milan in
2003 as a part of the CIA’s "extraordinary rendition" program and flown to
Egypt for interrogation and torture. Omar was held for four years without a
trial. In 2009, Italy convicted two Italians and 23 Americans for the
abduction, although all of the Americans were tried in absentia. The court
ordered Italy to pay over $127,000 in expenses and damages to Omar and his
wife.
Many other countries and NGOs have filed complaints, started investigations
or pursued criminal investigations, including Spain, France, Switzerland,
Canada and Poland, among many others. Many of these cases have revolved
around trying to force the country in question to admit it participated in
the CIA’s rendition program, with limited success. Two detainees were
actually successful with their charges that Poland authorized a black site
and that Polish authorities were directly responsible for the detainees'
torture and unlawful rendition. A Polish court eventually ordered the
country to pay Abu Zubaydah and another detainee roughly $112,000 in
damages.
Since the days of Abu Ghraib and the CIA black sites, laws have been passed
to make it much more difficult for U.S. intelligence operatives or soldiers
to legally commit acts of torture, Pitter said. Yet Guantanamo remains open,
and the treatment of detainees is hardly transparent to the public. Drone
attacks continue, and the CIA and other intelligence agencies have hardly
disappeared from the realm of foreign intelligence gathering and the
detention of suspected terrorists. They are simply far more careful about
how they go about doing so and who knows about it.
This past February, the Pentagon began reluctantly to release a few hundred
photos showing abuses of detainees held by U.S. forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan--out of at least 2,000 photos the ACLU has sought to have
released under the Freedom of Information Act. Just as in the case of the
Senate Summary on CIA black sites, in which a few hundred pages were
eventually released out of thousands, the ACLU’s deputy legal director
Jameel Jaffer pronounced that "more important than the disclosure is the
fact that hundreds of photographs are still being withheld."
The released images are, for the most part, closeup pictures of unidentified
men bearing scars, cuts, bruises and other evidence of blunt-force trauma.
The Pentagon has taken redaction to a new art form, even to the point of
blacking out noses, eyes and other features, in a likely ploy to make sure
that victims of abuse and torture are unidentifiable. According to expert
briefs filed with the court, the images that still have not been released
are far more disturbing than those which have been released, including
images of sodomy and guns pointed at the heads of hooded captives.
The Pentagon releases are part of an exhaustive ACLU FOIA battle, which has
been ongoing since 2003 and has resulted in what the ACLU calls a torture
database of more than 6,000 documents. The photos have been the most
difficult and contentious part of this battle, which finally began to move
forward when a Manhattan federal judge ordered the Department of Defense to
disclose all photographs related to the ACLU’s FOIA request.
"Unfortunately, America still hasn't accounted for its dark, historical
past. Not acknowledging for it in the past has had an incredibly corrosive
effect on the present day and has undermined the ability of the U.S. to push
for human rights. It has done enormous damage," said HRW's Pitter.
The damage has taken many forms, not the least of which is the sheer gall of
the U.S. government trying to persuade other governments to stop torturing
dissidents.
From an anthropological standpoint, one could also make the argument that a
different kind of damage has taken place within American society. Varied
acts of torture are now commonly built into the plot lines of innumerable
television shows centered around glossy depictions of American police and
intelligence agencies. There, in the space of a few minutes, torture is
typically unleashed on a bad guy and the intelligence hero saves the day
with the information extracted.
The reality is that the results of torture have long since been proven to be
both unreliable and misleading, and confessions derived from torture are
inadmissible in a court of law.
Torture has essentially become woven into the fabric of American culture. It
is hard to foresee an immediate future for the United States in which
torture can be taken seriously for the horror and outright violation of
basic human dignity that it is. That bodes poorly for the survivors of
torture who are trying to seek restitution and apology, and also for the
modern-day incarnation of the American government, which seems to have lost
sight of its moral center altogether.
Silja J.A. Talvi has been an essayist, author and investigative journalist
for the past 20 years. She has lived in Finland since 2011.
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/torture-culture-normal-american-society-still-incredibly-inhumane
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/silja-ja-talvi-0
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.alternet.org/culture/major-poll-shocking-63-percent-americans-support-torture-would-they-if-they-understood
[4]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/10/cia-wont-torture-terror-suspects-regardless-presid/
[5]
https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/01/no-more-excuses/roadmap-justice-cia-torture
[6]
https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/photograph/2015/12/01/2015-usa-torture-devices
[7] https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/12/01/us-cia-torture-unfinished-business
[8] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Has Torture Become ;
Normalized in Our Culture? It's Still Unbelievably Inhumane
[9] http://www.alternet.org/
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
