The United States As Torture
Central
U.S. sponsors regimes using
torture extensively
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine, May 2004
The recent release of five British citizens
from the Camp X-Ray prison at Guantanamo Bay and their disclosures
of serious abuse and torture at the hands of U.S. personnel, raises
once again the question of the U.S. position vis-a-vis torture
and its role in the global system in which the United States is
the dominant power.
I say "again" because the question
arose in the 1970s, when Amnesty International's 1974 Report on
Torture pointed out that torture, which had been at a low ebb
for centuries, "has suddenly developed a life of its own
and become a social cancer." AI located this cancer in the
West and most particularly in the Third World client states of
the West, given that torture in the Soviet Union had declined
following the death of Stalin in 1953. In its 1978 Annual Report,
AI noted that some "80 percent" of the "urgent
cases" of torture were coming out of the National Security
States of Latin America and in The Washington Connection and Third
World Fascism (South End Press), Noam Chomsky and I showed that
26 of the 35 states that were using torture on an administrative
basis in the 1970s were U.S. clients, who had received military
aid and police training from this country.
So the United States was truly torture
central at that time, not by virtue of its own use of torture,
but by its sponsorship of regimes that used it extensively. Add
to this the fact that this country is always in the forefront
of technological advance in the tools of repression, as well as
war, and in those earlier years carried out major operations in
the supply of torture technology and training in its use. Electronic
methods of torture were used extensively by U.S. and mercenary
army forces in Vietnam and, in the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. experts
advised client-state torturers from Vietnam to Brazil and Uruguay
on the permissible limits of electronic torture to prevent premature
death under "interrogation," among other advanced techniques
(see A. J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors for details on the U.S. technological
and advisory role in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s; and
see Michael Klare and Cynthia Arnson, Supplying Repression, on
the character and scope of the weapons of repression supplied
to its clients in earlier years).
Torture within U.S. police stations, jails,
and prisons was "astonishingly commonplace" in those
years, including electroshock treatment, notoriously so in Chicago
where internal city investigations documented "more than
fifty incidents of torture committed by police officers"
(Paige Bierma, "Torture behind bars, right here in the United
States of America," the Progressive, July 1994). This was
undoubtedly to some degree "blowback" from external
operations and training, but both the domestic police and the
U.S. police and military advisers helping their counterparts in
Uruguay were drawing from a common pool of advancing know-how,
technology, and understanding of acceptable and efficient practice.
Relevant to the U.S. role in torture today
are two questions: (1) Why did the United States support and underwrite
torture in earlier years; (2) how did it get away with doing this
in a supposedly free and democratic society in which torture was
considered by the public as a barbaric practice identified with
totalitarian rule? The answer to the first is simple: the ruling
U.S. elite was preoccupied with preventing "radical nationalism"
or even social democracy in the Third World, which would serve
the poor local majority and interfere with transnational corporate
access, privileges, and rights. It therefore gravitated to alliances
and joint venture arrangements with local military and comprador
elements to fend off those democratic tendencies, frequently by
coups that established military and terror regimes.
The extensive training programs at the
School of the Americas, and elsewhere, and arms supply were designed
to ensure the trainees "understanding of, and orientation
toward, U.S. objectives" and to eliminate "the menace
of internal Communist, or other anti-U.S. subversion" (NSC,
1954). In other words, they were designed to make the trainees
into subversives working in the U.S. interest, and they succeeded,
with 18 Latin American governments, 11 under constitutional rule,
overthrown by the military in the 1960s alone. These new regimes
did well for the Godfather, crushing unions, opening the door
to transnational corporate sales and investment, and proving reliable
members of any "coalitions of the willing" the Godfather
sponsored. Only the majority and the victims of torture suffered.
More interesting is the question of how
Washington could get away with large-scale sponsorship of regimes
of torture in a supposedly democratic society. The answer here
rests on the superb quality and service of the U.S. media as a
propaganda system, as well as the ease with which the public is
managed by patriotic symbols and the demonization of official
targets. If the corporate community and the military and foreign
policy establishment support regimes of torture, the corporate
media will do the same. First, they will underplay the torture,
suppress information on it, and focus their attention and indignation
on abuses of enemy states. For example, during that earlier period
the press often focused intensively on Cuban abuses, but never
Guatemala's, although Cuba's human rights record was glowing in
comparison with that of Guatemala. The New York Times never once
mentioned AI's incredible report of 1980, "Guatemala: Government
by Political Murder," or its volume, "Disappearances:
A Workbook," and it never reviewed Penny Lernoux's great
book Cry of the People (among many other similar volumes). No
U.S. mass circulation medium ever mentioned the first Latin American
Congress of Relatives of the Disappeared held in Costa Rica in
January 1981, at which it was estimated that 90,000 had already
been "disappeared" right in the U.S. backyard.
The second method of evasion is playing
down or altogether ignoring the U.S. role in originating, underwriting,
and supporting regimes of terror. The media played dumb, and largely
suppressed information tying the coups to U.S. training, encouragement,
support, and policy interest. They could easily see and report
with indignation that the behavior of the Soviet satellites of
Eastern Europe conformed to Soviet interests and reflected Soviet
power, but the spread of the National Security State and torture
in the U.S. backyard was never admitted to be based on U.S. policy
choices, despite the evidence of extensive and purposeful linkages.
(Allan Nairn had a series of powerful articles on the close linkages:
e.g., "Behind the [El Salvador] Death Squads," the Progressive,
May 1984; "The Guatemala Connection," the Progressive,
May 1986).
The third and most interesting method
of evasion and apologetics was by allowing U.S. officials to define
their relation to human rights abuses through statements and actions
regretting, opposing, and threatening to penalize state terror
in client regimes. After some terrible slaughter of civilians
by U.S. clients that could not be entirely ignored, U.S. officials
would express dismay and promise improvement by "quiet diplomacy,"
and the media would swallow this and never ask the obvious questions:
Aren't these killer regimes in place because of U.S. support,
so aren't these murders part of the overall acceptable package
and even a major feature of that package, given U.S. police and
military aid and training and explicit anti-populist (and anti-democratic)
political objectives? Could these official pronouncements of concern
be phony and designed to placate public opinion and clear the
ground for more state terrorism, following the media's dropping
the subject after a short burst of interest?
The media have also never challenged the
regular claims over many decades that the U.S. training of Third
World military and police is designed to instill democratic values
and alleviate human rights problems, despite massive evidence
that the trainees have been taught that unions and dissidents
in general are part of a "communist" threat; and in
the face of evidence that the trainees have been exceptionally
inclined to kill, torture, and overthrow constitutional governments-in
Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Indonesia, and elsewhere. This gambit
was even used in defense of loans to our ally Saddam Hussein,
prior to his 1990 invasion of Kuwait and transformation into "another
Hitler," the State Department explained that helping him
out would "put us in a better position to deal with Iraq
regarding its human rights record. "
The Pentagon-CIA Archipelago Today
The United States is once again supporting
regimes of terror in the alleged interest of a "war on terrorism,"
just as it did in the 1960s and 1970s and again in the Reagan
years. If they are "with us," these regimes-from Algeria
and Morocco to Pakistan and Uzbekistan to Indonesia and the Philippines-can
not only go after dissidents with U.S. protection, but they also
will receive U.S. aid in weapons and training. The United States
will also send them prisoners in what amounts to a torture farming-out
or outsourcing system, now openly referred to as "rendering,"
allowing some or all of the dirty work in extracting information
to be shared with allies. Such renderings have been made, among
others, to Yemen, Thailand, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, and even Syria,
to which the United States sent the Canadian citizen Maher Arar
for "interrogation" in 2002. This system helps institutionalize
torture as an acceptable practice.
The United States is also big in the business
of supplying instruments of torture and AI, in its report, "The
Pain Merchants" (December 2003), notes that U.S. companies
are exporting such instruments to 12 countries, which the State
Department says engage in the "persistent" application
of torture (including a number to whom prisoners are "rendered").
These companies had 2002 sales abroad of $14.7 million of electroshock
equipment and $4.4 million of restraints (steel shackles, among
other instruments, including 12,000 leg irons sold to Saudi Arabia).
This has been part of a broader global expansion of the trade
in weapons of torture.
AI also points out that the United States
is developing new technologies such as radio-frequency weapons
to induce an artificial fever, "stench chemicals," UV
lasers, and other devices to deliver electric shocks, and still
others. The United States has also pioneered, and been criticized
by a UN Committee Against Torture, for the development and use
of, electric-shock stun belts and restraint chairs as methods
of restraining those in custody. That same UN committee also criticized
the excessively harsh regimes imposed in "supermaximum"
prisons and the frequent ill-treatment of prisoners by police
and prison guards, which "seemed to be based upon discrimination.
"
An international convention on torture
was passed by the UN in 1989 and has been ratified by about 130
states, including the United States. However, a UN plan to enforce
that convention by a protocol allowing inspectors to visit prisons,
worked on for a decade and passed by the UN Economic and Social
Council in July 2002, was strenuously opposed by the United States
(Dafna Linzer, "U.S. Loses Torture Treaty Fight," AP
Online, July 25, 2002). The Bush administration wants to keep
that convention nominal to avoid any threat of publicity to prison
abuses. This strong opposition by the leader of the Free World
represents both a symbolic and substantive weakening of opposition
to torture.
It is also noteworthy that the United
States has long accepted Israel's institutionalized torture of
Palestinians and not allowed it to interfere with U.S. financial
and diplomatic underwriting of that ally and client state. It
goes without saying that the U.S. media have normalized this practice,
insofar as they allow its existence to surface at all. When the
London Times published its detailed study on "Israel and
Torture" in June 1977, both the New York Times and Washington
Post refused the opportunity to obtain rights to publish it in
this country and the former gave the study strictly back-page
coverage, its longer article framed by Israeli denials of the
charges (Roy Reed, "Israelis Deny a London Paper's Charges
of Torture," NYT, July 2, 1977).
In another case, in 1993, when Israeli
torture of Palestinians was running at 400-500 a month, a rare
Times article on the subject mentioned the numbers being tortured
quite matter-of-factly, deep into an article that framed the issue
around Israeli doubts about the merits of such " interrogation"
practices (Joel Greenberg, "Israel Rethinks Interrogation
of Arabs," NYT, August 14, 1993). The durable U.S. support
of Israeli torture gives any U.S. complaints about terror elsewhere
a cynical and hypocritical cast.
What is more, the United States clearly
uses torture as a standard instrument of policy in Guantanamo,
Afghanistan, and almost certainly in Iraq. In Afghanistan, officials
admitted that two captives had died while under interrogation,
helped along by "blunt instrument" injuries added to
others, which might have included sleep deprivation, denial of
medication for battle injuries, dousings with cold water or exposure
to freezing temperatures, forcing them to stand or kneel for hours
on end with hoods on, and subjecting them to loud noises and sudden
flashes of light, among other tactics. These were all discussed
as "routine" practices in a Human Rights Watch Report,
"'Enduring Freedom': Abuses by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan"
(March 2004), which also claims that U.S. forces arbitrarily detain
and regularly mistreat large numbers of civilians.
Guantanamo Torture
The practices described by HRW as employed
in Afghanistan were spelled out in detail by the British prisoners
recently released from Guantanamo, in the British, but not U.S.
media. The contrast between the treatment in the two medias is
enlightening. David Rose's long article in the Observer (London)
was based on interviews with the Tipton Three; it was entitled
"How we survived jail hell" (March 14, 2004). A long
article in London's the Mirror, based on the testimony of one
of the Tipton Three, Jamal al-Harith, also uses the word "hell"
in its title (Rosa Prince and Gary Jones, "My Hell in Camp
X-Ray"). Both articles give extensive and convincing detail
on what Rose calls "the horror of their story," which
involves systematically brutal treatment, including a great deal
of petty and gratuitous violence while under U.S. control in Afghanistan
and then on their flight to Guantanamo and in Guantanamo.
On the flight to Guantanamo, in tight
chains, they were not released from the chains for use of the
toilet, so "Basically people wet their pants. You were pissing
all over your legs." The hand shackles, linked to leg-irons,
were so tight, that Shafik Rasul was in "serious pain"
and claims to have lost feeling in his hands for the next six
months. Asking a guard to relieve the tightness, he was told,
"You'll live." At Guantanamo, there were beatings and
isolation for trivial violations of arbitrary rules, endless interrogations
under harsh physical conditions, with detainees shackled to the
floor, and contemptuous disrespect for prisoner religious beliefs
(use of "vice girls" to torment the most religious,
shutting off water before prayers so inmates couldn't wash). They
were also put in isolation, in tiny cells with bright lights left
on to impede sleeping, the cells freezing at night and very hot
during the day.
The Tipton Three were soon accused of
terrorist connections by other inmates, who were also under intense
interrogation, and the three were eventually told that the U.S.
had a video of a 2000 meeting with Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta,
which showed three bearded men present that someone alleged to
be the Tipton Three. This pushed them into solitary confinement
for three months. All denied that they had ever worn beards and
claimed that they had jobs at the time that the authorities could
check. This proving temporarily unavailing, in due course all
three gave up and 'confessed." But the British did eventually
check and sustained their alibis, which led to relieved conditions
and eventually their release to Britain.
The New York Times' treatment of the Guantanamo
victims' releases was markedly different from that of the London
papers and is a throwback to their protective news coverage of
U.S.-sponsored torture in the 1960s and 1970s. We may note the
following differences and features in the Times' four substantial
articles on the releases (Alan Cowell, "Five Britons Released
From Guantanamo Arrive Home" (March 10); Patrick Tyler, "Ex-Guantanamo
Detainee Charges Beating" (March 12); Amy Waldman et al.,
"Guantanamo and Jailers: Mixed Review by Detainees"
(March 17); Neil Lewis, "U.S. Military Describes Findings
at Guantanamo" (March 21):
* Only in Waldman's article was any Guantanamo
prisoner quoted firsthand and she "evenhandedly" quotes
prisoners well-treated and happy and, in a few lines, those who
offered "decidedly darker views." An attached photo
shows four happy Afghans waving goodbye. Nowhere in these articles
are words like "horror" or "hell," used by
the victims and quoted in the British press, offered, even in
quotes by the victims. Although reporter Patrick Tyler was in
London, he never interviewed any of the returnees there (or gave
no evidence of having done so). The result is that the massive
details of systematic brutality and intense suffering that would
humanize the victims and connect readers to them is entirely absent.
* The four articles together gave almost
twice as much space to official denials of mistreatment in Guantanamo
to claims or evidence of abuse. In quoting the U. S. official
denials, the Times reporters never cited the numerous instances
where officials lied about mistreatment or other matters. They
never mentioned Donald Rumsfeld's statement, cited by David Rose
in the Observer, about the early arrivals at Guantanamo, who included
the Tipton Three, that they are "the hardest of the hard
core." Some space was also given to the possible impact of
the disclosures on U.S. and British policy, Patrick Tyler mentioning,
"Graphic portrayals of alleged deprivations and abuses at
Guantanamo Bay could further inflame antiwar sentiment and complicate
Mr. Blair's relations with the Bush administration...." Tyler
and his Times' associates carefully avoided such "graphic
portrayals. "
* Times reporters' skepticism is confined
to the "allegations" of the victims. Tyler, commenting
on one of the victims claims, that prostitutes had been paraded
before the young religious muslims to embarrass and degrade them,
says: "He did not explain how he knew that the women were
prostitutes." But when Tyler quotes at some length a Pentagon
spokesperson on the complete falsity of a victim's claims and
firm U.S. adherence to the Third Geneva Convention, he doesn't
use any words like "alleged" or say that this claim
has not been confirmed or that it is inconsistent with the findings
of Human Rights Watch that U.S. violations of rules of humane
treatment in Afghanistan are systematic.
* David Rose in the Observer (March 14)
says that the claims of the Tipton Three "cannot be corroborated,"
but he quickly goes on to say that these claims "have been
related in identical terms by other freed detainees. Last October
I spent four days at Guantanamo. Much of what the three men say
about the regime and the camp's physical conditions I either saw
or heard 3 from U.S. officials." But the Times reporters
fail to do this kind of checking for consistency. Neil Lewis gives
the Pentagon view (March 21), with a few reservations, but declares
that there is "no way to verify independently the situation
as described by American officials" or to confirm victims'
claims. This is not true: with enough victims evidence, and with
a careful and critical examination of Guantanamo operations and
talks with a variety of U.S. officials and cadres and other relatively
independent sources, such as NGO workers and concerned lawyers,
a fair approximation to the truth would seem to be quite possible.
That is something the New York Times evaded in the National Security
State years and continues to do today.
* The Times reporters never mention that
the Tipton Three were falsely accused by other prisoners, apparently
under the pressure of harsh and incessant interrogations, and
that the Three eventually gave up and "confessed," before
an MI-5 inquiry in Britain showed them to be innocent.
* The Tipton Three had initially been
captured in Afghanistan in 2001 by the Taliban, but they were
shortly thereafter swept into custody by the victorious U. S.
-backed Northern Alliance. Among the many thousands of prisoners
taken, a large number were herded into containers at Sheberghan
and shipped by truck to a death destination in the Dasht Leili
desert, a great many of them dying enroute. The Tipton Three estimated
that only a fraction of the many thousands of prisoners in custody
survived horrendous prison conditions, outright slaughter, and
the container-herding massacre. Physicians for Human Rights identified
dozens of mass graves in Northern Afghanistan in 2001, and, just
recently, forensic anthropologist William Haglund reported that
he had once again dug up 15 bodies in the area and found that
they were young men who had died of suffocation, corroborating
the charges of the Tipton Three (David Rose, "U.S. Afghan
allies committed massacre," the Observer, March 21, 2004).
* This was apparently a massacre that,
at a minimum, rivaled a Western massacre symbol like Srebrenica,
not to mention Racak (Jamie Doran estimated some 3,000-5,000 slaughtered
by the Northern Alliance; the Tipton Three go much higher). But
none of the New York Times articles mentioned the Tipton Three's
experience in Northern Afghanistan and their claims about Northern
Alliance brutalities and killings. In 2002, when Jamie Doran had
put up a strong documentary on the container massacre, widely
viewed in Western Europe, the mainstream media in the United States,
including the New York Times, never mentioned it. Racak and Srebrenica
got endless attention and great indignation. A comparable or greater
massacre, but by a U.S. ally and with U.S. personnel in attendance,
stays in the black hole. As with the Times' treatment of the U.S.
torture center in Guantanamo, this is the way a well-oiled propaganda
machine works.
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