Abuse 'designed to humiliate'

by Michael Jansen

Thanks to leaks from shamefaced officials in the US government and a competitive climate in the quality US press, evidence has emerged of top level involvement in the Iraqi prison torture scandal. This means the White House.

President George Bush has repeatedly stated that military personnel dealing with Iraqis have been instructed to "stay within US law" and to abide by US "international treaty obligations". However, on Aug. 1, 2002, his chief legal adviser, Alberto Gonzalez, who served on Bush's staff while he was governor of Texas, approved a memorandum which says otherwise. The memo argued that torturing Al Qaeda suspects held outside the US - at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - "may be justified" and international conventions against torture "may be unconstitutional". Since Gonzalez is Bush's senior legal adviser, the memo, which was passed onto the Justice Department, is seen as a binding document. The White House memo was the basis for a second, Pentagon, memo issued in March 2003 spelling out the rules for Iraq.

The White House memo argued that it is "within US law" to employ harsh treatment just short of causing "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death". The memo is wrong, although unlawful abuse and torture have been practised by the US for decades. A US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) handbook on methods of interrogation, issued 40 years ago during the Vietnam conflict and declassified a decade ago, includes precisely some of the techniques employed in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. CIA trainers not only employed these techniques but also taught them to interrogators from a variety of other countries where US-friendly governments faced opposition and unrest.

The fact that the US has used such techniques for many years does not mean that they are acceptable or legal, but simply that the US has been violating the rules of war, the Geneva Conventions, the convention outlawing the use of torture and US army regulations on the treatment of prisoners. All these instruments ban brutal, inhumane and humiliating treatment.

Nevertheless, Gonzalez' memo stated: "We conclude that the treaty's text prohibits only the most extreme acts by reserving criminal penalties solely for torture and declining to require such penalties for `cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment'."

The memo said that certain techniques may amount to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" without being classified as torture and concluded that there is a "wide range of techniques" which do not "rise to the level of torture". The memorandum stated that, ultimately, the treatment prisoners received should be dictated by "necessity or self-defence". The purpose of the memorandum was to give the CIA the authority to push techniques to their limits while assuring its operatives of legal cover. The White House legal office, on behalf of Bush as commander-in-chief, authorised the employment of these techniques.

A year after it was presented to the Justice Department, this memorandum was, on the orders of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, adopted and adapted by the Defence Department for application in Iraq. Gonzalez' deputy who drafted the memo, Jay Bybee, a hardline conservative, was later appointed to the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, one level below the supreme court.

The two lengthy memos amounted to a torturers' charter. Interrogators and aides could employ a variety of harsh methods to extract information as long as they did not inflict permanent damage or kill prisoners. So far, 91 cases of death in US custody are being investigated so it is clear that some soldiers and interrogators did not abide by the lax rules laid down in the memos. Amongst authorised techniques are sleep and light deprivation, humiliation, a diet of bread and water, isolation for 30 days and more, threatening with dogs, and imposition of "stress positions" for 45 minutes - repeatedly.

Although Bush may not have requested, authorised or contributed to the original memorandum, he is responsible for the paper flowing from his office. Therefore, when Attorney General John Ashcroft stated, "there is no presidential order immunising torture", he was correct. There was, instead, the torturers' charter drawn up by senior White House aides who knew what the president wanted. Furthermore, the White House asked for and received reports on the interrogations conducted under the rules set by the memorandum.

Bush's attitude towards US captives was defined by his military order of Nov. 13, 2001, in which he declared that those detained in Afghanistan would not be regarded as prisoners of war and could be detained indefinitely without trial or access to legal advice. This order laid the foundation for the abusive regime in Guantanamo which was transported to Abu Ghraib in Iraq where local modifications were introduced.

But the situation in Iraq was very different from that in Afghanistan. While most of the detainees of the Afghan conflict are local militiamen or foreign fighters, the vast majority of prisoners in Iraq are ordinary folk caught up in US military sweeps, looters, thieves and other criminals. Although they have no information to impart to CIA interrogators, some of these people have been abused and tortured - as were security detainees. The treatment of innocent civilians has angered and alienated most Iraqis, already deeply antagonistic towards the US.

The most worrying aspect of the torture scandal is that the White House and Pentagon ignored the opinions of intelligence operatives and veteran interrogators who say that information extracted during abuse or torture is generally worthless: the victim simply tells the torturer anything that stops the abuse rather than useful information. This leads one to suspect that abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees is designed to humiliate them and through them their fellow countrymen and women in order to encourage abject acceptance of the US occupation.

This article was originally published in the Thursday, June 17, 2004 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.