Torture the Dark Side

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Two articles by Professor Danner:

1. Tales from Torture's Dark World
2. Torture and Truth

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15 March 2009

ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody


Tales from Torture's Dark World

By: Professor Mark Danner, University of California, Berkeley.

ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

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Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds — he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture — Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”

He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific…. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:

“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week.”

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Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

“On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks…. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.”

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

“After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists.”

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.

“Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets…. I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.”

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Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep — “the first proper sleep in over five days” — and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:

“I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ‘.pl.’”

He was stripped and put in a small cell. “I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor,” he told the Red Cross.

“Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

“If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe.”

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the “alternative set of procedures” used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:

“The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the “alternative set of procedures” as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

“After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well…. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request” — he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling — “but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month…. I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.”

•
Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other “high-value detainees” whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be “brought to justice,” as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured — and have already done so at Guantánamo — means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which “torture doesn’t work.” The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits — in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda — the president’s approval of use of an “alternative set of procedures” might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

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2004 Article:


Torture and Truth

By: Professor Mark Danner, University of California, Berkeley.


Last November in Iraq, I traveled to Fallujah during the early days of what would become known as the “Ramadan Offensive”—when suicide bombers in the space of less than an hour destroyed the Red Cross headquarters and four police stations, and daily attacks by insurgents against US troops doubled, and the American adventure in Iraq entered a bleak tunnel from which it has yet to emerge. I inquired of a young man there why the people of that city were attacking Americans more frequently each day. How many of the attacks, I wanted to know, were carried out by foreign fighters? How many by local Islamists? And how many by what US officers called “FRL’s”— former regime loyalists?[1]

The young man—I’ll call him Salih —listened, answered patiently in his limited but eloquent English, but soon became impatient with what he plainly saw as my American obsession with categories and particulars. Finally he interrupted my litany of questions, pushed his face close to mine, and spoke to me slowly and emphatically:

For Fallujans it is a shame to have foreigners break down their doors. It is a shame for them to have foreigners stop and search their women. It is a shame for the foreigners to put a bag over their heads, to make a man lie on the ground with your shoe on his neck. This is a great shame, you understand? This is a great shame for the whole tribe.
It is the duty of that man, and of that tribe, to get revenge on this soldier—to kill that man. Their duty is to attack them, to wash the shame. The shame is a stain, a dirty thing; they have to wash it. No sleep—we cannot sleep until we have revenge. They have to kill soldiers.
He leaned back and looked at me, then tried one more time. “The Americans,” he said, “provoke the people. They don’t respect the people.”


I thought of Salih and his impatience as I paged through the reports of General Taguba and the Red Cross, for they treat not just of “abuses” or “atrocities” but the entire American “liberation” of Iraq and how it has gone wrong; they are dispatches from the scene of a political disaster. Salih came strongly to mind as I read one of the less lurid sections of the Red Cross report, entitled “Treatment During Arrest,” in which the anonymous authors tell how Iraqis they’d interviewed described “a fairly consistent pattern… of brutality by members of the [Coalition Forces] arresting them”:

Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people…pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles.
Of course, this is war; those soldiers had intelligence to gather, insurgents to find, a rebellion to put down. However frightening such nighttime arrests might be, Iraqis could at least expect that these soldiers were accountable, that they had commanding officers and a clear chain of command, that there were bases to which one could go and complain. These were, after all, Americans. And yet:

In almost all instances…, arresting authorities provided no in formation about who they were, where their base was located, nor did they explain the cause of arrest. Similarly, they rarely informed the arrestee or his family where he was being taken and for how long, resulting in the de facto “disappearance” of the arrestee…. Many [families] were left without news for months, often fearing that their relatives were dead.
We might pass over with a shiver the word “disappearance,” with its unfortunate associations, and say to ourselves, once again, that this was war: insurgents were busy killing American soldiers and had to be rooted out, even if it meant one or two innocent civilians were sucked up into the system. And then one comes upon this quiet little sentence:

Certain [Coalition Forces] military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake. [emphasis added]
Abu Ghraib contained within its walls last fall—as the war heated up and American soldiers, desperate for “actionable intelligence,” spent many an autumn evening swooping down on Iraqi homes, kicking in doors, and carrying away hooded prisoners into the night—well over eight thousand Iraqis. Could it be that “between 70 percent and 90 percent” of them were “arrested by mistake”? And if so, which of the naked, twisted bodies that television viewers and news paper readers around the world have been gazing at these last weeks were among them? Perhaps the seven bodies piled up in that great coil, buttocks and genitals exposed to the camera? Or the bodies bound one against another on the cellblock floor? Or the body up against the bars, clenched before the teeth of barking police dogs?

Consider the naked body wearing only the black hood, hands clasped above its head: Pfc Lynndie England, she of the famous leash, frames the body like a car salesman displaying next year’s model, grinning back at the camera, pointing to its genitals with her right hand, flashing a thumbs-up with her left. This body belongs to Hayder Sabbar Abd, a thirty-four-year-old Shiite from Nasi riya, also known as Abu Ghraib Prisoner Number 13077. Last June, at a military checkpoint in the south, according to The New York Times, Mr. Abd “tried to leave the taxi he was riding in.” Suspicious behavior, rendered more suspicious by the fact that Mr. Abd had served eighteen years in the Iraqi army, part of that time in the Republican Guard. The Americans took him to a detention center at Baghdad airport, and from there to the big military prison at Um Qasr, and finally, after three months, to Abu Ghraib. A strange odyssey through Occupied Iraq, made stranger by the fact that during that time, Mr. Abd says, “he was never interrogated, and never charged with a crime.” “The truth is,” he told Ian Fisher of The New York Times, “we were not terrorists. We were not insurgents. We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew this.”

As I write, we know nothing of what “American intelligence knew”—apart from a hint here or there, this critical fact is wholly absent from both reports, as it has been from the public hearings of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other officials. General Taguba, following his orders, concentrates instead on the activities of the military police, hapless amateurs who were “tasked” to “set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses” and whose work, thanks to digital photography, has now been displayed so vividly to the citizens of the world. It is this photography that has let us visualize something of what happened to Mr. Abd one night in early November, following a fight among prisoners, when he and six other men were brought to what was known as “the hard site” at Abu Ghraib, the wing for the most dangerous prisoners:

The seven men were all placed in hoods, he said, and the beating began. “They beat our heads on the walls and the doors,” he said. “I don’t really know: I couldn’t see.” He said his jaw had been broken, badly enough that he still has trouble eating. In all, he said, he believes that he received about 50 blows over about two hours.
“Then the interpreter told us to strip,” he said. “We told him: ‘You are Egyptian, and you are a Muslim. You know that as Muslims we can’t do that.’ When we refused to take off our clothes, they beat us and tore our clothes off with a blade.”
It was at this moment in the interview…that several pages of the photographs made public last week were produced…. He quickly and unemotionally pointed out all his friends—Hussein, Ah med, Hashim—naked, hooded, twisted around each other.
He also saw himself, as degraded as possible: naked, his hand on his genitals, a female soldier, identified in another report as Pvt. Lynndie England, pointing and smiling with a cigarette in her mouth. Mr. Abd said one of the soldiers had removed his hood, and the translator ordered him to masturbate while looking at Private England….
“She was laughing, and she put her hands on her breasts,” Mr. Abd said. “Of course, I couldn’t do it. I told them that I couldn’t, so they beat me in the stomach, and I fell to the ground. The translator said, ‘Do it! Do it! It’s better than being beaten.’ I said, ‘How can I do it?’ So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending.”
All the while, he said, the flash of the camera kept illuminating the dim room that once held prisoners of Mr. Hussein….[2]
Such scenes, President Bush tells us, “do not represent America.” But for Iraqis, what does? To Salih and other Iraqis they represent the logical extension of treatment they have seen every day under a military occupation that began harshly and has grown, under the stress of the insurgency, more brutal. As another young Iraqi man told me in November,

The attacks on the soldiers have made the army close down. You go outside and there’s a guy on a Humvee pointing a machine gun at you. You learn to raise your hands, to turn around. You come to hate the Americans.
This of course is a prime goal of the insurgents; they cannot defeat the Americans militarily but they can defeat them politically. For the insurgents, the path to such victory lies in provoking the American occupiers to do their political work for them; the insurgents ambush American convoys with “improvised explosive devices” placed in city neighborhoods so the Americans will respond by wounding and killing civilians, or by imprisoning them in places like Abu Ghraib.[3] The insurgents want to place the outnumbered, overworked American troops under constant fear and stress so they will mistreat Iraqis on a broad scale and succeed in making themselves hated.

In this project, as these reports make clear, the methods used at Abu Ghraib played a critical part. For if Americans are learning about these “abuses” for the first time, news about what has been happening at Abu Ghraib and other prisons has been spreading throughout Iraq for many months. And if the Iraqis, with their extensive experience of Abu Ghraib and the purposes it served in the national imagination, do not regard such methods as “abuses,” neither do the investigators of the Red Cross:

These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information or other forms of co-operation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an “intelligence value.” [emphasis added]
What, according to the Red Cross, were these “methods of physical and psychological coercion”?

• Hooding, used to prevent people from seeing and to disorient them, and also to prevent them from breathing freely. One or sometimes two bags, sometimes with an elastic blindfold over the eyes which, when slipped down, further impeded proper breathing. Hooding was sometimes used in conjunction with beatings thus increasing anxiety as to when blows would come. The practice of hooding also allowed the interrogators to remain anonymous and thus to act with impunity. Hooding could last for periods from a few hours to up to two to four consecutive days…;
• Handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, which were sometimes made so tight and used for such extended periods that they caused skin lesions and long-term after-effects on the hands (nerve damage), as observed by the ICRC;
• Beatings with hard objects (including pistols and rifles), slapping, punching, kicking with knees or feet on various parts of the body (legs, sides, lower back, groin)...;
• Being paraded naked outside cells in front of other persons deprived of their liberty, and guards, sometimes hooded or with women’s underwear over the head…;
• Being attached repeatedly over several days…with handcuffs to the bars of their cell door in humiliating (i.e. naked or in underwear) and/or uncomfortable position causing physical pain;
• Exposure while hooded to loud noise or music, prolonged exposure while hooded to the sun over several hours, including during the hottest time of the day when temperatures could reach…122 degrees Fahrenheit…or higher;
• Being forced to remain for prolonged periods in stress positions such as squatting or standing with or without the arms lifted.
The authors of the Red Cross report note that when they visited the “isolation section” of Abu Ghraib in mid-October 2003, they “directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation” of prisoners, among them “the practice of keeping [prisoners] completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness….” When the Red Cross delegates “requested an explanation from the authorities…the military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was ‘part of the process.’”

The ICRC medical delegate examined persons…presenting signs of concentration difficulties, memory problems, verbal expression difficulties, incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions, abnormal behavior and suicidal tendencies. These symptoms appeared to have been caused by the methods and duration of interrogation.
This “process” is not new; indeed, like so many of the news stories presented as “revelation” during these last few months, it has appeared before in the American press. After the arrest in Pakistan more than a year ago of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operations chief, “senior American officials” told The New York Times that “physical torture would not be used against Mr. Mohammed’:

They said his interrogation would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention.
American officials acknowledged that such techniques were recently applied as part of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Qaeda operative in custody until the capture of Mr. Mohammed. Painkillers were with held from Mr. Zubaydah, who was shot several times during his capture in Pakistan.[4]

In the same article, published more than a year ago, a number of American officials discussed the “methods and techniques” applied in interrogations at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, at Guantanamo, and at other secret prisons now holding the thousands who have been arrested and confined by American and allied forces since the attacks of September 11:

Routine techniques include covering suspects’ heads with black hoods for hours at a time and forcing them to stand or kneel in uncomfortable positions in extreme cold or heat…. In some cases, American officials said, women are used as interrogators to try to humiliate men….
Disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life. To that end, the building—an unremarkable hangar—is lighted twenty-four hours a day, making sleep almost impossible, said Mu hammad Shah, an Afghan farmer who was held there for eighteen days.
Colonel King said it was legitimate to use lights, noise and vision restriction, and to alter, without warning, the time between meals, to blur a detainee’s sense of time. He said sleep deprivation was “probably within the lexicon….”
Two former prisoners said they had been forced to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled in the isolation cells.
The “methods of physical and psychological coercion” that the Red Cross delegates witnessed at Abu Ghraib were indeed, as the “military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation” told them frankly, “part of” a “process” that has been deployed by American interrogators in the various American-run secret prisons throughout the world since September 11. What separates Abu Ghraib from the rest is not the “methods of physical and psychological coercion used” but the fact that, under the increasing stress of the war, the pressing need for intelligence, and the shortage of available troops and other resources in Iraq, military policemen like Pfc England, who had little or no training, were pressed into service to “soften up” the prisoners and, as the Taguba report puts it, set “the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.” And so when Specialist Sabrina Harman was asked about the prisoner who was placed on a box with electric wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis, in an image now famous throughout the world, she replied that “her job was to keep detainees awake,” that “MI [military intelligence] wanted to get them to talk,” and that it was the job of her and her colleagues “to do things for MI and OGA [Other Government Agencies, a euphemism for the CIA] to get these people to talk.” The military police, who, General Taguba notes, had “no training in interrogation,” were told, in the words of Sergeant Javal S. Davis, to “loosen this guy up for us.” “Make sure he has a bad night.” “Make sure he gets the treatment.”

As for the unusual methods used—”breaking of chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees,” “using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees,” “beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair,” “threatening male detainees with rape,” “sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick,” and the rest of the sad litany General Taguba patiently sets out Sergeant Davis told investigators that he “assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”

Many of the young Americans smiling back at us in the photographs will soon be on trial. It is unlikely that those who ran “the process” and issued the orders will face the same tribunals. Iraqis will be well aware of this, even if Americans are not. The question is whether Americans have traveled far enough from the events of September 11 to go beyond the photographs, which show nothing more than the amateur stooges of “the process,” and look squarely at the process itself, the process that goes on daily at Abu Ghraib, Guant�namo, Bagram, and other secret prisons in Iraq and around the world.

To date the true actors in those lurid scenes, who are professionals and no doubt embarrassed by the garish brutality of their apprentices in the military police, have remained offstage. None has testified. The question we must ask in coming days, as Specialist Jeremy Sivits and other young Americans face public courts-martial in Baghdad, is whether or not we as Americans can face a true revelation. We must look squarely at the photographs and ask: Is what has changed only what we know, or what we are willing to accept?

—May 12, 2004

markdanner.com


Notes
[1] See my “Delusions in Baghdad,” The New York Review, December 18, 2003.

[2] See “Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by US Troops,” The New York Times, May 5, 2004, p. A1.

[3] See my “Iraq: The New War,” The New York Review, September 25, 2003.

[4] See Don Van Natta Jr., “Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World,” The New York Times, March 9, 2003.

see also:

ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE (The Taguba Report)
by Major General Antonio M. Taguba.

REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS (ICRC) ON THE TREATMENT BY THE COALITION FORCES OF PRISONERS OF WAR AND OTHER PERSONS PROTECTED BY THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS IN IRAQ DURING ARREST, INTERNMENT AND INTERROGATION
by Delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, February 2004

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