Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope

What is the main reason why we need to press President Bush to make an unequivocal
and verifiable commitment to ending the US government’s use and toleration
of torture?

Because any hint at all from the highest echelons of government that this
kind of deeply abusive behavior is ever acceptable at all is a slippery
slope down which it is all too easy for a government, its employees, and
even a supposedly democratic citizenry to slide.

We now have two prime examples of this slippery slope phenomenon:

(1) In Israel, the legislature specifically allowed for the security
services to apply “moderate physical pressure”, at first in cases where there
was good reason to suspect that a suspect had concrete informatin about a
“ticking time-bomb” just about to explode…

Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!

“Moderate physical pressure” became a use of stress positions, dousing with
cold water, and other means of inflicting pain so harsh that many survivors
have had lasting side-effects. (See, for example,
this
2002 Amnesty International report.)

As for “ticking time bombs”?

That got reconfigured along the way to
mean not actual “bombs” that were literally already “ticking”, but anything
that could, well, just possibly might, and maybe not this month but some months
down the pike, cause some kind of harm–well, y’know, generally, some kind
of something fairly bad–to Israelis; basically, that is, anything that a
particular Israeli soldier or prison guard didn’t want to happen. I’ve
even heard Israelis talking seriously about the danger from “ticking infrastructure”…

The bottom line? Torture–that is, deliberately cruel, inhuman, or degrading
treatment– is okay if you can think of any reason to fear anything bad might
ever happen.

And indeed, the well-respected human rights groups like B’tselem of the
Palestinian Center for Human Rights report that some 90% of the thousands
of detainees whom the Israelis have put into their prison camps in recent
years have been subjected to some form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

(2) Here in the U.S. I guess the first place where the administration
stated explicitly that it would be breaking with the norms of international
humanitarian law (IHL) was Guantanamo. IHL includes an explicit ban
on meting out “cruel treatment and torture” or “humiliating and degrading
treatment” to anyone who is either a civilian or who is a wounded or detained
military adversary.

The Bush administration had spirited most of the detainees currently in
Guantanamo out of Afghanistan–with this transfer itself being an act of
highly dubious legality. It then claimed that in Gitmo, US domestic
law did not apply, and neither did the laws regulating foreign military occupations.
Therefore in Gitmo, the US could do what it darn well pleased with
these hundreds of detainees. And what it darn well pleased involved
giving them a designation with no standing whatsoever in international law:
that of “unlawful combatants”. And to people in this category, the
Bushies asserted, none of the protections of IHL were relevant.

Meanwhile, of course, we had all kinds of people inside and outside the
Bush administration arguing that, in the context of a “ticking time-bomb”-type
situation, some special forms of torture might be permissible.

Not surprising that some advocates of this position were long-time friends
of Israel. Alan Dershowitz immediately springs to mind. Since
he has generally been considered politically very “liberal” (in US affairs,
though not on matters Middle Eastern), his outspoken advocacy of a policy
that explicitly allowed “torture” of very high-level suspects–provided it
is carried out by very high-level, well-trained torture specialists–came
as a surprise to many.*

So anyway, they started using physical-pressure techniques and disorientation
techniques in Gitmo (and actually, even prior to that, inside Afghanistan)
on some of these people suspected of being high-level al-Qaeda operatives,
and then…

Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!

Part of this slippery slope of transmission of the culture of torture even
had a name: it was that of General Geoffrey Miller. The guy who was
sent in to Gitmo to “organize” the interrogation system there, and then was
sent in to Iraq to duplicate a good part of that system, there.

Plus of course, even in Gitmo, by no means everyone they have had in there
has been anything like a “high-level suspect”. And once the techniques
got transferred to Iraq, they were using them on large numbers–probably hundreds–
of people who weren’t even suspected high-level insurgents at all, but rather,
random detainees and a sprinkling of common criminals…

Today, the New York Times had an interesting
article
by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt titled, “Prison interrogations in Iraq
seen as yeilding little data on rebels”. In it, they write:

civilian and military intelligence officials, as well as top commanders
with access to intelligence reports, now say they learned little about the
insurgency from questioning inmates at the prison. Most of the prisoners
held in the special cellblock that became the setting for the worst abuses
at Abu Ghraib apparently were not linked to the insurgency, they said.

Right next to that article is
one on a linked subject:
the fate of Lt. Col. Allen West, the commander of an artillery battalion
in central Iraq last August who was told that one of the Iraqi police officers
working with his units was a spy for the insurgents. West had some of
his men bring in the police officer, Yehiya Hamoodi, for questioning, which
was condicted pretty roughly.

When Hamoodi refused to confess, or to give details about his accomplices,
West had his soldiers put his head in a barrel of sand, and then he himself
shot one shot into the barrel, “angling his gun away from the Iraqi’s head,
he [later] testified.”

The writer of this long piece, Deborah Sontag, has interviewed both West–who
was later effectively booted out of the army for his action– and Hamoodi.
She wrote this about what happened next:

Mr. Hamoodi finally “admitted there would be attacks, and called out
names.” Mr. Hamoodi said that he was not sure what he told the Americans,
but that it was meaningless information induced by fear and pain.

At least one man named by Mr. Hamoodi was taken into custody, according
to testimony, and his home was searched. No plans for attacks on Americans
or weapons were found. Colonel West testified that he did not know whether
“any corroboration” of a plot was ever found, adding: “At the time I had
to base my decision on the intelligence I received. It’s possible that I
was wrong about Mr. Hamoodi.”

When the interrogation was over, a physician’s assistant checked Mr.
Hamoodi and found “swelling but no bruises,” according to a hearing transcript.
He was detained another 45 days and released without being charged, he said.

Mr. Hamoodi said he did not really blame the Americans for “arresting
and torturing me.” Obviously, someone had informed on him, he said, and
they had to act on the information they obtained. Still, he trembles now
when he sees a Humvee and he no longer trusts or works with the Americans.

So much for the effectiveness of cruel and inhuman treatment in extracting
solid intel….

Well, anyway, the WaPo also has an interesting, lengthy
article
today about all the five or six different kinds of enquiries that various
government bodies here have launched into different aspects of the prison
torture revelations. This piece is by Brad Graham. He writes:

In response to mounting evidence that detainees in U.S. military custody
were badly abused in Iraq and elsewhere, the Pentagon has launched an array
of investigations, assessments and reviews aimed, officials have insisted,
at exposing those responsible for the misdeeds and preventing recurrences.

But a close look at what is being investigated, and who is doing the
investigating, reveals gaps in the web of probes as well as limitations on
the scope, with none of the inquiries designed to yield a complete picture
of what went wrong or address suspicions of a possible top-secret intelligence-gathering
operation that may have helped set the stage for the misconduct.

“I can’t tell if all the inquiries represent attempts to patch new
holes opening in the boat every day, or if they’re part of some carefully
designed strategy to have lots of activity going on around the center of
this thing without probing the center itself,” said John Hamre, who served
as deputy secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and now heads
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington…

Well, I applaud everyone who’s asking serious, probing questions about all
those past instances of troture and abuse. But still, I wish more people
would start demanding the kind of clear-cut, “zero tolerance” policy that
can keep us all off the slippery slope of tolerating torture from here on out.

—

* Footnote: Check out what Dersho has been saying in response to the
Abu Ghraib scandal,
here
.