I have been thinking intensively about the effects the widespread pattern
of tortures in Abu Ghraib and othe parts of the United States’ global gulag
has had on two distinct groups of people: the survivors of those acts, and
the U.S. Army.
But first, a very important but seemingly innocent question to which I have
seen as yet, no clear answer:
Has the practice of administering torture at many locations inside the
U.S. gulag actually been definitively brought to a halt yet?
How would we know that it has? What kind of evidence would it take
for us to convince ourselves and the rest of the world that it has?
I know one thing. The fact that Gen. Geoffrey Miller is still in
charge of the Abu Ghraib branch of the gulag is distinctly not reassuring.
Miller is the Marines General and former commander of the Gitmo branch
of the gulag who was the one who institutionalized the “conditioning”, i.e.
torture, of suspects over at the Abu Ghraib branch back last October.
… And now we’re supposed to believe that this old fox can successfully
be the one to “clean up” the abuses in that hen-house? What do they take
us for– dummies?
Indeed, given (1) the distinct possibility that permission for the “conditioning”
to occur was given at the very highest levels of both the military command
in Iraq the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, and (2) the lengthy record
of these leaderships in trying to sweep all the evidence about the tortures
under the rug for many months till Sy Hersh and Dan Rather forced it into
the open, there is almost nothing that those leaderships by themselves could
do at this point that would provide me with the necessary level of reassurance
that the torture has actually stopped.
Which brings me back to a suggestion I made
here
last June, to the effect that in the case of our earlier, very lively concerns
about Saddam Hussein’s terrible record of rights abuses, people in
the global human rights movements should– in the years before the war–
have been aggreessively promoting the idea of the UN forming a robust, intrusive
‘Human Rights Monitoring, Verification , and Inspection Commission’ to investigate
all the suspected abuses inside the country. You know, a sort of ‘Human
Rights UNMOVIC’ analogous to the WMDs UNMOVIC that governments that had concerns/allegations
about Saddam’s WMDs program were able to form back in the fall of 2002…
(I also formalized my expression of that idea into the chapter I contributed
to the book on
The Iraq War and its Consequences
.)
Maybe it’s time to resurrect that idea now, and call for the UN to establish
an emergency Human Rights UNMOVIC to investigate the rights situation inside
all branches of the US gulag.
Starting with Iraq, yes. But moving beyond there, too, to Afghanistan–where
the presence and actions of all the US forces are occurring under an explicit
mandate from the U.N. Security Council. So the UN has a direct interest
in robustly investigating the human-rights situation there. And moving,
too, to Gitmo, which–as the Bushies continually claim–is not actually
U.S. soverign territory, and where, therefore, claims about rights abuse
should surely be a legitimate matter for UN concern.
What we urgently need to see now is:
- Lawmakers and media people seeking a definitive and satisfactory answer
from the top levels of the Bush administration to the two questions: “Has
the use of crual, inhuman, and degrading treatment now been definitively
ended inside all prisons and detention facilities run by the US
military or ‘other US government agencies’ around the world’?” and “Describe
to us in detail the safeguards now in place to ensure that such abuses never
occur there again”; and - An exploration of different ways that the rights situation of detainees
inside the United States global prison/detention system can continue to be
satisfactorily monitored.
It may be that, for whatever reason, the proposal establish a Human Rights
UNMOVIC for this purpose under UN auspices might not fly right now. But
one alternative to that would be to seek a Rights Monitoring Mission for
this task through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
OSCE is an experienced international body that grew out of the landmark 1974
Helsinki Accords. The US has always been a member of OSCE; and OSCE
has considerable experience of monitoring rights situations within territories
controlled by its member states… Actually, this wealth of experience probably
means that an OSCE monitoring mission might be the better answer to our present
need for reassurance…
The sooner, the better! We all, all of us, need to know that those
practices have STOPPED.