Helping the torture victims heal

How many people have been victim to the practice of torture inside the
United States’ global gulag, and what do they need in order to heal?

Answer to that first question: an assessment urgently needs to be carried
out.

Answer to the second question: let’s start with–

Definition of torture given in Article 1 of the UN’s 1985 Convention Against
Torture, which was ratified by the US Congress in 1994:

    For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which
    severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted
    on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information
    or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed
    or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or
    a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when
    such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with
    the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting
    in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only
    from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Okay, what do victims/survivors of torture need, if they and the communities
of which they are a part are to heal the many wounds inflicted through this
experience?

The veterans in the western world in terms of working with victims/survivors
of torture at rehabilitation are undoubtedly the good people at the Copenhagen-based
International Rehabilitation
Council for Torture Victims
(IRCT), who have been doing this work since 1974 and has been running
a specialized Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (
RCT
) was in Copenhagen since 1982. (Check out their very impressive
English-language website for more details of their work.)

Continue reading “Helping the torture victims heal”

Has the torture actually stopped?

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…

Continue reading “Has the torture actually stopped?”

Who’s in charge here?

More, from whichever of the Keystone Cops is making decisions regarding the management of the US occupation this week…
Or, are there any adults in the house?
This, just in from Reuters:

    The two leaders of the U.S. military unit at the center of the Iraqi prison scandal could still face sanctions even though they have recently returned to their work duties, an official said on Friday.
    The U.S. military suspended Capt. Donald Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, and his top noncommissioned officer, First Sgt. Brian Lipinski, in January after revelations of abuse from soldiers in the unit.
    A military spokesman confirmed for the first time on Friday that the two men had quietly regained their leadership positions three weeks ago just as pictures of abuses in Abu Ghraib began to circulate in worldwide media.
    “Captain Donald Reese and First Sgt. Brian Lipinski were suspended from their duties with the 372nd Military Police Company on January 18, 2003 and returned to their duties on April 30, 2003,” Major Scott Bleichwehl, a U.S. military spokesman, said in an e-mail.
    “The return of these individuals to their positions does not equate to them being fully exonerated. The final disposition of their reprimands has not yet been completed.”

Not even the United Nations can be as hamhanded as this lot.

Beware of chaos–and the wounded neocon tiger

Just how deeply has the U.S. national-security establishment
(and therefore, its ability to make rational decisions on national-security
issues) been damaged by the accelerating confusion marking the conduct
of its policy in Iraq and elsewhere?

My first answer is that the damage goes far beyond the few Military
Police and Military Intelligence units at the epicenter fo the Abu Ghraib
torture scandal. (This, even on the day that the WaPo has published
some of what seem to be the shocking
photos and videos
of Abu Ghraib torture that were shown to lawmakers earlier this week, as
well as a collection of
sworn statements
from former detainees, collected as part of an internal military investigation
into the Abu Ghraib abuses as long ago as January 16-18.)

Policy on Iraq, in general, is in evident turmoil:  

  • The question of who–at the highest levels of the chain of command–
    commanded and authorized the torture techniques at Abu Ghraib continues to
    be both revealed and very revealing.  Today’s WaPo has a good

    story by Brad Graham
    that spells out that Rumsfeld himself was the one, in late 2002, to explicitly
    authorize the first use of abusive interrogation tactics in the Gitmo branch
    of the Global Gulag (from where, many of them were later transferred by Gen.
    Geoffrey Miller to the Abu Ghraib branch).  The NYT has a good

    story
    about how interrogation techniques developed and used in the Afghanistan
    branches of the Gulag were transferred to Abu Ghraib–along with a good,
    short
    timeline
    showing some of the key decisions along the way there.
  • The President of the quasi-puppet Interim Governing Council got effortlessly
    blown up near the gates of the US Imperial Compound in Baghdad earlier this
    week.  Meanwhile, the question of who commanded and authorized the raid
    against the home and office of IGC member and close (until two days ago)
    Pentagon ally Ahmad Chalabi remains shrouded in mystery. US-trained Iraqi
    Police were directly involved, along with US agents not in uniform who were
    identified as belonging to the FBI and CIA. But what about the US military,
    which is supposed to be running the whole occupation? Where were they on
    this?
  • There is zero evidence that the Bush administration has any plan at
    all–let alone a workable one–for how Iraq will be governed after June 30th,
    a date that is only 40 days away.  (For a few really macabre
    cheap laughs, go check out the
    ‘Countdown to Sovereignty’
    website the CPA has put up.)
  • Meantime, Reuters is reporting that “U.S. troops pounded Shi’ite militia
    in the holy city of Kerbala on Friday [i.e., today] in a bid to crush insurgents
    whose demands for Americans to leave Iraq are gaining support among
    Iraqis frustrated with the occupation.” (emphasis by HC there). This reporter,
    Sami Jumaili, also noted that Moqtada al-Sadr was able to slip out of Najaf
    to nearby Kufa to deliver his Friday sermon there.
  • The big question of who is currently making the decisions regarding
    the use of US power in Iraq     remains very mysterious. It was mysterious
    back in early April, when someone– Bremer? Feith? Sanchez? Or even, as reported,
    the President himself?– made the disastrous triple decisions to (1) force
    an escalation in Fallujah, (2) force an escalation against Moqtada, and (3)
    align strongly with Sharon on his unilateral plan for the Palestinians. It
    is even more mysterious today, especially since Generals Sanchez and Abizaid
    are nowhere near the theater of operations but rather, back in Washington
    …

(Time to exit that bulleted list there, since I’m getting to the crux of
my argument.)

Continue reading “Beware of chaos–and the wounded neocon tiger”

Redemption, anyone?

Thank God for the checks-and-balances system of government here in the US. The US Congress may have been totally supine for far too long in 2001-2003 in the face of the administration’s intemperate rush toward war. But now, finally, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal seems to have forced many veteran leaders in the U.S. Senate to start questioning the Bushies’ assertions–and more importantly, their policies– regarding at least this one crucial aspect of the so-called “Global War on Terror”.
Who knows how far this process will go before it ends?
I’ve been cruising round the web a little bit this afternoon looking for transcripts of the many important hearingsthat have been held on Iraq in both houses of Congress. It would be kinda nice, since we taxpayers pay the huge salaries of both the congressional representatives and the administration personnel involved in these hearings, if the transcripts of the whole sessions could be made available in timely fashion, at no cost, and in a well-organized way to the US public…
But no. I looked at the websites for the Armed Services Committees at both the US Senate and the US House of Representatives websites. No luck. Then I went to “Defenselink”, the central website for the DOD. There, they had the texts of the prepared statements made by the various DOD luminaries who have been called to testify in recent weeks. But they notably didn’t have transcripts for the all-important Q&A period afterwards.
I did find one possibly fruitful source…

Continue reading “Redemption, anyone?”

U.S. Congress getting ‘SMART’?

There is so much bad news from the US Congress– the long history of rolling over to the administration on the whole war-mobilization effort; trade barriers that hurt low-income nations; blanket support for the Israeli government; etc etc– that it’s great to be able to highlight a few really good things that seem to be happening there.
One is the new climate in which the Democrats and even some leading Republicans in the Senate are seeking to hold the administration accountable for the Abu Ghraib tortures and many other misdeeds in Iraq. Even our own senior Senator from here in Virginia, the generally hawkish and very powerful John Warner, seems to be acting sensibly on some of these issues.
Thanks, Senator! Keep it up!
But there’s more good news from Capitol Hill, too…

Continue reading “U.S. Congress getting ‘SMART’?”

Now, do you understand ‘unilateral’?

Oh boy, has Ariel Sharon been given plaudits in the west for his “courageous” decision to withdraw from Gaza…
Trouble is, too few policymakers in the west have any real understanding of the difference between Sharon’s dedication to pursuing his policies in both Gaza and the West Bank on a totally unilateral basis, and the pursuit of any kind of a negotiated peace.
Al-Jazeera has a very moving little 20-pic slideshow on its English-language website that shows what “unilateral” really means for the people of Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip.
“Where they make a desert, they call it peace” (Cornelius Tacitus, about the actions of those early empire-builders, the Romans).

Homeless in Gaza

Meanwhile, are you wondering why Ariel Sharon, his tanks, his D-9 armored Caterpillar bulldozers, and his helicopter gunships seem to be going quite insanely beserk with their violence in Gaza? 12,000 Palestinians rendered homeless thru demolitions, and counting…
Well, number one, perhaps, because they can. Who’s going to stop ’em? Colin Powell? The Pope? Right, I can just see Sharon quaking in his shoes at the prospect…
Also, don’t under-estimate the pique of this Israeli leadership after the IDF lost two APC’s full of soldiers to IEDs last week, in two consecutive days. I think a total of eleven Israeli soldiers lost their lives? … Looks like the militants in Gaza have been picking up some tips from Lebanon’s Hizbollah on how to really make a difference in Israeli thinking: hit at soldiers carrying out missions that are controversial inside Israel, rather than hitting at civilians. (Nearly all of Hizbollah’s lethal actions were aimed against soldiers.)
And then, of course, there’s the additional pique factor, for Sharon, that these tactics seem to be having a good political effect: they’ve been reviving the activism of the Israeli peace movement which staged a rally in Tel Aviv over the weekend of proportions not seen since…. the first intifada?

Continue reading “Homeless in Gaza”

Newsweek revelations

It looks like a good, well-reported copy of Newsweek is about to drop on our doorstep. (Actually, two of them, since for some reason we seem to have two concurrent subscriptions. Sorry about all those trees.)
John Barry and an investigative team have been at work on one large chunk of the brutality in the gulag story. And Michael Isikoff has meanwhile gotten hold of both the Alberto Gonzales memo to W of Januray 25, 2002 urging him to junk the Geneva Conventions with respect to captives taken in Afghanistan, and an (unsuccessful) attempt by Colin Powell, also in memo form, to persuade Gonzo to change his mind.
These memos are now posted on the Newsweek/MSNBC website. Gonzo here and Powell here.
Gonzo was apparently most concerned to protect US intel operatives from any charges they might otherwise be subject to, in US courts, under the 1996 War Crimes Act, which bans any Americans from committing war crimes. (!)

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