It’s extremely frustrating that the New Yorker hasn’t made Jane Mayer’s superb reporting on the use of medical doctors to facilitate and monitor abuse of detainees at Gitmo avilable online. But the detail and scope and meticulousness of the piece make it must-reading for those concerned about what is going on in U.S. military detention centers across the world. Gitmo, however disturbing its methods, is almost certainly the best run and least abusive of such centers. Mayer’s key point is that the military has redeployed its own training for resistance to enemy torture into a blue-print for inflicting torture on “illegal combatants” at Gitmo and elsewhere. The cooperation of military doctors, monitoring exactly how far a detainee can be physically and psychologically pushed until he dies, is about as unethical a process as can be imagined. But it’s yet another one of George W. Bush’s innovations in American warfare. What I also found fascinating was Mayer’s account of some of the techniques U.S. troops are trained to withstand – a program known as SERE: “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.” One of them was trashing of the Bible, as a way to unsettle and destabilize the psyches of prisoners. Sound familiar? One graduate recalled:
“One of the most memorable parts of the camp experience was when one of the camp leaders trashed a Bible on the ground, kicking it around etc. It was a crushing blow, even though this was just a school… [T]he Bible trashing happened when this guy had us all in the courtyard sitting for one of his speeches. They were tempting us with a big pot of soup that was boiling – we were all starving from a few days of chow deprivation. He brought out the Bible and started going off on it verbally – how it was worthless, we were forsaken by this God, etc. Then he threw it on the ground and kicked it around. It was definitely the climax of his speech…”
Gee, I wonder why there was an alleged mass suicide attempt by Muslim prisoners at Gitmo in August 2003 to protest systematic abuse of the Koran in interrogation techniques. One such incident, denied by the Pentagon, was one in which the text was “allegedly wrapped inside an Israeli flag and stomped on.” I wonder where on earth one American trainer of prison guards gave an affidavit where s/he informed an interrogator at Abu Ghraib: “I told him of a story of an interrogator using and Pride and Ego Down approach. The interrogator took a copy of the Koran and threw it on the ground and stepped on the Koran, which resulted in a detainee riot.” I guess that since the Koran is treated with the utmost respect at Gitmo, all these things are simply invented by enemy propaganda and stab-in-the-back lefties. Just a few bad apples – with meticulous, and completely coincidental, legal cover from the White House memos.
The Dish 