Category: Torture

The CIA’s tight relationship with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department has meant that 12 individuals have been "interrogated" at the CIA’s behest by the Jordanians under the Bush administration. The interrogators are torturers, according to the State Department and every other reliable source. And torturers of the most barbaric kind:

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

In a report released in January 2007, Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator for torture, found that "the practice of torture is routine" at GID headquarters and concluded "that there is total impunity for torture and ill-treatment in the country."

Hence the Bush administration’s reliance on them, I suppose. Hat tip: Jeb Koogler.

Under the Bush administration, the United States’ relentless abandonment of many basic norms of international behavior is now driving a wedge between two close allies. Canada first:

Yesterday, the Canadian Federal Court issued an opinion in the case Canadian Council for Refugees, Canadian Council of Churches, Amnesty International, and John Doe v. Her Majesty The Queen. This case challenges the “Safe Third Country Agreement” between Canada and the United States that came into force in December 2004. This agreement provides that, with limited exceptions, individuals who first enter either Canada or the United States and then attempt to cross a land border into the other country in order to lodge an asylum claim must be returned to claim asylum in the first country they entered. In assessing the constitutionality of the agreement, the Canadian Court found that the United States does not comply adequately with Article 33 of the UN Refugee Convention, which prohibits return to persecution, or Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits return to torture — specifically naming the Maher Arar case as an example of the United States’ failure to protect.

And so torture slowly begins to destroy critical alliances. Scott Horton comments here. Then this:

America has told Britain that it can "kidnap" British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.

America desperately needs a new president who can re-connect the US to the norms of the civilized world.

Somewhat depressing:

The politics of torture remind me in many ways of the politics of crime. There’s little room in the public discourse anymore for smart crime policy, because the politics of crime demand increasingly tough positions that are increasingly irrational. Sentencing policy, particularly on drug-related offenses, is perhaps the best illustrative example, but there are others, like California’s long-running debate over its "three strikes" law. Rational policymaking gets squeezed out because legislators cannot afford politically to adopt any position which might make them look soft on crime — even when such positions (like drug diversion programs, community policing, etc.) might make for better uses of state resources than tougher sentencing, tougher law enforcement, etc.

McCain is the exception to the rule. Will Huckabee follow soon?

It is, sadly, a simple fact that torture was once a deep part of the American way of life, inextricable from slavery and racism, for a very long time. It was worst in the South, but not unknown elsewhere – well into the twentieth century. The ease with which some in the new GOP reconcile themselves to it with respect to terror suspects, as long as it is directed at "the other," cannot be fully understood outside this context. "Waterboarding," for example, a torture technique the majority of GOP candidates cannot bring themselves to condemn and which the new attorney-general refuses to declare illegal, was used against African-Americans to extract false confessions in the South. And lynching was often accompanied by gruesome torture. A reader writes:

The ugly truth is that for the 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, this country committed torture against thousands of its own citizens.

White Southerners, faced with the specter of black economic mobility, developed a variety of methods to squelch these advancements, the most violent and dehumanizing of which was the spectacle lynching. The term lynching evokes a scene of spontaneous violence hastily committed by small group of hysterical citizens, but the sad reality is that a typical lynching was a deliberate, organized ritual that unfolded over the course of days or weeks, often in collusion with local law enforcement.

Newspapers advertised the event and thousands of spectators attended with wives and children in tow, snapping photographs, purchasing concessions and memorabilia, and eagerly discussing the means of execution. Hanging was the most common method, but lynchings incorporated a combination of torture techniques including castration, branding with hot irons, eye-gouging, severing of appendages and burning alive. In some cases, spectators rummaged through the leftover ashes searching for grim souvenirs.

At one particularly notorious lynching in Paris, Texas, the crowd numbered 10,000. Take a moment to let that number sink in. 10,000 men, women and children munched on popcorn and snapped photos as a black man was tortured and burned alive.

This is our legacy. And it goes a long way toward explaining the synthesis of "today’s Dixie-based, pro-torture, anti-immigrant GOP."

(Photo: The bludgeoned body of an African American male, propped in a rocking chair, blood splattered clothes, white and dark paint applied to the face and head, shadow of man using rod to prop up the victims head. Circa 1900, location unknown. From a real, photo postcard that Americans once sent one another.)

That stupid and ugly use of the troops and the idiotic idea that our current Middle East policy is somehow in danger of becoming another version of the 1930s. Over to you, Larison.

It seems to me that McCain’s passion on torture has peaked as his belief in the "surge" rises. It’s as if he knows he cannot be anti-war and anti-torture at the same time and win over Republicans. But the problem is: he is so wedded to a maximalist Iraq strategy that he would be very vulnerable next year in a general. There are a number of fair-minded Americans happy to hope for the best in Iraq; but I can’t see more than a handful who actually, at this point, think of it as something we’d do again if we had the chance of a do-over. McCain is giving the impression that it’s another great advance for mankind. Wishing doesn’t make it so, alas.

Not so fast:

For the most part, Huckabee told reporters after speaking in Cedar Rapids on Thursday morning, U.S. policy ought to be to "never support anything done to others that we would not want done to our own soldiers."

As to waterboarding, "I would defer to John McCain for this simple reason: John McCain has been tortured and nobody else running for president has,” the former Arkansas governor said. "I’m not about to stand on any stage in America and act like I know more about torture than John McCain does."

What does "for the most part" translate to? This:

Huckabee would leave decisions about the appropriateness of the technique "because of a unique situation" to commanders in the field.

If it’s illegal, it’s illegal. No commander-in-chief grants commanders the power to overrule the laws of war. But his position is better than Giuliani’s or Romney’s.

A reader writes:

Your discussion about torture is at once thought provoking and troubling. For this conservative it used to be a "slam dunk" for me. People like Khaled Sheik Mohammed got what they deserved and I couldn’t care one wit. The "Jack Bauer" method of Intel was good enough for me. But torture policy in the hands of a faceless government bureaucrats without accountability gives me real pause. Especially incompetent bureaucracies! (Has the CIA got anything right in the last 15 years?) Your post about the death of innocent people under our government authority questioning seems no better on the face of it than those poor souls disappearing in the subterranean haunts of Tehran.

Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and many other civil liberties during the crises of the Civil War but his greatness was, I think, in the fact that he realized it was an "abnormal", reluctant and extraordinary condition to be righted when the emergency, i.e., the war was over.  Cheney/Bush seem to think this is a perpetual state, a ceaseless war.

When do the extraordinary measures to extract Intel from suspects, like water boarding, end? If ever? How is it justified and/or different then the torture chambers in Falluja run by Al Qaeda? And no I don’t see a moral equivalency between us and the monstrous jihadists stated but one created when horrific means are used by our government even for the best of intentions.

Or are we to become a nightmare terror society as portrayed in the Movie "Brazil" with bombs going off everywhere among placid numb people, while innocent suspects are snatched from the streets, sometimes because of a misspelling of your name on a form? When does it just become one evil pursuing another evil?

I guess you’ve got a point; can Hillary or Rudy recognize extraordinary measures for extraordinary times that need the most careful rigorous control in their application if they are not to warp and twist our free society into something unrecognizable?

They were barred from even confidential access to some prisoners in Gitmo, we now find. This is the defense:

A spokesman, Lt. Col. Edward M. Bush III, said, "I am in no position to speculate about what happened in 2003 … All I can tell you is what we do today. And the absolute policy now, today, is that the I.C.R.C. is granted access to everything."

Why were some prisoners withheld from Red Cross access – and in writing, a sign of the confidence some had that the Bush administration was very comfortable flouting international law? You know and I know. They were being tortured.