Broken Laws, Broken Lives: PHR's New Must Read Report

Let me add my voice to the cascade of praise for Physicians for Human Rights's new publication Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the U.S. As PHR puts it in their publicity for the document, "we have for the first time medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of men who endured torture by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. These men were never charged with any crime."

Moreover, PHR has engineered a coup by getting Major General Antonio M. Taguba, "deputy commanding general for support for the Third Army for ten months in Kuwait during the early days of the Iraq occupation," to write a preface to the report. Taguba, who wrote his own report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and was reportedly forced to "retire" last year due to his criticisms of the U.S. military, minces no words in his PHR preface, accusing unnamed U.S. high officials of "war crimes."

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

As PHR explains in their introduction to Broken Laws, Broken Lives:
This provides first-hand accounts and medical evidence of torture and cruel, inhuman,

or degrading treatment or punishment (“illtreatment”) of eleven former detainees who were held in US custody overseas. Using internationally accepted standards, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) conducted medical evaluations of the former detainees to document the severe, long-term physical and psychological consequences that have resulted from the torture and illtreatment. The evaluations provide evidence of violation of criminal laws prohibiting torture and of the commission of war crimes by US personnel.

The detainees examined were from Guantanamo and Iraq; all of them were ultimately released, though not before they were subjected to torture and abuse while in U.S. custody. The effects of this torture were documented throught the use of well-established medical procedures, notably the Istanbul Protocol: International Guidelines for the Investigation and Documentation of Torture.

From the report, some of the tale of Youssef, a man in his mid-forties, "held by US personnel at Kandahar and Guantánamo Bay detention centers. He was subjected to beatings, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and sexual and cultural humiliation. He
was released in November 2003." Medically, it was determined that he currently suffers from depression, PTSD, and panic disorder.

Youssef recalled that after his interrogation [by U.S. officials at Kandahar, Afghanistan], soldiers tripped him naked. He noted that many of the soldiers were female and he believed that “they were just trying to humiliate us.” He was allowed no sleep during his first night in Kandahar because the guards “kept kicking us [and] throwing sand at us.” Throughout his roughly six weeks in Kandahar, he endured other abuse, including being stripped naked, being intimidated by dogs, being hooded, and being thrown against the wall on repeated occasions....

Youssef was subsequently transferred to Guantánamo in early 2002. He recalled that he was forced to disrobe in front of female soldiers, was clothed in an orange suit and dark goggles, and his ears were covered with headphones. He stated, “They didn’t tell us anything — I remember the plane and the doors opening and there was warm air"....

Youssef described the conditions at Camp X-Ray as deplorable: “It was just a big plot of concrete and they had these steel cages [and] it was really, really hot…even in the night.” The prisoners were let out of the two-square meter “cages” only for questioning, were not allowed to speak to each other, and had to use a bucket as a toilet. Even small infractions could result in beatings. “If they would find one piece of string on the floor they would send in the ‘robocops’ [the IRF soldiers dressed in riot helmets and padded uniforms] to beat us.” The detainees were kicked all over, including in the back, legs, and head. According to Youssef, during the two to three times that he was beaten this way in Camp X-Ray someone who he presumed to be a doctor was always present; he suspected this was to make sure there were no injuries. Youssef suffered bruising as a result of these beatings and did his best to follow prison rules in order to avoid such abuses. However, he witnessed other detainees being beaten this way on a daily basis....

Apart from following interrogations or beatings, and despite his frequent requests for medical attention (“many, many” requests) for persistent stomach pain and swelling in his wrists, Youssef noted that he rarely saw physicians at Guantánamo. He was of the opinion that no one was concerned with the detainees’ health and recalled having been told by one of the physicians, “We’re making sure you don’t die in here — besides that whatever happens doesn’t interest us.” Youssef reported that he was forced to take medications as part of what he considered “experiments” and recalled receiving an estimated ten to fifteen unknown injections, often developing rashes several hours after these injections (“red dots on my body and shoulders that would start to itch”). A fellow detainee informed him that the injections could cause impotence or heart attacks, although nothing was ever said by the doctors. He also indicated that some individuals administering the injections were “civilians … coming to take lessons — it was like internships” but acknowledged that this may only have been his perception....

While in Camp Delta, Youssef asked to speak with a psychologist because he was distressed, and the two spoke about him missing his family and his feelings of sadness. Although Youssef believed the meeting was confidential, he stated that shortly after the psychologist left, he was brought to an interrogator who immediately brought up information connected to his disclosures, such as telling him that he was going to stay at Guantánamo for the rest of his life and discussing his family (“Don’t you want to leave this place and get back together with your family?”...If you do as we tell you, you can get back to your family.”). He stated, “I figured out the reason they had called me for the interrogation was because the psychologist had told them about the meeting.” He stated, “They were stressing these fears very much.” Following this interrogation, Youssef reported that he was moved to the “worst” section in Camp Delta, where he was not allowed to have a blanket or a mattress.

War Crimes and a Culture of Non-Accountability

The entire report, as you can imagine, makes for very difficult reading, due to the traumatic nature of the subject matter. But in the first decade of the 21st century, the militarist and inhumane policies of the United States have made such material essential to educate the citizenry about the nature of these policies. The revelations about the actions of doctors and psychologists is particularly disturbing, and only further corroborates crimes by these professionals at U.S. security sites that have been well-documented elsewhere, and certainly discussed dozens of times in articles at this site.

The cry for war crimes trials belies the fact that no high or authoritative U.S. official has ever stood trial for a war crime, despite decades of documented crimes in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and now the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The national security state apparatus wields tremendous power over all three branches of U.S. government. Not only has no official or high-level officer had to answer for the crimes of torture, or any other war crime (such as the use of chemical warfare on civilian populations by the U.S. in Fallujah), but no doctor or psychologist has even been brought up on ethics charges by their own professional societies for their unfit and criminal behavior.

It will take practically a revolution (of some sort) to pry the engine of inviolablity from their control and re-establish the rule of law over the apparatus of government.

Insider Politics of the Torture Chamber

In a blockbuster article by Seymour Hersh over at The New Yorker, "The General's Report," two-star general Antonia Taguba describes how he came to write the first report investigating the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Taguba describes how he was shunned and ultimately forced to retire because he tried to be honest in his report. Most stories reporting on Hersh's article have not focused on the aspect that concerns how the CIA and military special operations forces both collaborated and contested over the issue of coercive interrogations. I want to look more in depth at that.

A Washington Post article summarized well Taguba's charges:

In interviews with New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh, Taguba said that he was ordered to limit his investigation to low-ranking soldiers who were photographed with the detainees and the soldiers' unit, but that it was always his sense that the abuse was ordered at higher levels. Taguba was quoted as saying that he thinks top commanders in Iraq had extensive knowledge of the aggressive interrogation techniques that mirrored those used on high-value detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the military police "were literally being exploited by the military interrogators."

Reading Hersh's article myself, I was struck by the opaque quality that characterized the interactions between military intelligence, the Pentagon command structure and the CIA. We have some sense of how part of this worked by reading the recent Office of Inspector General report on detainee abuse, which describes how Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) military personnel, including psychologists, were used in training Guantánamo interrogators in coercive techniques.

What Hersh's article adds is a sense of how CIA personnel and higher-ups viewed the usurption of "higher-level" prisoners for interrogation by "special operations units", including possibly -- though Taguba doesn't say this -- by contractors. (The latter is a huge and controversial aspect of the Abu Ghraib story, and was addressed in the original Taguba report. For more information on this, please reference an excellent UK Guardian story from 2004.)

White House preempts civilian/military chain of command

According to Hersh, the CIA, even while "cooperating" with military special ops, were critical. They may (or may not) have had differences with the SERE-type torture being implemented, but CIA wanted some legal reassurances "before aggressively interrogating high-value targets". The CIA operates under presidential mandate, and is used to getting formal findings to legitmate their actions, with such findings communicated officially to the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. But this wasn't happening, because the White House refused to follow legal protocol and issue the findings, at least for awhile. When they finally did, a number of countries were said to become "free-fire zones" for the CIA. The Company was also given carte blanche to conduct its secret prison program.

I wish Hersh would have expanded this portion of his article, because it's unclear what finally happened with the CIA, who now awaits a new set of findings from the President on how to conduct interrogations. Evidently, Hersh couldn't get the full story here, or the evidence was contradictory. You'll see this as you read the article.

To get a flavor of what Taguba was up against, as he encountered the web of interrogator politics at Abu Ghraib, consider the case of Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, whom assorted MPs had mentioned as involved with the detainees. Jordan is also the only officer to be charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal, adn is to go on trial this summer.

From Hersh's article:

For the first three weeks of the investigation, Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated requests. When the investigators finally located him, he asked whether he needed to shave his beard before being interviewed—Taguba suspected that he had been dressing as a civilian. “When I asked him about his assignment, he says, ‘I’m a liaison officer for intelligence from Army headquarters in Iraq.’” But in the course of three or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he began to suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more intimately involved in the interrogation process -- some of it brutal -- for “high value” detainees....

Taguba said that Jordan’s “record reflected an extensive intelligence background.” He also had reason to believe that Jordan was not reporting through the chain of command. (emphasis mine)

This begs the question: who was Jordan reporting to? Hersh has been telling us for some time that to understand what's happened since 9/11 and in Iraq that we should look to the chain of command. His book on Abu Ghraib is called Chain of Command. At the top of the command structure is the President, as the latter is so fond of telling us. Hersh has some choice words about President Bush:

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command....

Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff” -- the explicit images -- “was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this....

"We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.” (emphasis mine)

Taguba doesn't say how they should be held accountable. But we could start with the impeachment of the commander-in-chief and courts martial for all involved in the chain of command. The above should be followed with referral to appropriate bodies for war crimes trials, to begin concurrent with a full withdrawal from Iraq.

UPDATE:

I wanted to include here a very useful comment from the Daily Kos thread for this story, by Snarcalita. It's an excellent analysis of what Hersh is reporting, and is often the case, is captured best by one of my readers:

Hersh hints around the SAP or Special Access Program, a highly-classified, compartmentalized operation that seems to have involved, among other things, Spec. Op.s teams operating from US Embassies with a literal license to kill, who formed kidnap teams filling the secret interrogation facilities. It seems the CIA was squeezed out of the covert ops business as a deliberate policy to avoid congressional oversight and covert ops reporting requirements. The Pentagon lawyers concluded that the unitary executive C-in-C could launch op.s to "prepare the battlefield" with no reporting requirements. Since, in a "Global War on Terror" the whole world is the battlefield, they basically seized carte blanche to run their own covert death squads. None of the investigators could be 'read in' to the details of these secret operations, though it seems they tried to indicate that the techniques of sexual humiliation and torture were taught by someone to the MP scapegoats who actually carried them out. It seems no accident that the prison was guarded by untrained National Guard units, rather than professional soldiers who would have known about procedure and their duty to refuse illegal orders and report war crimes.