More Secret Prisons, Tortured Confessions: The Debasement of Society and Politics Through Torture

Originally posted at FDL/The Seminal

Almost every day, a new revelation surfaces regarding the United States' role in spreading and perpetuating the crime of torture. In only the past few weeks, we've seen reported the following:

U.S.-backed Iraqi Regime Ran Secret Torture Prisons

First reported by Ned Parker at the Los Angeles Times, an April 19 story revealed that Iraqi army operations in the province of Ninevah last October swept up hundred of Sunnis, sending them off to a secret prison at the Muthanna military airfield run by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's own security office.

According to a Human Rights Watch report, as the New York Times noted, "The torture of Iraqi detainees at a secret prison in Baghdad was far more systematic and brutal than initially reported." Approximately three hundred prisoners were said to have been tortured between September and December 2009. During this period, Maliki was a visitor to the Obama White House, complete with Oval Office photo ops.

According to HRW:

All the detainees interviewed described the same methods of torture employed by their Iraqi interrogators. The jailers suspended the detainees handcuffed and blindfolded upside down by means of two bars, one placed behind their calves and the other against their shins. All had terrible scabs and bruising on their legs. The interrogators then kicked, whipped and beat the detainees. Interrogators also placed a dirty plastic bag over the detainee's head to close off his air supply. Typically, when the detainee passed out from this ordeal, his interrogators awakened him with electric shocks to his genitals or other parts of his body....

The detainees told Human Rights Watch of other torture methods as well. They described how interrogators and security officials sodomized some detainees with broomsticks and pistol barrels and, the detainees said, raped younger detainees, who were then sent to a different detention site. Some young men said they had been forced to perform oral sex on interrogators and guards. Interrogators also forced some detainees to molest one another.

Security officials whipped detainees with heavy cables, pulled out fingernails and toenails, burned them with acid and cigarettes, and smashed their teeth. If detainees still refused to confess, interrogators would threaten to rape their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters. The interrogation sessions usually lasted three or four hours and occurred every three or four days.

Maliki now raves that the entire torture-in-secret-prison story is a lie manufactured by "embassies and media organizations," and that the prisoners simulated torture scars by "rubbing matches on some of their body parts."

The Obama White House and State Department has not commented on the news reports, though a State Department report last March noted over 500 cases of Iraqi torture in 2009, a figure that we now know for sure was some hundreds too low.

Another Guantanamo Prisoner Wins Habeas Case, as Judge Finds Evidence Came from Torture -- Yet Prisoner Still Not Freed

Imagine the living nightmare of Saeed Hatim, a Yemeni held at Guantanamo for the past eight years, who was granted a habeas corpus petition by Judge Ricardo Urbina late last year. (The ruling was only recently released, and can be accessed via PDF.) As Andy Worthington describes it, Mr. Hatim was held in custody for years for his statements regarding his supposed presence at the Al Farouq training camp, and on testimony from a seriously mentally ill prisoner, whom even the Office of Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants had considered of dubious reliability since at least 2005.

Hatim claimed that his repetition of inculpatory statements at Guantanamo were made because of fear of being tortured again. The government claimed that even if there were torture, the statements should still stand. But Judge Urbina disagreed (emphasis added):

The petitioner claims that after he was captured in Pakistan, he was held for six months at a military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was severely mistreated, including being beaten repeatedly, being kicked in the knees and having duct tape used to hold blindfolds on his head. To this day, he cannot raise his left arm without feeling pain. The petitioner also alleges that he was threatened with rape if he did not confess to being a member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda....

Hatim's unrefuted allegations of torture undermine the reliability of the statements made subsequent to his detention at Kandahar. Thus, the government faces a steep uphill climb in attempting to persuade the court that the petitioner's detention is justified based on the allegation that he trained at al-Farouq, given that the sole evidence offered in support of that allegation is tainted by torture.

The Hatim decision follows that of Judge Henry Kennedy decision granting the habeas corpus petition of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, because the evidence against him was tortured out of two presumed Al Qaeda prisoners. In the Hatim case, Judge Urbina cited Judge Gladys Kessler's ruling in yet another case of evidence tainted by torture. (This may have been the case of Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed, famously known because the tortured evidence came from UK prisoner Binyam Mohamed.)

The victories of Hatim and Uthman remain bittersweet, as the men are not being released from Guantanamo, even as U.S. courts agree there is no legal reason to hold these men, and there are at least 100 more like them, as Worthington explains in his article.

"Treats" or Torture in Case of Child Soldier Prosecuted by U.S.

There's already lots of coverage at this site of the Omar Khadr pre-trial proceedings, where the 23-year-old Khadr's defense team is trying to obtain suppression of statements made by the defendant after he was tortured soon after capture at Bagram prison. I haven't heard the U.S. deny that they started the interrogations with Khadr lying almost mortally wounded in a battlefield hospital. Only 15 years old at the time, and with two wounds from being shot in the back, emerging as a gaping wound in front, and blinded from shrapnel, the interrogations began. Before long, they were turned over to the likes of Sgt. Joshua Claus, an interrogator later courtmartialled for his brutality to prisoners, including the infamous killing of Afghan taxi driver, Dilawar.

The U.S. government is trying a different spin. Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald described the testimony at the Guantanamo hearing of a female interrogator of Khadr's -- pseudonym "Agent 11" -- that she enticed him to talk with M&Ms and fig newtons, and how happy he was to talk with her, rather than be "bored" in his cell.

Since the press has never given a shit that prisoners at Guantanamo routinely are placed into solitary confinement, and kept in isolation for months on end, you can't expect them to understand, much less report, that one of the desired effects of isolation is to produce a desire to talk, and to foster a positive feeling toward anyone who would spend time with them after endless bouts of boredom, spawned by deprivation of social contact and perceptual stimulation. To produce Omar Khadr's statement that he'd rather be with Agent 11 than "bored" in his cell speaks to the effects of solitary confinement, and if he should go to trial, I would hope his defense team would seek to get expert testimony on the effects of isolation upon prisoners.

This article could go on and on, describing other evidence in the press of torture and abuses conducted by the U.S. or its allies. Let some brief linked headlines suffice:

Canadians 'subcontracted torture' in Afghanistan: Testimony

[An Afghan-Canadian interpreter] told a House of Commons committee hearing that he believes every Canadian armed forces member who was involved in transferring detainees in Afghanistan knows the NDS tortures people. "All along the chain of command, they know what is going on — everybody," he asserted.

Bahrain: Court Ruling Disregards Torture Evidence

19 Convicted in Killing Despite Earlier Acquittal, Lack of Evidence, Coerced Confessions

Egypt: “Hizbullah cell” convictions marred by torture allegations

Detainee-torture allegations spread to Britain

Allegations that Afghan detainees were routinely handed over to Afghan authorities for torture – up to now a largely Canadian scandal – are poised to envelop fellow NATO countries with a London court case that claims Britain exposed hundreds of prisoners to abuse in similar circumstances.

People deported by EU member states face torture despite Diplomatic Assurances

Feeling overwhelmed yet? If not, peruse a new article just posted today by Professor E. San Juan, Jr., who discusses the ongoing use of CIA KUBARK-style forms of torture and interrogation in the Philippines. Or read any number of histories of how the U.S. exported torture techniques abroad to Latin America, even before the U.S. gave the green light to death squads that killed or disappeared tens of thousands in that part of the world in the 1970-1980s (one could start with the works of John Dinges or J. Patrice McSherry).

Of course, my intent is not to truly overwhelm, but to educate and incite. Yes, incite readers to become active in protesting and helping eradicate this virus of torture from the body politic. By what special right does anyone in this society, after Abu Ghraib, after the 20,000 tortured to death by the CIA's Vietnam-era Operation Phoenix, after Guantanamo, Bagram, and the teaching of torture to foreign militaries, by what special right can anyone in this society claim any superiority, any moral right to pursue a foreign policy that demands U.S. right of military action anywhere in this world? (And this at a time when NATO sources are claiming combat operations in Afghanistan are likely to go on for another four years.)

It is difficult to read even the well-intentioned and researched articles at this blog (among the best around) and not feel that behind all the politics stand crimes of such monstrosity that one cannot take seriously any of the entire circus. It is not enough that the rulers of this country cannot even administer the country with anything like equity or even competence. The recent oil well blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico testifies to an ineptitude and willful blindness on environmental issues that shouts out mistrust for those who now claim they will fix things.

The same goes for the empty promises and gestures about torture that emanate from the PR-decked halls of the Obama administration. Immersed in attempts to expand Bush-era claims over "state secrets," it has broken its promise to close Guantanamo, even as it expands secret prisons (now run by JSOC instead of CIA) in Afghanistan, or as in Iraq, turns over the torture franchise to their Iraqi strongmen buddies, just as they had long ago given Saddam Hussein the green light to assassinate Iraqi leader Abd al-Karim Qasim. (Hussein failed and had to temporarily flee Iraq, but returned after a CIA-linked coup and as head of security made his bones torturing and killing thousands of Iraqi leftists.)

No day for the tortured is a usual day. It is a struggle for sanity and moments of peace, while the trauma lies distributed throughout the nervous system like an internal army of persecutors. A society that has tortured so many cannot be a just society, its very legitimacy is at question. What happens in the future depends on all of us. Make torture the issue of the day. Demand its eradication. Don't let "national security" tropes disguise the crimes committed by the state in your name.

Bush & the Mathematics of War: 4000, 1 million, 2 million

So passes what the U.S. media brazenly call a milestone: the 4000th dead U.S. soldier in the war against, and occupation of, Iraq. I cannot grieve more than the family and loved ones of each of those 4000. Nor certainly approach the agony and world-hurling destruction of a society where hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, are dead by airborne bomb, munitions shell, bullet, plague, beheading, chemical attack, human suicide bomb, and all the ways a human being can ponder in rending the body and soul of another human being to his or her final destiny.

The U.S. president, George W. Bush, has "vowed":

...so long as I'm president to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain, that in fact there is an outcome that will merit the sacrifice"...

He, of course, means that the superprofits from exploitation of oil will be assured to the ruling class he serves. That the influence of the American bankers, industrialists, and its military machine, will not be subjected to the imprecations and influence of some smaller, merely nationalist entity, nor to the competitive combines of larger, more powerful nation states, such as France or Germany or China. As the largest child stands on the top of the hill, surveying the carnage of his peers who lie in the dust about him, Bush swears the sacrifice worth it. Except the analogy is flawed, as he is not the bloodied king of the hill, but the thoroughly corrupt leader of a government that lost its way in the labryinth of imperial lust a long time ago.

In American history, one would have to go back to the days of Tom Paine, to find a pen that could write with sufficient disgust, and with honor for the inherent dignity of humankind, of the kind of empire-building and blood-curdling talk of sacrifice of these new monarchs, self-satisfied rulers of America, who send young men and women to fight their greedy and arrogant wars.

Can we possibly suppose that if governments had originated in a right principle, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it? What inducement has the farmer, while following the plough, to lay aside his peaceful pursuit, and go to war with the farmer of another country? or what inducement has the manufacturer? What is dominion to them, or to any class of men in a nation? Does it add an acre to any man's estate, or raise its value? Are not conquest and defeat each of the same price, and taxes the never-failing consequence? — Though this reasoning may be good to a nation, it is not so to a government. War is the Faro-table of governments, and nations the dupes of the game.

And the pawns of war are its refugees. In Iraq, the "success" of Bush's martial "surge" is belied by the attitude of the millions of refugees that previously fled the carnage imposed by the U.S. invasion and the resultant ethnic cleansing, as the U.S. maneuvered between the warring factions of a shattered society.

DAMASCUS, Syria: The much-heralded stream of Iraqi refugees back home to Iraq from Syria has slowed to a trickle, with many fearing that life in their homeland is still too dangerous despite improvements in security....

"To think of returning to Iraq is as bad as thinking of suicide," said Faten al-Samerrai, 42, who has been living in Damascus since 2006 with her husband and five children. "There is no future and no life in Iraq. There is only ruin."

She said life is not perfect in Damascus — but at least it's safe....

"I lost my son and my husband because of America," said Ikhlas al-Duleimi, a 36-year-old Sunni Muslim Iraqi in Syria. She added: "I wish Saddam's awful regime would return."

And so the great sacrifice of Bush comes full circle to the idealization of a tyrant that his own country put into power, deposed, and now restores to martyrdom. And this "noble" cause, this Iraq War of the Republicans and their Democratic Party enablers, claims its 4000th American corpse. The Iraqi bodies are not even counted by Bush and his government. That sacrifice might overwhelm the flimsy temple Bush is building for his unholy war.

Pentagon Damage Control in Action

Yesterday, the Pentagon announced they weren't going to post online their own report explaining how Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida were not linked. It's well known, of course, that the Bush Administration did everything they could in the run up to the invasion of Iraq to make the U.S. public believe that just the opposite was true, so that the invasion of Iraq was associated in the public's mind with the 9/11 attack.

The Pentagon's inane attempt at suppression and censorship was met with a howl of protest and ridicule, including here at Invictus.

Now, ABC News has said that they have requested and did receive a full copy of the report (said to be five volumes long), and they have posted a link to it (PDF) online.

Given the length of the report, you might want to follow dmd76's suggestion over at Daily Kos: to obtain your own hard copy on a CD, go to the US Joint Forces Command feedback page and request a copy of "IDA Paper P-4151". Because they need your physical address to send you the CD, be sure to include it in your request.

Out of the Shadows? A Tale of Two Wars

The New York Times famously writes that it publishes "all the news that's fit to print." But there's a lot that doesn't get published, even on the Internet. Let's look at two examples.

Yesterday, the Pentagon made it official. According to a U.S. military study, Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaida. None. Nada. But like a pesky gopher that sticks its head up out of the ground, and then swiftly disappears down the hole into its dark tunnels, governmental truth made a very swift appearance yesterday. And now, it's going to be snatched back out of the light and stuffed into a deep governmental shaft. Here's the UK Guardian on subject (with a h/t to StuHunter at Daily Kos):

The Pentagon study based on more than 600,000 documents recovered after US and UK troops toppled Hussein in 2003, discovered "no 'smoking gun' (ie, direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaida", its authors wrote.
George Bush and his senior aides have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terror in their justification for waging war against Iraq.

Wary of embarrassing press coverage noting that the new study debunks those claims, the US defence department attempted to bury the release of the report yesterday.

The Pentagon cancelled a planned briefing on the study and scrapped plans to post its findings on the internet, ABC news reported. Unclassified copies of the study would be sent to interested individuals in the mail, military officials told the network.

The Pentagon played this trick a few years back, when it declared "secret" another report that showed negligence in planning for post-war Iraqi reconstruction. The document was deemed officially "of limited value." Yes, for the mandarins and demagogues that rule this country, the truth is "of limited value." At least for now, we have ABC's posting of an executive summary of the current Saddam-Al Qaida report.

But then we all knew there was no link between Saddam and Al Qaida, didn't we? I know the polls showed otherwise, and then there are the Rush Limbaughs of this world who will prattle on endlessly with little regard to facts or veracity anyway. But the report certainly isn't shocking.

Meanwhile, today's New York Times has more on the slowly emerging story of military-CIA videotaping of interrogations. As we first heard it some weeks ago, the CIA had taped the interrogations of two "high-profile" detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri -- and then later destroyed those videotapes illegally. The investigation into the destruction of the tapes seems to be going nowhere, or moving at the glacial pace of congressional investigations that aren't related to baseball or steroids, which is the same thing. According to the NYT:

The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect....

The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, Defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.

You can bet that there were a lot more than 50 videotapes, and as for audio tapes? Well, no one's even asking, so there must be hundreds. (The CIA 1960s interrogation manual, KUBARK, suggested taping interrogations as a routine matter.) But I suppose when the Pentagon finishes its "review" we won't be seeing it posted online or published anytime soon.

So this story might be a notch higher on the "shock" scale, but then, one generally expects the Pentagon and CIA to do these types of things. We're not liberal Pollyannas, are we?

But, sometimes there are shocking reports and studies, and these never see the light of day either. Nor is it always the government which censors. The editors and publishers of scholarly journals and establishment press also exert a real if impalpable influence on the nation's public discourse.

So I was surprised to see that an important 2002 article by the British scholars, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman's "United States Biological Warfare during the Korean War: rhetoric and reality," has failed to date to find a scholarly publisher. Endicott and Hagerman were the authors of the 1998 book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). The thesis of both the book and article is that the United States, all denial and protestations aside, experimented with biological warfare against North Korea and China during the Korean War.

From the 2002 article:

For half a century one of the most closely guarded state secrets of the United States government has been its large-scale field experiments with biological weapons during the Korean War. This secrecy is perhaps not surprising since, as a prominent American scholar has noted, if it is shown that the US engaged in germ warfare then it will also be shown that the US in the eyes of most of the world has committed a major international war crime... Such an admission would be an intolerable blow to the prestige of a government and a nation many of whose citizens believe that the United States is the natural moral and human rights leader of the world....

The Air Force was assigned the primary operational role in biological warfare. The directorate of the air force biological weapons program during the Korean War was divided into two parts, both parts reporting separately to Lt-Gen. T. D. White, deputy chief of staff for operations. The task of the first part, known as the US Air Force BW-CW Division (with an acronym AFOAT-BW) under Colonel Frank Seiler, was to establish an overt biological warfare capability for the emergency general war plan against the Soviet Union referred to earlier... Initial capability within this plan was phased in by March 1952 but it was plagued with difficulties, shortage of refrigeration facilities for the brucellosis pathogen and fell short of expectations.

But there was another part. The second part was hidden in the Psychological Warfare Division of the air force under the command of Colonel John J. Hutchison and its tasks were to direct and supervise covert operations 'in the scope of unconventional BW and CW operations and programs,' and to 'integrate capabilities and requirements' for biological warfare and chemical warfare into war plans... Our understanding about what was going on in the Korean War was the covert experimental testing of biological weapons within the objectives of the emergency war plan, with the added advantage these weapons might serve some tactical purpose in the war.

The article, like the book, is copiously documented, and the authors, admitting they have no "smoking gun" document, nevertheless build a powerful case for the use of these weapons. I'll spend some time in future articles giving more details to their thesis.

But the story caught my attention because of a footnote. Back in 1952-1953, the scandal over use of these weapons broke because U.S. fliers shot down over Korea and imprisoned as POWs gave confessions as to the use of biological warfare, leading to investigations by various boards, by Congress, and impassioned denials by the military and U.S. authorities. Out of the turmoil, a tom-tom of accusation of Chinese "brainwashing" was beat: U.S. soldiers had been tortured into giving false confessions. In the clandestine hallways of the CIA and military intelligence offices, millions of dollars poured into research programs to discover the secret to this so-called "brainwashing" program. And so was born the CIA program of research into mind control, MKULTRA. The U.S. instituted their SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), training military personnel how to withstand torture. Over 50 years later, this training was reverse-engineered in order to teach a new generation of American interrogators how to torture.

But what if these so-called false confessions were real? What if the fliers, under coercive interrogation, or otherwise, had told the truth? What if the U.S. had committed a serious war crime? Where would this leave the project to study brainwashing? Was torture about producing false confessions, or producing valid information? Did torture work or not?

As you can probably tell, these questions lead directly to the issues that haunt the nation today. Even bigger than the torture-brainwashing story is the truth behind the nature of the U.S. state, its military, its capability for great destruction, and its willingness to use it. (Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less than ten years before the Chinese crossing of the Yalu River.)

This is an important story. This story deserves to come out of the shadows. We deserve to know our history, how to think about our history. Endicott and Hagerman's study deserves wider dissemination.

Tonight I walked outside. There was a ghostly half-moon falling slowly in the western sky, fuzzy and indistinct behind a shredded grey cloud that skirted in front of it. The reality of the moon hit me, even as it was shrouded by dark nocturnal clouds. It's really there, I thought, this half-planet rotating for ages hundreds of miles from this blue-green Earth. That's reality, behind the mists.

Let's find our reality behind the mists, outside of the government imposed shadows of secrecy.