Torture – Informed Comment

Carceral Imperialism: Torture, Abu Ghraib, and the Legacy of the U.S. War on Iraq

Maha Hilal — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 04:04:41 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – “To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I’m only half a human now.” That’s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.

He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’s estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.

The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”

On April 28th, 2004, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.

Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.

Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.

The Road to Abu Ghraib

”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.

As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.

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Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.

In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.

In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”

Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Simulating Atonement

Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”

As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.

In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.

In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”

True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.

Weapons of American Imperialism

On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”

There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”

Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.

When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.

In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”

As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)

Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice

What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.

One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.

Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.

Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.

Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.

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Ron DeSantis: Yet Another Cog in Guantanamo’s Torture Machine

Common Dreams — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 05:02:49 +0000

Roy Eidelson

( Commondreams.org ) – Recently, there have been troubling revelations about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — a leading 2024 GOP presidential aspirant — concerning his conduct as a Navy JAG officer at Guantanamo Bay. His responsibilities at the detention facility apparently included responding to claims of mistreatment from the war-on-terror prisoners there. Relatively few of these detainees had any connection with al Qaeda, and many had simply been handed over to US forces in exchange for bounty payments. But DeSantis seemingly viewed them all as wily and unrepentant terrorists.

Of particular note, DeSantis was at Guantanamo in 2006 during the brutal forced-feeding of prisoners engaged in a mass hunger strike. Years later, DeSantis acknowledged that, as a legal advisor, he had suggested this intervention as a countermeasure to what he described as the detainees’ “waging jihad” — by refusing to eat. When interviewed last month, DeSantis emphasized that he “didn’t have authority to authorize anything” and that Guantanamo was “a professionally-run prison.” His first claim — sidestepping personal responsibility — may contain elements of truth; his second is outrageously absurd.

As a general matter, the forced-feeding of mentally competent individuals violates international standards of medical ethics and constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment. This was especially so in the case of the Department of Defense, which opted to employ extreme, punitive measures — even described as torture by United Nations investigators — when force-feeding the prisoners at Guantanamo. These measures included a restraint chair that immobilized the detainee’s entire body for hours at a time, and the use of tubing that was inserted through the nose into the stomach and then removed and reinserted multiple times each day, often causing sharp pain and bleeding. A defense attorney for Guantanamo prisoners subjected to forced-feeding has written, “Only a sadist could impose and witness such treatment without grave concern and soul-sickness.” It’s hard to argue with that blunt assessment. But there are also two larger truths we shouldn’t overlook.

First, even though DeSantis has disingenuously characterized the detainees as master manipulators who all claimed to be “Koran salesmen,” the hunger strikers were actually protesting an unconscionable system of indefinite detention and ruthless interrogation that relied on daily abuse — solitary confinement, physical beatings, sexual humiliation, and more. This routinized cruelty didn’t solely involve guards and interrogators. It also depended upon guidance from health professionals,who seemingly abandoned their fundamental “Do No Harm” principles to accommodate a White House insistent that the prisoners had no entitlement to humane treatment.

Vice News Video from 2017: “Guantanamo Ex-Detainees Talk Through Their Past Torture (HBO)”

These abusive conditions and techniques have left many Guantanamo prisoners —past and present — with deep psychic wounds. Survivors of torture often experience overwhelming feelings of shame, helplessness, and disconnection as a result of having been subjected to mistreatment at the hands of another human being. Frequently, the victims of such traumas are also haunted by depression, anxiety, and PTSD; by nightmares and flashbacks; and by a lasting sense that safety and solace will never be achieved. Viewed from this perspective, the hunger strikes that DeSantis witnessed — and apparently dismissed as terrorist tactics — are better understood as the prisoners’ desperate and despairing attempts to regain some semblance of control over their lives and circumstances, even at the risk of starvation.

The second larger truth is this: accountability for Guantanamo’s horrors has never been a priority for our country’s elected leaders. No US president has ever taken meaningful steps on this front. George W. Bush, of course, never sought to discipline those responsible for the torturous policies his own administration authorized. Barrack Obama took action to end torture — but when it came to accountability, he decided “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Donald Trump clearly had no interest in such matters, promising instead to bring back waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse.” And although Joe Biden has expressed a desire to close Guantanamo, he’s now building a second, multi-million-dollar courtroom there for military commission prosecutions in which detainees have limited due process rights.

So then how does Ron DeSantis’s alleged up-close-and-personal connections to prisoner abuse years ago really matter? It would be naïve to think that his political prospects will suffer. Indeed, he may even gain in popularity among voters who embrace his authoritarian mindset, share his disdain for protecting the rights of the vulnerable, and believe his misleading characterizations of the prison and the prisoners at Guantanamo.

But the attention DeSantis’s story has brought to Guantanamo can still do some good. Ideally, it can spark broader public interest in an examination of the facility’s shameful 21-year history: how its detention and interrogation operations have dishonored the values this country has long professed to hold dear; how the prisoners there became defenseless victims of state vengeance run amok; how the perpetrators of torture and abuse — and their masters — have eluded any form of accountability; and how essential it is to close Guantanamo and throw away the key.

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US celebrates Nobel for Iran’s Narges Mohammadi, but We have Executions, Torture and Prisoner Abuse Too

Juan Cole — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 05:00:34 +0000

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize this year to Iranian feminist and human rights worker Narges Mohammadi, 51. It was the second time that an Iranian woman had won, the first having been attorney Shirin Ebadi in 2003. Mohammadi, although trained as a physicist, worked as a journalist and activist in Ebadi’s center in the early zeroes of this century. She was first arrested in 1998 and spent a year in jail at that time, but subsequently has been in and out of prison.

She is currently in Evin Prison on multiple charges, including spreading propaganda against the government, with 10 years, nine months left on her sentence. She issued a statement on hearing the news: “I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of all women.”

She supported last year’s movement for “Woman, Life, Liberty” from behind bars, have long criticized compulsory veiling.

Mohammadi’s causes included women’s rights, of course. But she has also campaigned for human rights more generally, including the right of women to be safe from sexual harassment even in prison and of prisoners to be safe from torture and from the death penalty.

Although many observers in the United States will applaud this award as a black eye for the self-styled Islamic Republic of Iran, the fact is that Mohammadi would be critical of American policies as well. That is, if we are to listen to her prophetic voice with approval, we must do more than use her politically to denigrate our enemies; we must take to heart the implications of her ethical witness for our own society, too.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Democracy Now! “Woman, Life, Freedom: Narges Mohammadi, Imprisoned Iranian Activist, Awarded 2023 Nobel Peace Prize”

For instance, there were 18 executions of prisoners in the United States in 2022, up 64% from the total of 11 killed by the state in 2021. Although the US executes many fewer prisoners each year than Iran or Saudi Arabia, and although the number in the US has fallen significantly since the 1990s, it still does execute prisoners, and Ms. Mohammadi deeply believes that is wrong. She might well be in jail here if she lived in the United States, from protesting in front of city halls and jails. Only 13 states still permit executions in the US, and half of those killed in 2022 were executed in Texas and Oklahoma.

Moreover, 7 of these executions were seriously botched. In one instance, it took 3 hours of trying to get a fatal intravenous line into the arm of an Alabama convict. Some initial attempts to kill the convict were called off because of difficulties with the intravenous injection or because proper protocols has not been followed.

Between 46% and 54% of Americans believe in capital punishment, depending on which poll you believe. So Mohammadi might well be in a minority on this issue in the US, as well.

As for torture, Karen J. Greenburg wrote this week about the scandal that the Guantánamo Prison Camp still has not been closed. One of the difficulties has been that some prisoners were so badly tortured that no court, including a military tribunal, can now conduct a legitimate trial.

There has never been a reckoning by the US establishment with the Bush administration’s extensive use of torture.

If Mohammadi had been an American she might have been put on trial, as Josie Setzler was, for protesting torture at Guantánamo.

As for sexual abuse of female prisoners by male guards in federal prisons, a Senate report from last year makes it clear that this is a real issue and that it hasn’t been adequately addressed by the Bureau of Prisons.

Regarding women’s rights, I doubt Ms. Mohammadi would approve of Nebraska jailing a woman for two years for giving abortion pills to her daughter. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that she would not like our current Supreme Court much at all. She rails against religious theocrats’ repression of women.

So a warm congratulations to her, and to her cause, of women’s rights and human rights in Iran. But we owe it to ourselves also actually to listen to what she is saying and to take to heart the principles for which she has spent so much of her life in jail, torn from her husband and children.

The Guantánamo Prison Camp may someday be Closed, but it Will leave a Permanent Scar on America’s Conscience

Karen J. Greenberg — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 04:02:06 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com) – For 18 years, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. And here’s my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them, and despite the expressed desire of three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — to close it, the endgame remains devastatingly elusive.

At times due to a failure of will, at times due to a failure of the system itself or the sheer complexity of the logistics involved, and at times due to acts of Congress or the courts, efforts to shut that prison have been eternally stymied. Despite endless acknowledgements that what’s gone on there has defied domestic, international, and military law — not to mention longstanding norms of morality and justice — that prison persists.

Recently, however, for those of us perpetually looking for a ray or even a glimmer of hope, there have finally been a few developments that seem to signal steps, however tiny, toward closure.

There are still 30 detainees at Guantánamo. Sixteen of them have been deemed no longer threats to the United States and cleared for release, but arrangements have yet to be made to transfer them to another country. Three others are considered too dangerous for release. And eleven have been charged in the military commissions system that was set up in 2006 and revised under President Obama in 2009. One, Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al-Bahlul, has been convicted. Another, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, recently pleaded guilty. Now, nine detainees face trials in three separate cases. All of them were tortured at CIA “black sites” for different periods of time between 2003 and 2006.

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Progress in the Biden years has been occurring, even if at a snail’s pace. His administration has said that it intends to close Guantánamo by the end of his term. And in the last two and a half years, it has indeed reduced the population from 40 to 30, the most recent transfer of a freed prisoner to another country occurring this April. In addition, the Biden administration increased the total number of remaining detainees eligible for release from six to its current 16.

Arranging such transfers has proven painstaking work, requiring complex negotiations with foreign countries, as well as assurances to American officials — and ultimately Congress — that the release will pose no future threat to the United States and that the prisoner will be treated justly in the receiving country. Those releases have been complicated because, after Obama announced at the outset of his presidency that Guantánamo would close within a year, Congress banned any Gitmo detainee from ever being transferred to the United States for any purpose whatsoever, a ban that’s been re-authorized every year since then.

While those detainees cleared for release await transfer to other countries, developments over the past few months have put the military commissions in the forefront of activities aimed at closure.

Until now, the commissions have indeed been a dismal failure. A mere nine convictions have been secured since the passage of the first Military Commissions Act in 2006, all but two through plea deals, and four of the nine have been overturned on appeal. Two remain on appeal. Generally, however, the fact that all of the individuals currently charged and facing trial were initially held at CIA black sites around the world where they were grievously tortured has proven an impassable barrier to trial. Consequently, as New York Times reporters Carol Rosenberg and Charlie Savage have reminded us, “No former C.I.A. detainee has been convicted at trial before a military commission.”

The reasons are many. Obama delayed the trials for three years and the pandemic delayed them further. But by far the biggest obstacle remains the fact that the detainees were horrifically tortured at those black sites. Defense attorneys have persistently insisted that evidence derived under torture should be inadmissible in the proceedings in accordance with the law. While the prosecutors have claimed otherwise, even so many years later, the tortured defendants continue to suffer from the devastating fashion in which they were treated, impeding their defense and causing further delay. In fact, their torture-induced severe psychological instability and often physical incapacity, not to mention instances of distrust of their lawyers, have made it difficult to hold hearings of any sort. As a result, after so many years, the cases remain in the throes of pre-trial hearings and jury selection is still far off.

President Biden has indeed set himself a lower bar than Obama, who issued an early executive order calling for the closure of the prison within a year only to encounter immediate blowback and failure. Still, Biden has made some modest headway in closing Gitmo. Since he took office, most of those who remained in “forever prisoner” limbo have at least been cleared for release. In addition, he’s appointed Tina Kaidanow, former State Department ambassador at large for counterterrorism, to oversee their transfers and has secured the release of 10 prisoners since he took office.

But the recent signs, however incremental, of further movement pertain not to the three remaining “forever prisoners” or to the 16 who have been cleared for release but to those being dealt with by the military commissions established by Congress.

The Military Commissions Cases

The military commissions still face the almost insurmountable hurdle that has haunted them from the start: the legacy of CIA torture. Nevertheless, there has been some recent modest progress, despite the irrevocable damage it caused both individual detainees and our system of justice.

The first signs of movement came in the initial days of the Biden presidency when the Pentagon referred charges against three men to the military commissions. The two Indonesians and one Malaysian captured in Thailand in 2003 had been accused in connection with bombings that targeted two nightclubs in Bali in 2002 and a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people, including Americans. A trial date has now been proposed for 2025. (This would, of course, be after Joe Biden’s first term in office.)

Then, there have been signs of progress on potential plea deals. In the summer of 2021, pretrial hearings in the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi captured in 2006 and accused of being a senior member of al-Qaeda, began. The al-Iraqi case reached a resolution in June 2022, when he pleaded guilty to war-crime charges for acts committed in Afghanistan. The terms of his plea deal are still unknown. His sentencing is set for 2024.

In addition, starting in the spring of 2022, prosecutors reached out to defendants in the 9/11 case, who have been facing the death penalty, to begin potential plea-deal discussions in which a maximum life sentence would replace the threat of death. But the path towards resolution remains fraught. In September, perhaps in response to pressure from some of the 9/11 families intent on keeping the death penalty in place, President Biden reportedly refused to approve certain details of those proposed deals. As with so much else at Guantánamo, for every step forward, there seem to be two steps back. Still, negotiations are presumably continuing.

In another instance of inching forward, the commissions have recently addressed the case of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 defendants. He has displayed severe signs of mental instability, including delusions and hallucinations, owing to his brutal treatment in CIA custody. He’s convinced, for instance, that CIA agents are still pumping unnerving noises and vibrations into his cell, causing sleep deprivation. His inability to talk about much else has stymied the attempts of his lawyers to prepare him for future hearings. Last June 6th, in fact, a panel of psychiatrists and forensic experts declared him unfit to stand trial, given his post-traumatic stress syndrome and his psychotic delusions. Based on their report, Commissions Judge Matthew McCall agreed and, on September 21, 2023, severed him from the trial.

Excluding Tortured Evidence

While there are, in other words, signs of progress via plea deals and severance, the most promising development may be in the longest running military commission case of all, that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. He’s accused of masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole, a destroyer off the coast of Yemen, in 2000 killing 17 American servicemen.

Al-Nashiri, a Saudi, was held in CIA black sites from 2002 to 2006, while being tortured using techniques like waterboarding, stress positions, forced sodomy, and mock executions. He was finally indicted in 2011, but his case has faced innumerable pretrial hurdles since then, largely involving debates over evidence derived from torture and the possible inadmissibility of it at trial.

Lawyers considered that his case had taken a step forward when the government reversed its position on torture-derived evidence. A Biden Department of Justice brief filed on January 31, 2022, said, “The government recognizes that torture is abhorrent and unlawful, and unequivocally adheres to humane treatment standards for all detainees… [T]he government will not seek admission, at any stage of the proceedings, of any of petitioner’s statements while he was in CIA custody.” That reversed a prior policy allowing such statements to be used in pretrial hearings, if not at trial itself.

Then, in August, the judge in the case made torture the grounds for taking yet another step forward. Like other detainees, al-Nashiri had been interviewed in later years by FBI “clean teams” of agents who attempted to solicit the same confessions without torture and were often successful. The prosecution wanted to use those confessions, but defense attorneys argued that the impact of torture didn’t dissipate with the clean teams, that the detainees feared their torturers were waiting in the wings to punish them if they gave different answers. They insisted that the defendant’s torture trauma and the perpetual fear of more of it remained an ongoing obstacle to statements of truth.

Al-Nashiri’s lawyers filed papers seeking to exclude his clean-team testimony. Judge Lanny Acosta then took a long-overdue step forward, ruling against the admission of such later confessions. He noted that the clean-team agents “acted professionally and in no way coerced the accused,” even offering “tea and pastries” and reassuring the defendant that he was no longer in CIA custody. Nonetheless, Acosta ruled the statements inadmissible in pre-trial proceedings as well as at trial, since prolonged torture had undoubtedly affected al-Nashiri’s later testimony.

In his 50-page opinion, the judge offered a detailed chronology of the kinds of torture Nashiri had suffered and noted as well the continued use of force against him during his time at Guantánamo, treatment and conditions that could indeed evoke memories of his period in CIA custody. As the judge wrote,

“[H]e was in no position to know whether Drs. Mitchell and/or Jessen [the architects of the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program] were watching…. prepared to intervene with more abusive treatment… He had no reason to doubt that he might, without notice, suddenly be shipped back to a dungeon like the ones he had experienced before… [or if someone] lurked nearby with a pistol, a drill, or a broomstick, ready to intervene in the event he chose to remain silent or to offer versions of events that differed from what he told his prior investigators.”

As the Judge concluded, “Even if the 2007 statements were not obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, they were derived from it.” Michel Paradis, a senior attorney in the Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Defense Counsel and counsel for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has summed up the situation aptly, telling me, “What the refusal to admit the so-called ‘clean team’ statement shows is what anyone who looks at it up close sees. There is nothing clean about torture and there is no way to sanitize it.”

The judge’s decision also marks a potential threshold for the remaining Gitmo cases. If evidence from torture is disallowed, including in pre-trial proceedings, that may lead to future plea deals and even some leniency. Either way, in the wake of Judge Acosta’s decision, the interminably slow Guantánamo cases might just begin to proceed more rapidly.

Add to all this the effect of the passage of time, given among other things the aging not just of Gitmo’s prisoners, but of those working to bring their cases to trial over all these years, many of whom have retired. Judge Acosta gave notice of his retirement from the Army as September ended, while Matthew McCall, the fourth judge to preside over the 9/11 case, has similarly indicated that he’ll be leaving next April, also before it comes to trial. Several of the attorneys for the detainees have retired as well, after so many years representing their clients.

The belated but increasingly accepted notion that torture renders trials impossible, now seemingly shared by the court as well as the defense teams, has become more than mere rhetoric. As Paradis commented to me, “No justice system worth the name permits even the whiff of evidence tainted by torture. We have revolted at the idea for more than a century in this country and even persuaded the world that it should do the same, such as when Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture.”

Ironically, the acknowledgement of this reality may finally bring these cases to their conclusion. But so many years later, despite being determined to grasp every ray of hope, I suspect that, when it comes to the closing of Guantánamo, the sorrowful record of the past may overshadow the dreams of a better tomorrow.

Tomdispatch.com

Iraqis Tortured by US at Abu Ghraib have Never Received Justice or Compensation

Human Rights Watch — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 04:08:19 +0000

The US government has apparently failed to provide compensation or other redress to Iraqis who suffered torture and other abuse by US forces at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons in Iraq two decades ago.

Iraqis tortured by US personnel still have no clear path for receiving redress or recognition from the US government though the effects of torture are a daily reality for many Iraqi survivors and their families.

In August 2022, the Pentagon released an action plan to reduce harm to civilians in US military operations, but it doesn’t include any way to receive compensation for past instances of civilian harm.

( Human Rights Watch ) – (Baghdad) – The United States government has apparently failed to provide compensation or other redress to Iraqis who suffered torture and other abuse two decades after evidence emerged of US forces mistreating detainees at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons in Iraq, Human Rights Watch said today.

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US and its coalition allies held about 100,000 Iraqis between 2003 and 2009. Human Rights Watch and others have documented torture and other ill-treatment by US forces in Iraq. Survivors of abuse have come forward for years to give their accounts of their treatment, but received little recognition from the US government and no redress. Prohibitions against torture under US domestic law, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, as well as customary international law, are absolute.

“Twenty years on, Iraqis who were tortured by US personnel still have no clear path for filing a claim or receiving any kind of redress or recognition from the US government,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “US officials have indicated that they prefer to leave torture in the past, but the long-term effects of torture are still a daily reality for many Iraqis and their families.”

Taleb Al Majli, an Iraqi who described being tortured by US forces after his detention at Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003, at his home in Baghdad in 2023. The US released him without charge in March 2005. © 2023 Human Rights Watch

Between April and July 2023, Human Rights Watch interviewed Taleb al-Majli, a former detainee at Abu Ghraib prison, in addition to three people with knowledge of his detention and his condition after his release who wished to remain anonymous. Human Rights Watch also interviewed a former US judge advocate who served in Baghdad in 2003, a former member of Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights, and representatives of three nongovernmental organizations working on torture. Human Rights Watch also reviewed media and nongovernmental reports, as well as US government documents including US Department of Defense investigations into alleged detainee abuse.

In May, Al-Majli told Human Rights Watch that US forces subjected him to torture and other ill-treatment, including physical, psychological, and sexual humiliation while detaining him at Abu Ghraib prison between November 2003 and March 2005.

He said he was one of the men in a widely circulated photo at Abu Ghraib that shows a group of naked, hooded prisoners on top of one another in a human pyramid, while two US soldiers smile behind them. “Two American soldiers, one male and one female, ordered us to strip naked,” al-Majli said. “They piled us prisoners on top of each other. I was one of them.”

Al-Majli said that US forces detained him while he was visiting relatives in Anbar province in 2003.

“On the morning of October 31 [2003], US forces surrounded the village my uncle lived in,” al-Majli said. “They took boys and old men from the village. I told them I’m a guest from Baghdad, I live in Baghdad and just came to visit my uncle. They put a cover on my head and tied my wrists with plastic zip ties, then loaded me into a Humvee.”

After a few days at Habbaniya military base and at an unknown location in Iraq, US forces moved al-Majli to Abu Ghraib prison. “It was then the torture started,” he said. “They took away our clothes. They mocked us constantly while we were blindfolded with hoods over our heads. We were completely powerless,” he said. “I was tortured by police dogs, sound bombs, live fire, and water hoses.”

While Human Rights Watch is unable to conclusively verify al-Majli’s account, including whether he was one of the men in the “human pyramid” photo, his story of detention at Abu Ghraib is credible. Al Majli presented corroborating evidence, including a prisoner identity card with his full name, inmate number, and cell block, which he said US forces issued him at Abu Ghraib after taking his photo, iris scan, and fingerprints. Al-Majli also showed Human Rights Watch a letter he obtained in 2013 from the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, a governmental body with the mandate to protect and promote human rights in Iraq, confirming his detention at Abu Ghraib prison, including his date of arrest (October 31, 2003), and listing the same inmate number as his prisoner identity card.

He said he has kept them all this time as proof of what he endured.

During the US occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, authorities held thousands of men, women, and children at Abu Ghraib prison. A February 2004 report to the US-led military coalition by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that military intelligence officers told the ICRC that an estimated 70 to 90 percent of people in coalition custody in Iraq in 2003 had been arrested by mistake.

Al-Majli said that after 16 months at Abu Ghraib, he was released without charge. Though he gained his freedom, he said he found himself physically ailing, penniless, and traumatized. While he was detained, he said, he began biting his hands and wrists to cope with the trauma he was experiencing, and has continued ever since. Raised, purple welts were clearly visible across his hands and wrists.

“It became a mental health condition,” he said. “I did it in jail, and after I left jail, and I keep doing it today. I try to avoid it, but I can’t. Until today, I can’t wear short sleeves. When people see this, I tell them it’s burns. I avoid questions.”

More than the pain he suffered himself, al-Majli laments the negative effect it has had on his children: “This one year and four months changed my entire being for the worse. It destroyed me and destroyed my family. It’s the reason for my son’s health problems and the reasons my daughters dropped out of school. They stole our future from us.”

For two decades, al-Majli has sought redress, including compensation and an apology, for the abuse he suffered. Unable to afford a lawyer or access the US embassy in Baghdad, al-Majli sought help from the Iraqi Bar Association, which turned him away, telling him it did not handle cases like his. Al-Majli then went to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, but all it could do was issue him a letter confirming he is in their records as a former detainee at Abu Ghraib. He said he did not know how to contact the US military and raise a claim.

Human Rights Watch wrote to the US Department of Defense on June 6, 2023, outlining al-Majli’s case, providing the research findings, and requesting information on compensation for survivors of torture in Iraq. Despite repeated follow-up requests, Human Rights Watch has not received a response.

“I didn’t know what else I could do or where else to go,” al-Majli said. Human Rights Watch was not able to find any legal pathway for al-Majli to file a claim seeking recompense.

“The US secretary of defense and attorney general should investigate allegations of torture and other abuse of people detained by the US abroad during counterinsurgency operations linked to its ‘Global War on Terrorism’,” Yager said. “US authorities should initiate appropriate prosecutions against anyone implicated, whatever their rank or position. The US should provide compensation, recognition, and official apologies to survivors of abuse and their families.”

20 Years of US Silence

Article continues after bonus IC video
Human Rights Watch: “Iraq Torture Survivors Await US Justice”

In 2004, then-US President George W. Bush apologized for the “humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners” at Abu Ghraib. Soon after, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that he had found a legal way to compensate Iraqi detainees who suffered “grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty at the hands of a few members of the United States armed forces. It’s the right thing to do, and it is my intention to see that we do.”

Human Rights Watch has found no evidence that the US government has paid any compensation or other redress to victims of detainee abuse in Iraq, nor has the United States issued any individual apologies or other amends.

Twenty years on, Iraqis who were tortured by US personnel still have no clear path for filing a claim or receiving any kind of redress or recognition from the US government. US officials have indicated that they prefer to leave torture in the past, but the long-term effects of torture are still a daily reality for many Iraqis and their families.

Sarah Yager

Washington director, Human Rights Watch

Some victims have attempted to apply for compensation using the US Foreign Claims Act (FCA). The law allows foreign nationals to obtain compensation for death, injury, and damage to property from “noncombat activity or a negligent or wrongful act or omission” caused by US service members. However, it includes a so-called combat exclusion: claims are not payable if the harm results from “action by enemy or U.S. forces engaged in armed conflict or in immediate preparation for impending armed conflict.” Furthermore, for al-Majli and other survivors of detainee abuse during the invasion and occupation, filing a claim under the Foreign Claims Act is not an option because claims must be filed within two years from the date of the alleged harm.

Human Rights Watch was unable to find public evidence that payments have been made under this law as compensation for detainee abuse, including torture. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents detailing 506 claims made under the Foreign Claims Act: 488 in Iraq and 18 in Afghanistan. The majority of claims relate to harm or deaths caused by shootings, convoys, and vehicle accidents.

The only case of a Foreign Claims Act payment relating to detention in those documents was for a claimant who was paid US$1,000 for being unlawfully detained in Iraq, with no mention of other abuse. Five other claims were for abuse in detention, but they are among eleven claims that do not contain the outcome, including whether payment was made.

The US Defense Department did not respond to repeated requests for information as to whether the US government made Foreign Claims Act or other compensation payments to survivors or families of those who died of detainee abuse in Iraq.

Jonathan Tracy, a former judge advocate who handled claims of harm in Baghdad in 2003, told Human Rights Watch he did not know of any Foreign Claims Act payments to torture survivors by the Army. “If any of the survivors received a payment, I would doubt the Army would have wanted to use Foreign Claims Act money because it could be interpreted as an admission on the government’s part,” he said.

A US submission to the UN Committee Against Torture from May 2006 reported that 33 detainees had by that date filed claims for compensation to the US Army, 28 of which were from Iraq.

The submission stated that “no compensation has been provided to date, however, compensation has been offered in two cases.” Subsequent submissions to the Committee Against Torture do not contain updates to these figures, nor specify whether those payments were made. Notably, according to the document, neither of the two recommended payments was listed as compensation for torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Other Iraqis have attempted to find justice in US courts. But the US Justice Department has repeatedly dismissed such cases using a 1946 law that preserves US forces’ immunity for “any claim arising out of the combatant activities of the military or naval forces, or the Coast Guard, during time of war.”

So far, the only lawsuits able to advance have targeted military contractors. Those cases, too, face considerable obstacles. One such case, Al Shimari et al. v. CACI, has been slowly making its way through courts since June 2008. The lawsuit was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a US-based nongovernmental organization, on behalf of four Iraqi torture victims against CACI International Inc. and CACI Premier Technology, Inc. The lawsuit asserts that CACI, which the US government hired to interrogate prisoners in Iraq, directed and participated in torture and other abuse at Abu Ghraib.

CACI has attempted to have the case dismissed 18 times since it was first filed. On July 31, 2023, a federal judge refused CACI’s most recent motion to dismiss the case, which finally appears to be heading to trial.

Criminal Investigations into Detainee Abuse in Iraq

The US Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) opened at least 506 investigations into alleged abuses of people in the hands of US and other coalition forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2005, according to a US Department of Defense document reviewed by Human Rights Watch. The document details investigations into 376 cases of assault, 90 cases of deaths, 34 cases of theft, and 6 cases of sexual assault allegedly committed by US and coalition forces.

These US Army criminal investigations paint a stark picture of the scale and range of abuse that was alleged inside US-controlled prisons in Iraq. The most high-profile cases – like the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi – and hundreds more cases of abuse that never made headlines are outlined with clinical descriptions of violence.

The investigations concerned 225 allegations of assault and sexual assault in US-controlled detention facilities, involving at least 318 potential victims and 426 alleged abusers.

38 of those investigations upheld the allegations or found the accused guilty.

In 57 cases, investigators were unable to find sufficient evidence to prove or disprove the allegation or were unable to identify the suspect. In 79 cases, investigators declared the allegations unfounded. However, cases reviewed by CID highlighted several shortcomings in investigative processes, including a failure to identify and follow leads, failure to locate and interview witnesses, over-reliance on medical records without corroborating evidence, and failure to photograph or examine crime scenes. For example:

Figure 1: Screenshot of a case reviewed by the Criminal Investigation Division’s Automated Case Review System, including reviewer’s comments on shortcomings of the investigative process

In cases in which Army officials interviewed the victims and knew their identities, it appears that no attempt was made to couple punishments of abusers with compensation or other forms of redress.

Nineteen allegations of abuse were written off as standard operating procedure, leading the CID to conclude that the “offenses were unfounded” or “did not occur as alleged”:

Figure 2: Case summary written by the Criminal Investigation Division of the US Army published on 13 January 2006.

Figure 3: Case summary written by the Criminal Investigation Division of the US Army published on 13 January 2006.

Finally, 16 cases involved allegations of abuse committed by forces other than the US Army. Such cases were referred to investigators of the alleged abuser’s branch of the military, such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), for further investigation. For example:

Figure 4: Case summary written by the Criminal Investigation Division of the US Army published on 13 January 2006.

A Climate Enabling Torture

When the photos of detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib went public, then-President Bush sought to minimize the systemic nature of the problem by calling it “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” But investigations including by Human Rights Watch have found that decisions taken at the highest levels of government enabled, sanctioned, and justified these acts. Abu Ghraib was but one of several US military detention centers and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “black sites” worldwide where US forces, intelligence agents, and contractors carried out torture and other ill-treatment, or so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

When the first detainees arrived at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from Afghanistan in January 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld labeled them “unlawful combatants,” seeking to deny them protections under the Geneva Conventions. The same month, the Bush administration intensified its efforts to circumvent domestic and international prohibitions on torture, with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issuing memos that sought to legally justify torture and protect those engaging in it.

Denying detainees these protections enabled Rumsfeld to expand the list of interrogation techniques for use against prisoners at Guantanamo between December 2002 and April 2003.

Subsequent US government investigations, including the 2004 Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations (also known as the Schlesinger report), found that “the augmented techniques [approved by Rumsfeld] for Guantanamo migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded.”

The use of these techniques violated the prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners under the laws of armed conflict and international criminal law.

The Bush administration limited the scope of these policies and practices in subsequent years, including by reducing the list of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but stopped short of banning torture. In January 2009, then-President Barack Obama rescinded all Bush-era memos allowing torture. However, he stated that his administration would prosecute neither the authors of the memos nor those who carried out the acts described in them in the belief that they were legal.

The Legacy of Abu Ghraib

Ninety-seven US soldiers implicated in 38 cases of abuse that the US Army Criminal Investigation Division investigated in Iraqi detention centers between 2003 and 2005 received punishments.

Just 11 of these soldiers were referred to a court martial to face criminal charges, where they were found guilty of crimes including dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault, and battery. 9 of the 11 served prison sentences. Fourteen others received nonjudicial punishments (e.g., a fine, reduction in rank, letter of reprimand, or discharge from the service). Reports of disciplinary action were pending for 72 individuals as of the document’s publication date, January 13, 2006.

There is no public evidence that any US military officer has been held accountable for criminal acts committed by subordinates under the doctrine of command responsibility.

Human Rights Watch reports in 2005 and 2011 presented evidence warranting substantial criminal investigations into high-level government officials for the roles they played in setting interrogation and detention policies following the September 11, 2001 attacks, including former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (now deceased), and CIA Director George Tenet. Additional Human Rights Watch research outlined the systematic nature of torture in Iraq, and the high level of command at which it was condoned.

Every US administration from George W. Bush to Joe Biden has rebuffed efforts for meaningful accountability for torture.

Some steps have been taken to change policies and introduce stricter controls on the treatment of people in US custody abroad. Congress passed new laws, including the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits subjecting anyone in US custody or control, “regardless of nationality or physical location,” to “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” as defined by the Senate reservation to Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture. The Defense Department also established various offices and positions related to “Detainee Affairs,” and initiated a department-wide review of detainee-related policy directives.

In August 2022, the Pentagon released a 36-page action plan aimed at reducing risks to civilians in US military operations. The plan directs the Defense Department to incorporate civilian harm issues into its strategy, planning, training, and doctrine; improve and standardize investigations of civilian harm; and to review and update guidance on responding to civilian harm. However, the plan fails to include a mechanism for reviewing past instances of civilian harm that have gone unaddressed, uninvestigated, and unacknowledged for 20 years.

Via Human Rights Watch

The Ugly Side of American Exceptionalism: Refusing to Play by the Rules

Rebecca Gordon — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 04:02:08 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and his girlfriend in a tiny town on the Mediterranean. (In the middle of our six-week sojourn there, the girlfriend ran off to marry a Czech she’d met, but that’s another story.)

In Paris, I saw American tourists striding around in their shorts and sandals, cameras slung around their necks, staking out positions in cathedrals and museums. I listened to my mother’s commentary on what she considered their boorishness and insensitivity. In my 11-year-old mind, I tended to agree. I’d already heard the expression “the ugly American” — although I then knew nothing about the prophetic 1958 novel with that title about U.S. diplomatic bumbling in southeast Asia in the midst of the Cold War — and it seemed to me that those interlopers in France fit the term perfectly.

When I got home, I confided to a friend (whose parents, I learned years later, worked for the CIA) that sometimes, while in Europe, I’d felt ashamed to be an American. “You should never feel that way,” she replied. “This is the best country in the world!”

Indeed, the United States was, then, the leader of what was known as “the free world.” Never mind that, throughout the Cold War, we would actively support dictatorships (in Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, among other places) and actually overthrow democratizing governments (in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, for example). In that era of the G.I. Bill, strong unions, employer-provided healthcare, and general postwar economic dominance, to most of us who were white and within reach of the middle class, the United States probably did look like the best country in the world.

Things do look a bit different today, don’t they? In this century, in many important ways, the United States has become an outlier and, in some cases, even an outlaw. Here are three examples of U.S. behavior that has been literally egregious, three ways in which this country has stood out from the crowd in a sadly malevolent fashion.

Guantánamo, the Forever Prison Camp

In January 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush established an offshore prison camp at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The idea was to house prisoners taken in what had already been labelled “the Global War on Terror” on a little piece of “U.S.” soil beyond the reach of the American legal system and whatever protections that system might afford anyone inside the country. (If you wonder how the United States had access to a chunk of land on an island nation with which it had the frostiest of relations, including decades of economic sanctions, here’s the story: in 1903, long before Cuba’s 1959 revolution, its government had granted the United States “coaling” rights at Guantánamo, meaning that the U.S. Navy could establish a base there to refuel its ships. The agreement remained in force in 2002, as it does today.)

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In the years that followed, Guantánamo became the site of the torture and even murder of individuals the U.S. took prisoner in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries ranging from Pakistan to Mauritania. Having written for more than 20 years about such U.S. torture programs that began in October 2001, I find today that I can’t bring myself to chronicle one more time all the horrors that went on at Guantánamo or at CIA “black sites” in countries ranging from Thailand to Poland, or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or indeed at the Abu Ghraib prison and Camp NAMA (whose motto was: “No blood, no foul”) in Iraq. If you don’t remember, just go ahead and google those places. I’ll wait.

Thirty men remain at Guantánamo today. Some have never been tried. Some have never even been charged with a crime. Their continued detention and torture, including, as recently as 2014, punitive, brutal forced feeding for hunger strikers, confirmed the status of the United States as a global scofflaw. To this day, keeping Guantánamo open displays this country’s contempt for international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention against Torture. It also displays contempt for our own legal system, including the Constitution’s “supremacy” clause which makes any ratified international treaty like the Convention against Torture “the supreme law of the land.”

In February 2023, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, became the first representative of the United Nations ever permitted to visit Guantánamo. She was horrified by what she found there, telling the Guardian that the U.S. has

“a responsibility to redress the harms it inflicted on its Muslim torture victims. Existing medical treatment, both at the prison camp in Cuba and for detainees released to other countries, was inadequate to deal with multiple problems such as traumatic brain injuries, permanent disabilities, sleep disorders, flashbacks, and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“These men,” she added, “are all survivors of torture, a unique crime under international law, and in urgent need of care. Torture breaks a person, it is intended to render them helpless and powerless so that they cease to function psychologically, and in my conversations both with current and former detainees I observed the harms it caused.”

The lawyer for one tortured prisoner, Ammar al-Baluchi, reports that al-Baluchi “suffers from traumatic brain injury from having been subjected to ‘walling’ where his head was smashed repeatedly against the wall.” He has entered a deepening cognitive decline, whose “symptoms include headaches, dizziness, difficulty thinking and performing simple tasks.” He cannot sleep for more than two hours at a time, “having been sleep-deprived as a torture technique.”

The United States, Ní Aoláin insists, must provide rehabilitative care for the men it has broken. I have my doubts, however, about the curative powers of any treatment administered by Americans, even civilian psychologists. After all, two of them personally designed and implemented the CIA’s torture program.

The United States should indeed foot the bill for treating not only the 30 men who remain in Guantánamo, but others who have been released and continue to suffer the long-term effects of torture. And of course, it goes without saying that the Biden administration should finally close that illegal prison camp — although that’s not likely to happen. Apparently it’s easier to end an entire war than decide what to do with 30 prisoners.

Unlawful Weapons

The United States is an outlier in another arena as well: the production and deployment of arms widely recognized as presenting an immediate or future danger to non-combatants. The U.S. has steadfastly resisted joining conventions outlawing such weaponry, including cluster bombs (or more euphemistically, “cluster munitions”) and landmines.

In fact, the United States deployed cluster bombs in its wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan. (In the previous century, it dropped 270 million of them in Laos alone while fighting the Vietnam War.) Ironically — one might even say, hypocritically — the U.S. joined 146 other countries in condemning Syrian and Russian use of the same weapons in the Syrian civil war. Indeed, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that if Russia were using them in Ukraine (as, in fact, it is), that would constitute a “war crime.”

Now the U.S. has sent cluster bombs to Ukraine, supposedly to fill a crucial gap in the supply of artillery shells. Mind you, it’s not that the United States doesn’t have enough conventional artillery shells to resupply Ukraine. The problem is that sending them there would leave this country unprepared to fight two simultaneous (and hypothetical) major wars as envisioned in what the Pentagon likes to think of as its readiness doctrine.

What are cluster munitions? They are artillery shells packed with many individual bomblets, or “submunitions.” When one is fired, from up to 20 miles away, it spreads as many as 90 separate bomblets over a wide area, making it an excellent way to kill a lot of enemy soldiers with a single shot.

What places these weapons off-limits for most nations is that not all the bomblets explode. Some can stay where they fell for years, even decades, until as a New York Times editorial put it, “somebody — often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground — accidentally sets it off.” They can, in other words, lie in wait long after a war is over, sowing farmland and forest with deadly booby traps. That’s why then-Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon once spoke of “the world’s collective revulsion at these abhorrent weapons.” That’s why 123 countries have signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Among the holdouts, however, are Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the cluster bombs the U.S. has now sent to Ukraine each contains 88 bomblets, with, according to the Pentagon, a failure rate of under 2.5%. (Other sources, however, suggest that it could be 14% or higher.) This means that for every cluster shell fired, at least two submunitions are likely to be duds. We have no idea how many of these weapons the U.S. is supplying, but a Pentagon spokesman in a briefing said there are “hundreds of thousands available.” It doesn’t take much mathematical imagination to realize that they present a real future danger to Ukrainian civilians. Nor is it terribly comforting when Sullivan assures the world that the Ukrainian government is “motivated” to minimize risk to civilians as the munitions are deployed, because “these are their citizens that they’re protecting.”

I for one am not eager to leave such cost-benefit risk calculations in the hands of any government fighting for its survival. That’s precisely why international laws against indiscriminate weapons exist — to prevent governments from having to make such calculations in the heat of battle.

Cluster bombs are only a subset of the weapons that leave behind “explosive remnants of war.” Landmines are another. Like Russia, the United States is not found among the 164 countries that have signed the 1999 Ottawa Convention, which required signatories to stop producing landmines, destroy their existing stockpiles, and clear their own territories of mines.

Ironically, the U.S. routinely donates money to pay for mine clearance around the world, which is certainly a good thing, given the legacy it left, for example, in Vietnam. According to the New York Times in 2018:

“Since the war there ended in 1975, at least 40,000 Vietnamese are believed to have been killed and another 60,000 wounded by American land mines, artillery shells, cluster bombs and other ordnance that failed to detonate back then. They later exploded when handled by scrap-metal scavengers and unsuspecting children.”

Hot Enough for Ya?

As I write this piece, about one-third of this country’s population is living under heat alerts. That’s 110 million people. A heatwave is baking Europe, where 16 Italian cities are under warnings, and Greece has closed the Acropolis to prevent tourists from dying of heat stroke. This summer looks to be worse in Europe than even last year’s record-breaker when heat killed more than 60,000 people. In the U.S., too, heat is by far the greatest weather-related killer. Makes you wonder why Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill eliminating required water breaks for outside workers, just as the latest heat wave was due to roll in.

Meanwhile, New York’s Hudson Valley and parts of Vermont, including its capital Montpelier, were inundated this past week by a once-in-a-hundred-year storm, while in South Korea, workers raced to rescue people whose cars were trapped inside the completely submerged Cheongju tunnel after a torrential monsoon rainfall. Korea, along with much of Asia, expects such rains during the summer, but this year’s — like so many other weather statistics — have been literally off the charts. Journalists have finally experienced a sea change (not unlike the extraordinary change in surface water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean). Gone are the tepid suggestions that climate change “may play a part” in causing extreme weather events. Reporters around the world now simply assume that’s our reality.

When it comes to confronting the climate emergency, though, the United States has once again been bringing up the rear. As far back as 1992, at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, President George H.W. Bush resisted setting any caps on carbon-dioxide emissions. As the New York Times reported then, “Showing a personal interest on the subject, he singlehandedly forced negotiators to excise from the global warming treaty any reference to deadlines for capping emissions of pollutants.” And even then, Washington was resisting the efforts of poorer countries to wring some money from us to help defray the costs of their own environmental efforts.

Some things don’t change all that much. Although President Biden reversed Donald Trump’s move to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords, his own climate record has been a combination of two steps forward (the green energy transition funding found in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, for example) and a big step back (greenlighting the ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska’s north slope, not to speak of Senator Joe Manchin’s pride and joy, the $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline for natural gas).

And when it comes to remediating the damage our emissions have done to poorer countries around the world, this country is still a day late and billions of dollars short. In fact, on July 13th, climate envoy John Kerry told a congressional hearing that “under no circumstances” would the United States pay reparations to developing countries suffering the devastating effects of climate change. Although at the U.N.’s COP 27 conference in November 2022, the U.S. did (at least in principle) support the creation of a fund to help poorer countries ameliorate the effects of climate change, as Reuters reported, “the deal did not spell out who would pay into the fund or how money would be disbursed.”

Welcome to Solastalgia

I learned a new word recently, solastalgia. It actually is a new word, created in 2005 by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.” Albrecht’s focus was on Australian rural indigenous communities with centuries of attachment to their particular places, but I think the concept can be extended, at least metaphorically, to the rest of us whose lives are now being affected by the painful presences (and absences) brought on by environmental and climate change: the presence of unprecedented heat, fire, noise, and light; the presence of deadly rain and flooding; and the growing absence of ice at the Earth’s poles or on its mountains. In my own life, among other things, it’s the loss of fireflies and the almost infinite sadness of rarely seeing more than a few faint stars.

Of course, the “best country in the world” wasn’t the only nation involved in creating the horrors I’ve been describing. And the ordinary people who live in this country are not to blame for them. Still, as beneficiaries of this nation’s bounty — its beauty, its aspirations, its profoundly injured but still breathing democracy — we are, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young insisted, responsible for them. It will take organized, collective political action, but there is still time to bring our outlaw country back into what indeed should be a united community of nations confronting the looming horrors on this planet. Or so I hope and believe.

Via Tomdispatch.com

Syria faces daunting Obstacles in its Attempt to rejoin the International Fold

The Conversation — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 04:02:36 +0000

By Scott Lucas, University College Dublin | –

(The Conversation) – In the carefully composed photograph released by their state news agencies at the beginning of May, Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad has his arms outstretched to welcome the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi. The two men are beaming.

Raisi’s visit was a sign of Tehran’s essential support for Assad, more than 12 years after the Syrian leader’s bloody repression of a popular uprising that called for reform and guarantees of human rights. The meeting was also an attempt to portray that both leaderships are stable and in control amid Assad’s quest for normalisation and re-entry into the regional community of nations.

But it’s a facade. The template agreements for “strategic cooperation” and declaration of Iranian support for Assad via “sovereignty” cannot knit together a Syria that is fractured, perhaps for the long term. They cannot provide relief for Syrians facing inflation and shortages of food, fuel and utilities, let alone the 11 million — almost half of the pre-conflict population — who are refugees or internally displaced.

Nor can they sweep aside ten months of Iran’s nationwide protests, sparked by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini after her detention and reporting beaten for “inappropriate attire”. They cannot end the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear programme or lift US and European sanctions. And despite Iran-backed attacks on American personnel in the region, they cannot break US support for the Kurdish administration in northeast Syria.

Seven weeks after the Assad-Raisi photo in Damascus, another international meeting in mid-June testified to the illusions of an Iran-Syria “Axis of Resistance”.

In Kazakhstan’s capital, the Assad regime was joining the six and a half-year “Astana process” – the UN-sponsored agreement between Iran, Russia, and Turkey to monitor its 2016 ceasefire for the first time in that part of Syria. This would be a sign of Damascus being actively involved in the supposed resolution of the March 2011 uprising.

But as soon as the session began, illusion met reality. The regime’s deputy foreign minister, Ayman Sousan, demanded Turkey withdraw its forces from opposition territory in northwest Syria. The Turks unsurprisingly refused. They wanted the gathering to put pressure on the Kurdish administration in northeast Syria, which Ankara sees as part of the Turkish Kurdish insurgency PKK.

But that raises the challenge of confronting the US, the backer of the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic Forces, who had helped evict the Islamic State from the country in 2019. Russia, embroiled in Vladimir Putin’s failing invasion of Ukraine, showed no appetite for a showdown with Washington.

So everyone went home with nothing beyond Moscow’s declaration: “This is a very crucial process.”

Moving pieces

The two days in Astana highlighted the difficulty for both the Assad regime and Iran. In a Middle East kaleidoscope of many moving pieces, it is daunting for either to line up all of them.

Assad’s headline ploy has been the restoration of relations with Arab states, hoping to break political isolation and his economic bind. There has been success: UAE and Bahrain reopening embassies; Assad’s visits to the Emirates and Oman; and re-entry into the Arab League in May, with Saudi Arabia — once the leading supporter of anti-Assad factions — welcoming Assad to the summit in Jeddah.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Al Jazeera English: “Iraqi PM Sudani and Syria’s Assad hold talks in Damascus”

However, that process runs head-on into Assad’s reliance on Iran to maintain control over even part of Syria, given the longtime rivalry between Tehran and some Arab states — notably Saudi Arabia — throughout the region.

An Arabian pipedream?

The solution to the conundrum is a grand reconciliation, in which Iran would also repair its position in the region. In March, Iran and Saudi Arabia announced the resumption of diplomatic ties more than seven years after they were broken.

The China-brokered deal was accompanied by a high-level Iranian visit to the UAE. Tehran spoke loudly about the prospect of billions of dollars of Gulf investments in its battered economy.

The manoeuvres freed the Iranian leadership from an immediate crisis. Amid the nationwide protests, its currency had almost halved in value, sinking to 600,000:1 against the US dollar. The easing of tensions with the Arab states, as well as talk of an “interim deal” with the US over the nuclear programme, helped lift the rial to 500,000:1, relieving pressure on an official inflation rate of 50%, with increases for food about 75% per year.

But this is a tentative respite. Saudi Arabia and Iran remain on opposite sides in the Yemen civil war. They back different factions in Lebanon’s long-running political and economic turmoil. Gulf States are wary about the renewal of Iran-backed attacks on Iraqi bases which host US personnel, as well as any further moves by Tehran towards the capacity for a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, the International Crisis Group has highlighted the unending instability in the Assad-held part of Syria. No Gulf country is likely to want to spend significant sums in support of his regime. Syria is far from their top priority, and it offers poor returns on investment. They cannot realistically hope to compete with the influence that Tehran has built through years of military engagement.

Western sanctions limit potential economic gains – and US sanctions in particular impose major legal barriers and political costs. Also, investing large amounts in Syria with a devastated infrastructure, an impoverished population with little purchasing power, a predatory regime and dismal security in the areas it nominally controls would be like pouring money into a bottomless pit.

Assad can still pose before the cameras to claim legitimacy. But his Iranian backers are entangled in domestic difficulties, his Russian backers are being sapped of strength by Putin’s deadly folly in Ukraine, and his would-be Arab escape route is far from assured.

Scott Lucas, Professor, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Crimes and Dangers of Elliott Abrams: Why Biden Should not Appoint Him

Waging Nonviolence — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 04:10:30 +0000

To honor those who have died and suffered from the fires Biden nominee Elliott Abrams lit and fanned abroad, we must stop his appointment.

Ariel Gold and Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler

( Waging Nonviolence ) – It was a bright sunny March morning in 1980. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart. He stumbled and fell to the ground, dead.

Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But, after his friend Rev. Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadorian peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of liberation,” a perspective that espouses G-d’s preference for the poor and oppressed. His visibility as archbishop elevated his voice and the credibility of his critique of the conditions faced by peasants in El Salvador.

A month before his assassination, Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter requesting a halt to U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran government.

Over 250,000 people attended Romero’s funeral demonstrating the love of the Salvadoran people and echoing his demands for justice. Tragically, however, they were swimming against a historical current of meddling and manipulation which included murder, often orchestrated or at the very least condoned from the U.S.

Intentionally ignoring two U.S. embassy cables naming the general who ordered his personal bodyguard to carry out the assassination of Romero, in 1982, Elliot Abrams, the newly appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, said, “anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool.” Thanks to Abrams and his ilk’s support, U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran regime was dramatically increased that year. The following year, the U.S. gifted the Salvadoran military and government with U.S. advisors.

Last week, President Biden nominated Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s pick to join the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Elliot Abrams. If you’re not already outraged and infuriated, keep reading.

Under Abrams’ watch, over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, 75,000 Salvadorians were killed. In the village of El Mozote, the army’s Atlácatl Battalion herded women and children into a church convent and opened fire with U.S.-supplied M-16 automatic rifles before burning the building down. One hundred and forty children, average age six, were killed. In 1994, with blood still dripping from his hands, Abrams referred to the U.S.’s record on El Salvador as a “fabulous achievement.”

In addition to supporting the Salvadorian junta, Abrams was a defender of the Guatemalan Montt regime which oversaw the mass murder, rape and torture of scores of Indigenous Ixil Mayan people in the 1980s. The Montt regime was so brutal that it was later classified by the United Nations as genocidal. From his conviction for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair, to his roles supporting the Iraq war, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, and attempting to orchestrate a coup in Venezuela as recently as 2019, one thing is clear: Abrams doesn’t have a diplomatic bone in his body.

Article continues after bonus IC video
The Young Turks: “Biden Just Nominated This Accused War Criminal To A Diplomacy Advisory Commission

Abrams epitomizes an extreme form of American biblical nationalism, dressed in the distortions of Christianity and Judaism that ironically echo the papal bulls of 1452. These papal decrees, known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” codify the rights of white nations to acquire and dominate any lands they “discovered.” Similarly, Abrams speaks the language of the Global North proclaiming that their hegemony is the natural order of the world, as G-d wills it to be.

The Doctrine of Discovery inspired the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the “right” to exploit and plunder Latin America to be exclusive to the U.S. “We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety,” President James Monroe said. This served as a philosophical justification for the ideological boots Abram’s wore to stomp all over Latin America, the Middle East and other places. Abrams has left bloody footprints across the globe.

Steps have been taken over the past couple of decades to repair the damage done by Abrams and Co. in Latin America and other parts of the world. In December 2011, the El Salvadoran government apologized for the El Mozote massacre. In 2018, Oscar Romero was elevated to the status of saint. Pope Francis said Romero “left the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the gospel.” And just a few months ago, on March 30, the Vatican, formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” and called it antithetical to the Catholic faith.

Justice is long overdue for Romero, the other Salvadorian faith leaders who were murdered in the 1980s, the children murdered in El Mozote, and the Ixil Mayan women raped by death squads in Guatemala. To honor those who died and continue to suffer from the fires Elliott Abrams lit and fanned in their countries, we must reclaim the name of G-d from the political and religious ideologies that twist it for hatred and violence. The first step we must take is to ensure that Abrams does not receive another appointment to another U.S. administration. The blood of his victims call out from the ground, and hearing their cries we are called to act and respond.

This story was produced by Fellowship Magazine

Ariel Gold

Ariel Gold is the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She was the national co-director of the antiwar group CODEPINK, where she specialized in campaigns for Palestinian rights. She is a member of Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York where she resides and has been a longtime active member of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler

Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler is the pastor emeritus at Plymouth United Church of Christ, in Washington, D.C., and founder and director of Faith Strategies, which engages in political ministry and partners with FOR-USA. He is co-chair of the Black Homeownership Strike Task Force to combat the racial wealth gap in Washington, D.C, and has served as co-chair of the D.C. Poor People’s Campaign.

Waging Nonviolence

Torture, American Style; and the Cover-UP

Karen J. Greenberg — Fri, 26 May 2023 04:02:05 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the Blindman’s Buff variation of tag, a child designated as “It” is tasked with tapping another child while wearing a blindfold. The sightless child knows the other children, all able to see, are there but is left to stumble around, using sounds and knowledge of the space they’re in as guides. Finally, that child does succeed, either by bumping into someone, peeking, or thanks to sheer dumb luck.

Think of us, the American public, as that blindfolded child when it comes to our government’s torture program that followed the 9/11 disaster and the launching of the ill-fated war on terror. We’ve been left to search in the dark for what so many of us sensed was there.

We’ve been groping for the facts surrounding the torture program created and implemented by the administration of President George W. Bush. For 20 years now, the hunt for its perpetrators, the places where they brutalized detainees, and the techniques they used has been underway. And for 20 years, attempts to keep that blindfold in place in the name of “national security” have helped sustain darkness over light.

From the beginning, the torture program was enveloped in a language of darkness with its secret “black sites” where savage interrogations took place and the endless blacked-out pages of documents that might have revealed more about the horrors being committed in our name. In addition, the destruction of evidence and the squelching of internal reports only expanded that seemingly bottomless abyss that still, in part, confronts us. Meanwhile, the courts and the justice system consistently supported those who insisted on keeping that blindfold in place, claiming, for example, that were defense attorneys to be given details about the interrogations of their clients, national security would somehow be compromised.

Finally, however, more than two decades after it all began, the tide may truly be turning.

Despite fervid attempts to keep that blindfold in place, the search has not been in vain. On the contrary, over these last two decades, its layers have slowly worn away, thread by thread, revealing, if not the full picture of those medieval-style practices, then a damning set of facts and images relating to torture, American-style, in this century. Cumulatively, investigative journalism, government reports, and the testimony of witnesses have revealed a fuller picture of the places, people, nightmarish techniques, and results of that program.

First Findings

The fraying of that blindfold took endless years, starting in December 2002, when Washington Post writers Dana Priest and Barton Gellman reported on the existence of secret detention and interrogation centers in countries around the planet where cruel, unlawful techniques were being used against war-on-terror captives in American custody. Quoting from a 2001 State Department report on the treatment of captives, they wrote, “The most frequently alleged methods of torture include sleep deprivation, beatings on the soles of the feet, prolonged suspension with ropes in contorted positions and extended solitary confinement.”

Less than a year later, the American Civil Liberties Union, along with other groups, filed a Freedom of Information Act request (the first of many) for records pertaining to detention and interrogation in the war on terror. Their goal was to follow the trail leading to “numerous credible reports recounting the torture and rendition of detainees” and our government’s efforts (or the lack thereof) to comply “with its legal obligations with respect to the infliction of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Then, in 2004, the blindfold began to show some initial signs of wear. That spring, CBS News’s 60 Minutes II showed the first photographs of men held at Abu Ghraib, an American-controlled prison in Iraq. They were, among other things, visibly naked, hooded, shackled, and threatened by dogs. Those pictures sent journalists and legal advocates into a frenzied search for answers to how such a thing had happened in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. By that fall, they had obtained internal government documents exempting any war on terror captives from the usual legal protections from cruelty, abuse, and torture. Documents also appeared in which specific techniques of torture, renamed “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), were authorized by top officials of the Bush administration. They would be used on prisoners in secret CIA locations around the world (119 men in 38 or more countries).

None of this, however, yet added up to “Tag! I found you!”

Senator Feinstein’s Investigation

Before George Bush left office, Senator Dianne Feinstein began a congressional investigation into the CIA interrogation program. In the Obama years, she would battle to mount a full-scale one into the torture program, defying most of her colleagues, who preferred to follow President Obama’s advice to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

But Feinstein refused to back down (and we should honor her courage and dedication, even as we witness the present drama of her insistence on remaining in the Senate despite a devastating process of aging). Instead of retreating, Feinstein only doubled down and, as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, launched an in-depth investigation into the torture program’s evolution and the grim treatment of those prisoners at what came to be known as “CIA black sites.”

Buy the Book

Feinstein’s investigator, Daniel Jones, spent years reading through six million pages of documents. Finally, in December 2014, her committee issued a 525-page “executive summary” of his findings. Yet his full report — 6,700 pages with 35,300 footnotes — remained classified on the grounds that, were the public to see it, national security might be harmed. Still, that summary convincingly laid out not just the widespread use of torture but how it “proved not to be an effective means of obtaining accurate information.” In doing so, it dismantled the CIA’s justification for its EITs which rested on “claims of their effectiveness.”

Meanwhile, Leon Panetta, Obama’s director of the CIA, conducted an internal investigation into torture. Never declassified, the Panetta Review, as it came to be known, reportedly found that the CIA had inflated the value of the information it had gotten with the use of torture techniques. For example, in the brutal interrogation of the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Agency claimed that those techniques had elicited information from him that helped thwart further terrorist plots. In fact, the information had been obtained from other sources. The review reportedly acknowledged that EITs were in no way as effective as the CIA had claimed.

The Cultural Sphere

In those years, bits of light from the cultural world began to illuminate the dark horror of those enhanced interrogation techniques. In 2007, after President Bush had acknowledged the use of just such “techniques” and had moved 14 detainees from the CIA’s black sites to Guantánamo, his infamous offshore prison of injustice in Cuba, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney directed Taxi to the Dark Side. It told the story of Dilawar, a taxi driver in Afghanistan who died in American custody after severe mistreatment. That film would be one of the earliest public exposés of cruelty and mistreatment in the war on terror.

But such films didn’t always yield doses of light. In 2012, for instance, Zero Dark Thirty, a movie heavily influenced by CIA advisers, argued that those harsh interrogations had helped keep America safer — specifically by leading U.S. authorities to bin Laden, a meme often repeated by government officials. In fact, reliable information leading to bin Laden had been obtained without those techniques.

Increasingly, however, films began to highlight the voices of those who had been tortured. The Mauritanian, for example, was based on Guantánamo Diary, a memoir by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a tortured Mauritanian held at that prison for 14 years. Slahi, never charged, was finally released and returned to Mauritania. As New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg summed up his experience, “The confessions he made under duress [were] recanted [and] a proposed case against him [was] deemed by the prosecutor to be worthless in court because of the brutality of the interrogation.”

Abu Zubaydah

Last year, award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney once again gave us a film on torture, The Forever Prisoner, focused on a Guantánamo detainee, Abu Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn. On him, the CIA first tested its harsh interrogation techniques, claiming he was a leading member of al-Qaeda, an assumption later disproved. He remains one of only three Gitmo detainees neither charged by the military commissions at that prison, nor cleared for release.

Nothing captures the futility of the blindfold — or sometimes even the futility of lifting it — more than Zubaydah’s story, which was at the heart of the story of torture in these years. The Senate Select Committee’s 525-page executive summary referred to him no less than 1,343 times.

Captured in Pakistan in 2002 and first taken to a series of black sites for interrogation, Zubaydah was initially believed to be the third highest-ranking member of al-Qaeda, a claim later abandoned, along with the allegation that he had even been a member of that terrorist organization. He was the detainee for whom enhanced interrogation techniques were first authorized by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, relying in part on the Justice Department’s greenlighting of such techniques as “lawful” rather than as torture (legally forbidden under both domestic and international law). Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s lawyer, summarized the horrific techniques used on him this way:

“His captors hurled him into walls and crammed him into boxes and suspended him from hooks and twisted him into shapes that no human body can occupy. They kept him awake for seven consecutive days and nights. They locked him, for months, in a freezing room. They left him in a pool of his own urine. They strapped his hands, feet, arms, legs, torso, and head tightly to an inclined board, with his head lower than his feet. They covered his face and poured water up his nose and down his throat until he began to breathe the water, so that he choked and gagged as it filled his lungs. His torturers then left him to strain against the straps as he began to drown. Repeatedly. Until, just when he believed he was about to die, they raised the board long enough for him to vomit the water and retch. Then they lowered the board and did it again. The torturers subjected him to this treatment at least eighty-three times in August 2002 alone. On at least one such occasion, they waited too long and Abu Zubaydah nearly died on the board.”

In addition, as Dexter Filkins reported in the New Yorker in 2016, Zubaydah lost his left eye while in CIA custody.

As the Feinstein committee’s torture report makes clear, CIA personnel present at that black site cabled back to Washington the importance of erasing any information about the nature of Zubaydah’s interrogation, implicitly acknowledging just how wrongful his treatment had been. The July 2002 cable asked for “reasonable assurance that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” CIA higher-ups assured the agents that “all major players are in concurrence that [Abu Zubaydah] should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

Sadly enough, that promise has been kept to this very day. In 2005, CIA officials authorized the destruction of the tapes of Zubaydah’s questioning and, never charged with a crime, he is still in Guantánamo.

And yet, despite the promise that he would remain incommunicado, with each passing year we learn more about what was done to him. In October 2021, in fact, in the United States v. Zubaydah, the justices of the Supreme Court for the first time openly discussed his treatment and Justices Sonia Sotomayer, Neil Gorsuch, and Elena Kagan publicly used the word “torture” to describe what was done to him.

Elsewhere as well, the blindfold has been shredded when it comes to the horror of torture, as ever more of Zubaydah’s story continues to see the light of day. This May, the Guardian published a story about a report done by the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University Law School that included a series of 40 drawings Zubaydah had made and annotated at Guantánamo. In them, he graphically depicted his torture at CIA black sites and at that prison.

The images are beyond grotesque and, like a cacophonous symphony you can’t turn off, it’s hard to witness them without closing your eyes. They show beating, shackling from the ceiling, sexual abuse, waterboarding, confinement in a coffin, and so much more. In one picture that he titled “The Vortex,” the techniques were combined as Zubaydah — in a self-portrait — cries out in agony. Attesting to the accuracy of the scenes he drew, the faces of his torturers have been blacked out by the authorities to protect their identities.

As the Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington reported, Helen Duffy, Mr. Zubaydah’s international legal representative, highlighted how “remarkable” it was that his drawings had ever seen the light of day even though he hasn’t “been able to communicate directly with the outside world” in all these endless years.

Calls for Action

In the years of the Biden presidency, the international community has focused on Guantánamo in unprecedented ways. In January 2022, “after 20 years and well over 100 visits,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (the ICRC) called for the release of as many of the remaining prisoners there as possible and, more recently, raised alarm over the failing health and premature aging of its 30 aging inmates.

Recently, the United Nations carved out new ground as well. In April, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued an opinion condemning the brutality long used against Mr. Zubaydah and called for his immediate release. That group further noted that the continued detention of the prisoners at Guantánamo could potentially “constitute crimes against humanity.”

With each passing year, ever more details about Washington’s torture programs have come to light. Yet, even now, ferocious attempts are still being made to keep the blindfold in place. As a result, to this day we’re left searching, arms extended, while those who have crucial information about this country’s nightmarish commitment to torture do their best to avoid us, hoping that the endless passage of time will keep them out of reach until we pursuers finally run out of energy.

To this day, much still remains in darkness, while Congress and American policymakers continue to refuse to address the legacy of such wrongdoing. But as the constant dribble of information suggests, the story simply won’t go away until, someday, the United States officially acknowledges what it did — what, if others were now doing it, would be instantly denounced by the same lawmakers and policymakers. That history of torture won’t go away, in fact, until this country apologizes for it, declassifies as much of the Feinstein report as possible, and provides for the rehabilitation of Abu Zubaydah and others whose physical and psychological health was savaged by their mistreatment at American hands.

It’s one thing to say, as Barack Obama told Congress a month into his presidency, that the United States “does not torture.” It’s another to expose the misdeeds of the war on terror and accept the costs as deterrence against it ever happening again.

Via Tomdispatch.com