The American Way of Torture

The American Way of Torture

Weekend Edition

January 7 - 9, 2011

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal, not in the shadows where it has always lurked, but up front and central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians. Rituals of coercion and humiliation seep through the culture, to the extent that before Christmas American travelers began to rebel at the invasive pat-down searches, conducted by the TSA’s airport security teams, groping around bosoms and crotches.

Covertly, there was always plenty of torture, just as there were assassinations, high and low. After World War Two the CIA’s predecessor, OSS, imported Nazi experts in interrogation techniques. But this was the era of Cold War competition: Uncle Sam the Good against the dirty Russians and Chinese. The US government would go to desperate lengths to counter accusations that its agents in the CIA or USAID practiced torture.

One famous case was that of Dan Mitrione, working for the US Agency for International Development, teaching refinements in torture techniques to Brazilian and Uruguayan interrogators. Mitrione was ultimately kidnapped by the Tupamaro guerillas and executed, becoming the subject of Costa Gavras’ movie State of Siege. The CIA mounted major cover-up operations to try to discredit the accusations against Mitrione, quoted as having said to his students: "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect."

The American liberal conscience began to make its accommodation with torture in June, 1977, which was the month the London Sunday Times published a major expose of torture of Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces and the security agency, Shin Bet. Suddenly American supporters of Israel were arguing that certain techniques – sensory deprivation, prolonged stress positions while hooded, incarceration in “cells” the size of packing crates, etc – somehow weren’t really torture, or were morally justifiable torture under “ticking time bomb” theory.

Ahead lay the repellent spectacle of Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, and a supposed liberal defender of civil rights, recommending to Israel the notion of “torture warrants”, with the targets of the warrants being “subjected to judicially monitored physical measures designed to cause excruciating pain without leaving any lasting damage.' One form of torture recommended by the Harvard professor was “the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails.”

With the Great War on Terror, launched after the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11/2001, torture made its march into the full light of day.

One hands-on executive in this itinerary was George Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, as Andrew Cockburn described here in 2007. At Guantanamo, it was Rumsfeld who gave verbal and subsequently written approval to torture suspects, using the notorious techniques of isolation, sleep deprivation and psychic degradation, with Rumsfeld micromanaging the humiliations. (For one prisoner’s horrifying torments in Guantanamo, read Richard Neville’s account last week on this site of David Hicks’ new book, Guantanamo, My Journey.)

In the case of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, there is again a trail of evidence showing it was Rumsfeld who personally decreed and monitored stress positions, individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. One US army officer, Janis Karpinski, described finding in Abu Ghraib a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators.

It was a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld, authorizing techniques such as use of dogs, stress positions, starvation. On the paper, in Rumsfeld's handwriting, was the terse instruction, "Make sure this happens!!"

James Bovard wrote on this site earlier this week that “Perhaps Bush’s most important legacy is his embrace of torture:”

“In a June 2010 speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he declared, ‘Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.’ There is no independent evidence that Bush-era torture saved any American lives.

“The fact that a former president can stand up in public and admit that he ordered torture is a sea change for the American republic. (While he was president, Bush consistently denied that the U.S. government engaged in torture.) … In reality, the Bush administration’s torture policies were simply the most vivid example of its belief that the president was entitled to do as he pleases. Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury declared in 2006, ‘Under the law of war, the president is always right.’”

On the home front torture as a drastic mode of social control flowered luxuriantly in the America’s prison system, whose population began to rocket up in the 1970s to its present 2.5 million total. Sanctioned male rape goes hand in hand with increasingly sadistic solitary confinement with prolonged sensory deprivation – a condition in which some 25,000 prisoners are currently being driven mad.

As the Bush years drew to a close liberals dared hope that the rule of law would return and with it respect for internationally agreed prohibitions on torture and treatment of combatants. Anticipation grew that the torturers, with the Bush high command at the apex, would face formal charges. Candidate Obama sedulously fanned that hope.

The moment of opportunity arrived on January 20, the day Obama was sworn in as president and declared that “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he said. He added that the United States is “ready to lead once more.”

On January 21, 1977, on his first day in office President Jimmy Carter fulfilled his campaign pledge issuing a pardon to those who avoided serving in the Vietnam war by fleeing the U.S. or not registering. If he’d waited a month or two, the honeymoon was already turning tepid and he might well have lost his nerve.

On his second day in office In his second full day in office, President Obama signed a series of executive orders Thursday morning to close the Guantanamo detention center within a year, ban the harshest interrogation methods and review military war crimes trials.

In his first state of the Union address, a week later Obama declared to the joint session of Congress that “I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture. We can make that commitment here tonight.” Within days of this guarantee, Obama's Justice Department lawyers were telling U.S. judges in explicit terms that the new administration would not be moving on from Bush's policies on the legal status of renditions and of supposed enemy combatants.

These lawyers from Obama’s Department of Justice emphasized to judges that they, like DoJ lawyers instructed by Bush’s lawyers, held that captives seized by the US government and conveyed to secret prisons to be tortured, had no standing in US courts and the Obama regime has no legal obligations to defend or even admit its actions in any US courtroom. “Enemy combatants” would not be afforded international legal protections, whether on the field of battle in Afghanistan or, if kidnapped by US personnel, anywhere in the world.

The torture system is flourishing, and the boundaries of the American empire marked by overseas torture centers such as Bagram. There are still detainees in Guantanamo – as of November last year 174 of them. They are supposedly destined for a Supermax in Illinois.

For the past seven months 22-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, first an army prison in Kuwait, now in Quantico, Virginia, has been held 23 hours out of 24 in solitary confinement in his cell, under constant harassment. If his eyes close between 5am and 8pm he is jolted awake. In daylight hours he has to respond “yes” to guards every five minutes. An hour a day he is taken to another cell where he walks figures of eight. If he stops he is taken back to his other cell.

Manning is accused of giving documents to Wikileaks. He has not been tried or convicted. Visitors report that Manning is going downhill mentally as well as physically. His lawyer’s efforts to improve his condition have been rebuffed by the Army. Accusations that his treatment amounts to torture has been indignantly denounced by prominent conservatives and some liberals. Gov. Huckabee and others have called for him to be summarily executed. After the columnist Glenn Greenwald publicized Manning’s treatment in mid-December, there was a moderate commotion. The U.N.’s top monitor of torture is investigating his case.

Meanwhile Manning fights for sanity in Quantico. He faces months, if not years, of the same. Will he end up like accused Chicagoan Jose Padilla, four years in total isolation and silence before his trial in 2007 (convicted as a terrorist and given 17 years) , with his lawyer informed by prison staff that Padilla had become docile and inactive to the point that he resembled “a piece of furniture.”

Memo to British prime minister David Cameron: Resist all extradition requests by the US government, on the grounds that those accused of terrorism cannot possibly expect anything but torture and a kangaroo trial. Imagine Julian Assange’s fate in a US prison, awaiting trial.

As the British lawyer, Yvonne Ridley, put it on this site earlier this week:

“As 2011 dawns the British Prime Minister David Cameron is faced with some hard choices this year, none more difficult than probably deciding whether or not to scrap our extradition treaty with the US and refuse to hand over a group of British citizens to Barack Obama’s America….

“It was Blair’s government that introduced the one-sided 2003 Extradition Treaty to please and appease the Bush Administration. Legislation drawn up in panic and haste is never a good idea nor was it wise to allow America to extend its jurisdiction in to the UK for that is exactly what has happened. And I wonder if the legislation was really drawn up by UK lawyers since a close inspection of the original documents reveal the liberal use of American English.

“I would urge Cameron to resist all of the existing US Extradition requests just as he would if the same demands were being made by some banana republic.”

I wrote here last year,

“The irony is that a moral debate is finally in motion over America’s horrifying sentencing laws. In New York State, the Rockefeller drug laws, which destroyed so many thousands of lives with mandatory sentencing, are being modified. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is courageously trying to coax into life a national commission to review the criminal justice system. Webb tells the Washington Post that cops and prosecutors often target the wrong people and says he believes society can be made safer while making the system more ‘humane and cost-effective.’ He flourishes a fine piece by Atul Gawande in the March 30 issue of The New Yorker stigmatizing solitary confinement (‘at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons’) as torture.”

That forecast sounds foolish now. But then, maybe I was assuming that a man I mistrusted from the day I clapped eyes on his speeches, would nonetheless improve the public tone on issues of torture and punishment. In fact Obama in this area as in so many others has merely given the ethics and practices of the Bush era his seal of approval.

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TERRORISM IS EVERYWHERE!

TERRORISM IS EVERYWHERE!

THE NEXT CONGRESS WILL BE FILLED WITH FRINGE REPUBLICANS ALL TOO EAGER TO PLAY THE TERROR CARD ON EVERY ISSUE

By Stephan Salisbury


This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

The woman who puzzled over Hispanics in her audience of high-school students and suggested they looked "Asian" was defeated in her run for the Senate in Nevada. The guy who called Islam a cult was knocked out of the Kentucky gubernatorial race. The bizarre candidate who threatened to "take out" a reporter was brushed aside in his bid for the governorship of New York.

Despite the electoral failures of Sharron Angle, Ron Ramsey, Carl Paladino, and a host of others inhabiting what used to be America's political peripheries, the next Congress will have a decidedly fringy tone. No wonder the wilder types already there are looking forward to the January 2011 legislative session with such relish: so many investigations crying out to be launched; so many dictators and thugs still hanging on in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela; terrorism in the streets of Portland; foreign terrorists flocking to America; secret government documents splayed across the front pages of our newspapers.

They wonder if the U.S. hasn't simply become a pitiful, helpless giant. But the rest of us ought to wonder just what kind of politics is going to grow in the strange, rich Petri dish of the new Congress.

Consider just one area that will be a major focus of congressional interest: immigration, an issue that will gain potency as it melds into the rhetoric of terror.

Foreigners and terrorists: Really, what's the difference? That the nation has grown and prospered precisely because of adaptive immigration is beside the point, an obvious reflection of someone caught in the old mind-set of the Sept. 10 world. Interestingly, though, only about 8 percent of those who cast ballots in the 2010 election cited immigration concerns as their primary motivator. Of those who did, however, nearly 70 percent were Republicans.
With their new House majority, the Republicans plan to pay some major attention to that 8 percent of the motivated electorate. Immigration matters will play out largely in two key House committees, Homeland Security and Judiciary, and critical members of each committee told me they intend to investigate past actions of the Obama administration "fully and completely," block any kind of comprehensive immigration reform, expose supposed lax enforcement of immigration laws and inadequate resources devoted to -- as one Judiciary member put it -- "boots on the ground." Terrorism will play a key role in hearings on virtually all these topics, most dramatically, no doubt, in focusing attention on what Republicans view as a shadowy Latin network of terrorist infiltrators seeking to exploit the U.S. failure to protect its own southern border.

Most people are probably blissfully unaware of a burgeoning conspiracy in which Cuba and Venezuela are reputedly assisting African and Middle Eastern extremists as they slip into the United States and fan out across the country. That lack of awareness will not last long, however, if the new Republican majority in the House has anything to do with it. Key representatives are already promising to pound the drums ever more loudly and so expose this supposed burst of clandestine activity over the next couple of years. More on that in a moment.

Peter King, vocal New York Republican opponent of the Lower Manhattan Islamic cultural center, aka the mosque at ground zero, will soon become chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. He has made it all too clear that he intends to "investigate" with abandon and continue to bird-dog that dreaded Manhattan "mosque." King's focus will serve to keep the specter of imminent terrorism directly before the country, infusing all manner of issues with claims and insinuations about bombs, plots, and massive threats.

He has made it no secret that he wants hearings on the administration's failure to put more money into protecting New York City from the threat of nuclear terrorism, on what kinds of screw-ups led to the Fort Hood shootings last year, and on what King views as the Obama administration's unconscionable plans to close Guantánamo and the Justice Department's plans to hold 9/11-related trials in New York civilian courts. (That neither of these "plans" is exactly at the top of the Obama agenda anymore won't matter a bit.)

King is a firm believer in Fortress America, too: in the creation, above all, of an impregnable fence along the border with Mexico. For want of such a fence, the nation's "homeland security" will, he insists, be eternally "at risk," as he wrote Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in a joint letter with Darrell Issa, the California congressman who will conduct his own set of investigations as new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

King sees Islam as virtually synonymous with violent extremism and, during last summer's raging controversy over whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's proposed Manhattan Islamic center should be built, he called for an investigation of its funders. (In fact, there are, as yet, no funders.) Now, developers of the Islamic center -- called Park51 -- are seeking public economic development funds aimed at blighted downtown Manhattan. King doesn't like that either. "It's an affront to the memory of all those who were murdered on 9/11," he insists. "This shows a gross insensitivity to the most fundamental feelings of New Yorkers and to those murdered on 9/11 it is a slap in the face that is a terrible insult."

That Islam can be linked to terrorism is a no-brainer for the congressman and many other conservatives and Republicans. This same thinking has now infected the controversy over WikiLeaks. Why not, King wonders, label the largely volunteer WikiLeaks group a terrorist organization, thus facilitating seizure of its assets and arrests of anyone remotely associated with it, including, presumably, readers? Tom Flanagan, a former aide to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has gone one step further, offering an idea that Republican leaders and conservative commentators appear to find appealing. Flanagan has proposed assassination as the fate for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Sarah Palin seems to agree. In a note on Facebook, she likened WikiLeaks to al-Qaida. Of Assange, she wrote, "He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?" (There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever that Assange has "blood on his hands.")

This violent thinking has spread like the Ebola virus through conservative circles. William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, typically wants to know why Assange and his colleagues have not been "neutralized" by the U.S. government. Mike Huckabee, a former governor as well as past and possibly future Republican presidential candidate, suggests those associated with the leaks get the death penalty -- but only after fair trials. "Any lives they endangered, they're personally responsible for and the blood is on their hands," he said. (One wonders why there is such a focus on bloody hands in the Republican Party.)

All Issues Are Terrorism Issues
What should be increasingly clear is that Republican members of the incoming Congress are looking for terrorism in ever more startling places. In fact, it seems that, for them, all domestic issues are potentially terrorist issues, perhaps none more so than immigration. Even in the current lame-duck session of Congress, their unsettling rhetoric has enswathed immigration in such claims. Take the debate over the DREAM Act, which would provide an avenue to citizenship via military service or college attendance for foreign-born young people brought to this country at a young age by their undocumented immigrant parents.

Steve King, the Iowa Republican who will chair the Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee, has been deriding the DREAM Act as a "special amnesty program [and] affirmative action program for illegals." Should it become law, he warns of a day when student "illegals" would find themselves "sitting in the classroom next to ... a widow or a widower or a son or a daughter of someone who has lost their life in Iraq or Afghanistan defending our liberty and our freedom." Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, goes King one better, suggesting that the DREAM Act could well pave the way for another 9/11 plotted by those "from the dangerous regions of the Middle East."

Former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock, now a popular, nationally syndicated conservative talk radio show host, claims the DREAM Act is par for the course "in an era when the Obama regime considers terrorists citizens and citizens suspects -- when Jesus' birth is considered myth, but Obama's birth is gospel."

Steve King believes up to 4 million illegal immigrants a year are piling into the United States. These, he told me, add up to a "huge human haystack" composed of "vicious, violent criminals" and an unknown number of bona fide terrorists.

"As a sovereign nation, we must control our borders," King argues. "We must ensure that terrorists do not infiltrate the United States. We must tighten and strengthen border control efforts so that illegal aliens and drug smugglers do not enter our country." A building contractor back home in Iowa, King has even designed a border fence to show how easily the country could staunch the tide of "illegals" from Mexico and, of course, the terrorists among them. "We do this with livestock all the time," he explained, as he described the fence to me.

Terrorists at the Door

The idea that terrorists are probing the southern border in the guise of immigrants has recently become part and parcel of Republican border-policy mythology. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican and current ranking minority member of the homeland security intelligence subcommittee, told me that "the border is going to be a focus" of extensive congressional investigation. "Who is coming into the country?" he wondered rhetorically in our conversation and added, "There is a massive tide of immigration without control."

Among those furtively crossing the southern border, McCaul believes, are an unknown number of terrorist operatives. This past year, he notes, authorities arrested Anthony Tracy, an American Muslim, and charged him with assisting nearly 300 undocumented Somalis in entering the United States. Tracy told U.S. authorities that a Cuban official in Africa helped provide papers for the immigrants, enabling them to reach Mexico. From there, the Somalis crossed over the southern U.S. border and have now vanished.

Conservative pundits and some media outlets have made much of this, suggesting members of al-Shabaab, the Somali terrorist group, are now roaming the American countryside. But there is no tangible evidence that any member of al-Shabaab entered the country with Tracy's help, according to an immigration spokeswoman.

McCaul said the Somali case and how the Obama administration let it happen would be a key topic in hearings in which he and other Republicans will demand answers. The real question is: Did it happen at all? Immigration authorities have not only been unable to find members of al-Shabaab who entered the country from the southern border -- with or without Tracy's help -- they haven't been able to locate any of the 300 supposed Somalis at all.

The federal judge trying the case, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, dubbed it "shaky" at Tracy's trial. Absent any smuggled Somalis, she pointed out, the government was unable to prove anything. Given the presence of informers at the center of so many terrorism prosecutions since 9/11, it should come as no surprise that Tracy has a long and mysterious past as an informer for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency and possibly the Drug Enforcement Administration as well. What that means in the Somali case remains unclear. It is, however, clear that Tracy served only a four-month federal sentence in the incident and is now chatting up authorities.

Keep in mind that murkiness is a useful political tool. It will certainly be the stuff of upcoming congressional hearings, which will echo the endless rounds of anti-communist hearings that dominated Washington in the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee and similar panels in the 1950s. What can't be seen must be feared, and in the confused darkness, passionate certainty grows.

In that murky vein, Republicans also hope to expose the links they see among Iran, Hezbollah, and Latin American lands, especially Venezuela. Right-wing commentators and military analysts assert Hezbollah is increasingly active in the Colombian drug trade, is working with Mexican drug cartels, and has ties to Venezuelan authorities.

Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has been increasingly vocal in denouncing Hezbollah's reputed march toward the Rio Grande. Earlier this year, she shared her concerns with the Department of Homeland Security. Within weeks, Mexico reported that it had broken up Hezbollah operations, although what "Hezbollah" was actually doing, if anything, is difficult to say.
Nevertheless, the talk of Hezbollah on the border has grown crazily since the supposed arrest of Jameel Nasr, described in second- and third-hand news accounts as a "Hezbollah operative" in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. This arrest, initially reported in July by a Kuwaiti newspaper, has not only not been confirmed, but Homeland Security officials insist that they have no "credible information" of any terror groups on the southern border.

That apparently is not good enough for the American right wing. They prefer to follow one of the primary laws of the post-9/11 world: Whatever can be imagined is in fact true. What "could be" invariably trumps what "is." Is it possible that supporters of Hezbollah are plotting terror attacks from bases in Tijuana? Of course it is, therefore it must be so.

Could Somalis be lining up to travel to Cuba, Mexico, and Texas? It is possible, as so much is possible, therefore it must be so. A corollary to this law is that if a falsehood or rumor is repeated often enough, it becomes so. Hence, Jameel Nasr, Hezbollah operative, who may not even exist, actually was arrested as he plotted terrorist operations for Hezbollah just south of Texas.

A more realistic appraisal of Muslim activity in Latin America comes from an overlooked WikiLeaks document, a classified cable from the U.S. Consulate in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which describes "the unique possibilities for Muslim engagement" with the U.S. in that country. Writing at the end of 2009, the consul reported that there were some Hezbollah supporters among recent Lebanese immigrants to Brazil. (That in itself is hardly surprising since Hezbollah is a popular, deeply rooted political movement that controls significant parts of southern Lebanon.)

The consul also informed Washington that such immigrants were surprisingly few in number and were completely overshadowed by the country's mainstream Muslim leaders, who have exhibited a keen interest in and curiosity about the United States, and are opposed to extremist ideologies of any kind. These leaders, he wrote, are eager "to engage, acutely aware of the dangers of radicalism, and had solid achievements in integrating Muslim and Brazilian identities, making them an excellent example of how a unique MMC [Muslim minority community] has, by and large, carved out a positive space within a diverse Latin American country." In other words, in the real world, the vast majority of Muslims in Latin America are eager for the same kind of stability and engagement as Muslims in the U.S.

But this view -- and the importance it places on dialogue -- does not fit the prevailing nativist mythology in this country or Republican and right-wing efforts to meld terrorism, Islam, and immigration into a single muddy brew (a characteristic of much public debate in the U.S. since 9/11). It appears we have entered a post-analytic world where the point of public discourse is not to make distinctions but to obliterate them.

A tiny group of radical extremists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, have become indistinguishable from a billion and a half Muslims all over the world. A bizarre and convoluted ideology, worked out to justify specific attacks on the U.S. and Egypt, has come to stand in for Islamic sacred texts and holy law. The roughly 50 al-Qaida fighters remaining in Afghanistan have become a synecdoche for the whole of the Muslim Middle East and South Asia.

Political dissenters in the United States have been absorbed into the terrorism trope as well. Information -- which is, after all, what has been disseminated by WikiLeaks -- is increasingly viewed as a potential terrorist weapon. Absorbing that information (that is, reading the documents) could even amount to material support for terrorism. In such a world, the counter-terrorism efforts of the U.S. government are trained on the entire civilian population, whether through electronic monitoring or fiddling with everyone's junk.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft noted the importance of blurring all distinctions years ago. "In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers," he proclaimed in June 2002. "They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values and kill innocent people."

It's all right there, hidden in plain sight. Terrorists are Muslims, Muslims are immigrants, immigrants are residents. Around it goes. Increasingly, immigration enforcement is becoming an anti-terrorism effort. Anyone and everyone is a suspect. That is the reality played out at every airport; it is the narrative touched by every monitored e-mail and tapped telephone call.

We are a fearful nation eating away at itself and the wolves are prowling the southern borders. Welcome to Congress, 2011.

Stephan Salisbury is a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is "Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland."

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