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Friday, November 02, 2007

 

The United States and Torture

*
A few days back a friend and I went to see "Rendition", the movie based on the experience of Canadian citizen Maher Arar. Both of us came out of the theater feeling depressed. We knew what the movie was about and didn't expect it to make us feel good but we had no idea how deeply the film would affect us

It is one thing to read about what our government is doing in the name of fighting terrorism, watching depiction of the nefarious activities on a big screen is something else. The film-makers adapted the basic facts; some liberties were taken. The movie made me feel as though I emerged from a sewer, I felt ashamed.

Jacobo Timmerman's 1981 book "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number" described his incarceration and torture for 30 months during Argentina's dirty war. In the 1970's the U.S. actively assisted juntas in Latin American nations to carry out atrocities against their citizens.

It is not my first post about torture and the United States' cozy relationships with brutal regimes. It has happened under Democrats too. The Extraordinary Rendition program began during the Clinton administration. Republicans, however, are more zealous when it comes to dark and secretive programs. They seem to have a warped outlook about oppression; rulers of some countries can do no wrong, while others face threats and punitive actions.

It is a strange world. Syria is on our "enemies list" and yet it was Syria where Maher Arar was renditioned for torture. No doubt the Syrians were rewarded in cash and kind. According to Radio Free Europe, Poland and Romania cooperated with CIA in setting up illegal detention centers. Airports in UK were used during Blair's premiership for flights ferrying "renditioned" prisoners.





The True Purpose of Torture
Naomi Klein
The Guardian - Saturday May 14, 2005

Guantánamo is there to terrorise - both inmates and the wider world

I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an event honouring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world's most famous victim of "rendition", the process by which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when US interrogators detained him and "rendered" him to Syria, where he was held for 10 months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings.

Arar was being honoured for his courage by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organisation. The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some speakers were unable even to mention the honoured guest by name, as if he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: the tenuous "evidence" - later discredited - that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?

In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, "not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so." Fear of being the next Maher Arar.

The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: you are being watched, your neighbour may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you could disappear on to a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay", to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights.

But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people being intimidated need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that they demand justice. This helps explain why the defence department will release certain kinds of seemingly incriminating information about Guantánamo - pictures of men in cages, for instance - at the same time that it acts to suppress photographs on a par with what escaped from Abu Ghraib. And it might also explain why the Pentagon approved a new book by a former military translator, including the passages about prisoners being sexually humiliated, but prevented him from writing about the widespread use of attack dogs. This strategic leaking of information, combined with official denials, induces a state of mind that Argentinians describe as "knowing/not knowing", a vestige of their "dirty war".

'Obviously, intelligence agents have an incentive to hide the use of unlawful methods," says Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "On the other hand, when they use rendition and torture as a threat, it's undeniable that they benefit, in some sense, from the fact that people know that intelligence agents are willing to act unlawfully. They benefit from the fact that people understand the threat and believe it to be credible."

And the threats have been received. In an affidavit filed with an ACLU court challenge to section 215 of the Patriot Act, Nazih Hassan, president of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor in Michigan, describes this new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations are way down, board members have resigned - Hassan says his members avoid doing anything that could get their names on lists. One member testified anonymously that he has "stopped speaking out on political and social issues" because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself.

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorise - not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more importantly, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist - the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "Perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill-treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualisations obscure the purpose of torture ... The aim of torture is to dehumanise the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror. But there's a problem: no one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool -least of all the people who practise it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate intelligence committee on February 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques". The army's own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear".

And yet the abuses keep on coming - Uzbekistan as the new hotspot for renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported to Iraq. And the only sensible explanation for torture's persistent popularity comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control them," she replied.

Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture.

Michael Mukasey, the attorney general designate, is dodging questions about his position on torture, specifically waterboarding. President Bush is, of course, strongly supportive of his nominee. And so it goes.
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"We do not torture"
--President Bush (White House Press Release Nov 7,2005)

"The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured.
--Secretary of State Rice (Press Release USINFO.STATE.GOV - Dec.5, 2005).
*****


# posted by musafir @ 6:29 AM
Comments:
Comrade Musafir,

Your piece has opened my eyes to the evil nature of our government.

We should probably just allow the people of Israel to be the victims of genocide yet again.

We should let go of our domination of this planet because God knows the Communist Chinese or Islamic fascists will do a better job after we are gone.

If we could only have a major terrorist attack take place in the S.F. Bay area, Vermont, Portland or Austin your feel-good ideas on the way the world should work might be replaced with something else.

The Swedish are waiting to put their arms around a traitor like you comrade.. Go to them soon..
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 12:26 PM
 
This comment has been removed by the author.
# posted by Blogger musafir : 3:59 PM
 
Anonymous:
You said: "We should probably just allow the people of Israel to be the victims of genocide yet again."

Please read: Holocaust Revisited
http://pacetua.blogspot.com/2006/03/holocaust-revisited.html

Auschwitz - Sixty Years Later
http://pacetua.blogspot.com/2005/01/auschwitz-sixty-years-later.
# posted by Blogger musafir : 4:04 PM
 
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