Sunday, May 09, 2004
Systematic torture at Abu Ghraib
According to two soldiers in Abu Ghraib, the torture of inmates was systematic and condone by military intelligence.
I have resisted this term all week, but it now looks hard to deny that the US is running a worldwide gulag, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.* Prisoners are often picked up with no evidence at all of wrongdoing:
Stalin used to give his secret policy quotas of arrest by town---e.g., arrest 5000 political opponents in Leningrad. It is deeply shameful and terrifying to be able to compare American policies to such capricious creulty. But what else can we say? Prisoners at Gitmo and Ghraib have no recourse to the law, no hope of outside defense, are often picked up on little or no evidence, often can't be released after their innocence is established because it would embarass the government, and can be abused with impunity because of the secrecy of the prisons and the intentional lawlessness of their locations that allows the guards to get away with murder. What a rejection of the Constitution, what a rejection of the liberal principals the US claims to fight for! And what has it gotten us? What is the use of torturing prisoners, when that merely makes them say whatever the interrogators want? What is the use of confining thousands of Arabic speakers for intelligence purposes when you have only a handful of interpreters? And how can the creation of a Muslim gulag archipelago aid us prevent future terrorist attacks? All we have done is create the perfect recruitment opportunity!
What can we do as citizens? The first thing is to demand an end to secret, lawless prisons. All prisoners of the US should have recourse to the courts, and the basic guarantees of the Constitution. The president is not a king, and should not be allowed to declare people---including American citizens---as without the basic right to a trial and a real legal defense. Bush will resist, because his secrecy fetish masks a great deal of incompetence (9/11), corruption (Cheney's energy task force), and wrongdoings (Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc.) That is all the more reason to deny him the cover of secrecy.
We have allies in many places, not least the military, where the grunts and the brass are furious about the trashing of their institutions. We will soon see if the Supreme Court will stand up for liberty, or cower before a wartime administration as it has often done.
* Sure, we can't match Stalin for quantity of victims, but you can't find the moral high ground with a policy that is only qualitatively similar to the Soviet prison system.
I have resisted this term all week, but it now looks hard to deny that the US is running a worldwide gulag, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.* Prisoners are often picked up with no evidence at all of wrongdoing:
"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."
"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.
According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.
"Now, whether the detainees are put into the general intelligence holding area, where they rot for a few months until final release, or if they are placed in solitary confinement because their story seems unbelievable is completely in the hands of the interrogator's opinion," he said. "It is in solitary that the abuses can be committed. So, in theory it is in fact very possible that purely innocent Iraqis could be placed in an environment where they could be brutalised, abused, "softened up" or even killed."
Stalin used to give his secret policy quotas of arrest by town---e.g., arrest 5000 political opponents in Leningrad. It is deeply shameful and terrifying to be able to compare American policies to such capricious creulty. But what else can we say? Prisoners at Gitmo and Ghraib have no recourse to the law, no hope of outside defense, are often picked up on little or no evidence, often can't be released after their innocence is established because it would embarass the government, and can be abused with impunity because of the secrecy of the prisons and the intentional lawlessness of their locations that allows the guards to get away with murder. What a rejection of the Constitution, what a rejection of the liberal principals the US claims to fight for! And what has it gotten us? What is the use of torturing prisoners, when that merely makes them say whatever the interrogators want? What is the use of confining thousands of Arabic speakers for intelligence purposes when you have only a handful of interpreters? And how can the creation of a Muslim gulag archipelago aid us prevent future terrorist attacks? All we have done is create the perfect recruitment opportunity!
What can we do as citizens? The first thing is to demand an end to secret, lawless prisons. All prisoners of the US should have recourse to the courts, and the basic guarantees of the Constitution. The president is not a king, and should not be allowed to declare people---including American citizens---as without the basic right to a trial and a real legal defense. Bush will resist, because his secrecy fetish masks a great deal of incompetence (9/11), corruption (Cheney's energy task force), and wrongdoings (Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc.) That is all the more reason to deny him the cover of secrecy.
We have allies in many places, not least the military, where the grunts and the brass are furious about the trashing of their institutions. We will soon see if the Supreme Court will stand up for liberty, or cower before a wartime administration as it has often done.
* Sure, we can't match Stalin for quantity of victims, but you can't find the moral high ground with a policy that is only qualitatively similar to the Soviet prison system.
