An
article in this morning's British Guardian newpaper has traced the foundations of the Bush administrations's legal justifications for torture to a 1977 decision of the European Court of Criminal Justice regarding the treatment of prisoners held and abused by the British in Northern Ireland. It also links the techniques and methods employed by US military intelligence, troops and the CIA in the torturing and involuntary extraction of information from prisoners in Iraq-Afgahistan-Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere to strikingly similar techniques and practices used by US, Canadian and British intelligence services dating back all the way to the immediate post-WWII period.
This extremely illuminating and informative article provides some valuable historical and legal context for understanding how the current situation with respect to the US administrion's so-called "war on terror" and its underlying legal justifications came into existence in the first place.
More on the flip:
The article also gives us a horrifying summary of what it calls "a catalogue of leaked memos and...investigations" which it promises to publish within the next month:
This month, British readers get the chance to study in full the catalogue of leaked memos and government investigations which track the evolution of the White House's torture policy from 9/11 to Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Iraq, with the publication here of Torture and Truth by the US journalist Mark Danner, and The Torture Papers, edited by two US lawyers, Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.
The article specifically refers to one Lt-Col. Jerald Phifer who, according to the Guardian:
pleads to be allowed to inflict more suffering on the prisoners there. "The current guidelines ... limit the ability of interrogators to counter advanced resistance," he writes. He asks for his people to be able to force prisoners to stand for up to four hours, put prisoners in solitary for 30 days or more, hood them, interrogate them continuously for up to 20 hours, subject them to sensory deprivation, take away their Korans, strip them naked, forcibly shave them, frighten them with dogs, deceive them into thinking they or members of their family are about to be killed or savagely tortured, "expose them" to cold temperatures or cold water, grab them, poke them, push them, and use the "waterboarding" technique, which involves covering the prisoner's mouth and nose with a cloth and pouring water into it so it forces itself down his throat and makes him believe he is about to drown.
In another shocking revelation, one of the memoranda, apparently, alludes to the existence of an entity within the United States with characteristics similar to the infamous
School of the Americas , but devoted specifically to the training and toughening-up of agents to deal specifically with the wars in Iraq and Afgahistan; and that the memoranum itself was approved in a rather non-chalante and off-handed manner by Donald Rumsfeld:
Phifer's memo makes it plain that a torture school exists in the US. "Any of these techniques that require more than light grabbing, poking, or pushing, will be administered only by individuals specifically trained in their safe application," he writes.
Phifer's request worked its way up to the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who works at a lectern-style desk in his office. He scribbled on one of the memos in December 2002: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"
It was not until October 2003 that Rumsfeld approved of Phifer's request which, as the testimony of released prisoners shows, left in place a harsh interrogation regime of extremes of hot and cold, confinement in solitary cells, depriving prisoners of everything except their prison clothes, deafening music and "short-shackling", the painful and perhaps permanently disabling practice of binding prisoners with short lengths of chain.
The Guardian article then goes on to describe and summarize the widespread and extremely brutal nature of the phenomenon as it is currently being practiced:
Guantánamo is only part of the network of US prisons overseas that the Bush administration has created since 9/11. What emerges from the paper trail assembled in these new books is the way in which military interrogation techniques migrated from installation to installation. Danner's book, for instance, includes the report by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, the Guantánamo commander, after he was asked to advise interrogators at Abu Ghraib and other US prisons in Iraq how to get better information from prisoners about the wave of attacks on US forces. Gen Miller suggests reorganising the prisons so that the guards help the interrogators "set the conditions for ... successful interrogation".
It was following his visit that torture and humiliation by the guards began in earnest. Prisoners were hooded, threatened with rape, threatened with torture, had pistols held to their heads, made to strip naked, forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, beaten till they bled - sometimes with implements, including a broom and a chair - hung from doors by cuffed hands, deceived into thinking they were to be electrocuted, ducked in toilet buckets, forced to simulate masturbation, force to lie naked in a pile and be photographed, urinated on, menaced and, in one case, severely bitten by dogs, sodomised with a chemical light, ridden like horses, made to wear women's underwear, raped, deprived of sleep, exposed to the midday summer sun, put in stress positions and made to lie naked, in empty concrete cells, in complete darkness, for days on end.
On one visit to Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross came across a Syrian prisoner lying in an unlit cell, two metres long and less than a metre wide, without a window, latrine, water tap or bedding. On the door was written "the Gollum", with a film still of the character from the Lord of the Rings. The ICRC was not allowed to talk to him.
Frighteningly enough however, as the author notes:
The worst may be to come. Little has yet emerged about conditions inside the prisons run by the US in Afghanistan, where eight deaths in US custody remain unexplained, and an internal military report remains unpublished. In an essay accompanying the documents, Danner draws attention to the language of one of the official investigators of Abu Ghraib, James Schlesinger, who wrote in his report of "five cases of detainee deaths [worldwide] as a result of abuse by US personnel". Danner points out that Schlesinger could as easily have written: "American interrogators have tortured at least five prisoners to death."
The worst treatment in Afghanistan seems to have been reserved for those who have been, in effect, kidnapped by the US from third countries, held in Afghanistan, and subsequently transferred to Guantánamo. In a previously unpublished sworn affadavit obtained by the lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a teacher of Islamic law with Palestinian citizenship, describes how he was arrested in Pakistan, in May 2002, handed over to the Americans and taken to Afghanistan.
Then, after a rather lengthy discussion of the infamous Bybee memo, the article arrives at its central thesis:
In passing, Bybee mentions something disturbing to British readers. The US law criminalising the torture of foreigners overseas was passed in the 1990s as the final stage in Washington's ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). The Reagan and elder Bush administrations added a rider to the law which would allow US organisations such as the CIA an opt-out from punishment for all but the most savage treatment of captives.
There was one country, however, which had sought an even narrower definition of torture: Britain. And, Bybee writes, the Reagan administration had relied on a legal precedent in Europe for its argument that torture was a word which meant only "extreme, deliberate, and unusually cruel practices". That legal precedent also involved Britain. It concerned the brutal treatment of detainees in Northern Ireland.
When the case came before the European court of human rights in 1977, the court ruled that although Britain had breached article 3 of the European Human Rights Convention, and must pay the men compensation, it had not actually "tortured" them. The five techniques of wall-standing, hooding, noise, sleep deprivation and reduced diet, it ruled, amounted to "inhuman and degrading treatment", not torture.
And now, of course, we can see the absolutely disastrous and horrifying consequences that that
fine little nicety in a single legal decision reached over twenty-eight years ago on another continent have wrought for the US and the entire international community, not to speak of the irreparable damage to the rule of law and human dignity. As the Guardian puts it:
What at the time seemed like a partial victory for the defence of individual human life and dignity now looks like a defeat. For it is exactly that distinction the European Court made 30 years ago that the White House has used as a precedent to claim that the US government may inflict pain and suffering on any foreigner it suspects of doing something it doesn't like. The European Court ruling was cited not only by Bybee but by Diane Beaver, a US military lawyer based at Guantánamo, when she gave a formal written opinion in 2002 that the water-boarding technique didn't constitute torture.
So is Europe, and particularly Britain, in some sense
responsible for the hideous practices of torture that are currently taking place in Iraq-Afgahanistan-Guantanamo?