Untitled Document
President George W. Bush has embedded murder, assassination, torture, and mistreatment
of prisoners into the structure of the U.S. system of global domination. Many
U.S. citizens, rightly outraged, want to know why this sort of barbaric, sadistic
violence has become an integral part of U.S. security policy, and what the Administration’s
justification of torture means institutionally for the future governance of this
country. Above all, they want to know how Bush has been able to avoid impeachment
for committing high crimes.
Here is a select list of typical tortures, abuses, and “outrages against
human dignity” inflicted by U.S. forces and mercenaries on enemy captives
in the course of their arrest, detention and interrogation:
Beating, kicking, and treading on bodies
Sleep deprivation and forced injection of drugs
Rape and sodomy
Water torture, a traditional U.S. Army practice since at least the Indian wars
and the Philippines insurrection at the end of the 19th century
Hanging prisoners whose arms are bound behind their back by shackles or handcuffs
until their limbs pop from their sockets—a new U.S. form of lynching
Tight handcuffing, close-shackling, and blindfolding or “hooding”
for extended periods; sometimes the hoods are marked in order to alert the U.S.
torturer to the particular crime that the prisoner is suspected of having committed
Forced stripping of Muslim prisoners and keeping them naked for long periods
Religious humiliation
Sexual humiliation, insult, and debasement, including smearing with feces, urine,
and what appears to be menstrual blood
Screaming racial insults before, during, and after unleashing violence against
captives
Shocking with electrical instruments, another method of torture commonly used
by U.S. troops in Vietnam
Exposure for prolonged periods to extremes of light and dark, heat and cold,
and noise so deafening as to rupture the eardrums
Extraction of nails, burning skin with cigarettes, stabbing or cutting the bodies
of prisoners
Threatening prisoners or their relatives with death or by having them watch
other victims being tortured
Threatening with dogs or allowing dogs to actually assault prisoners during
or before interrogation
Forcing prisoners to stand or to remain in painful positions for extended periods
Isolation in cells, cages, wooden boxes, and barbed wire-enclosed trailers for
prolonged periods
Depriving prisoners of food, water, drink, and toilet facilities
Extreme or enforced rendition, i.e., torture by proxy in foreign countries
These acts were performed both before and after the Bush administration had
unilaterally exempted itself from legal liabilities under international and
domestic law. Some members of the U.S. military abused prisoners because senior
military commanders such as Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez had explicitly authorized
them to do so; some tortured the enemy because they found it to be “fun”;
but most seem to have acted in the belief that their conduct was condoned because
the White House and the Department of Defense had adopted a policy of fighting
terror with terror.
In the U.S. mass media the routine, sometimes bone-shattering beating of prisoners
in U.S. custody receives relatively little attention except as a public relations
problem. Moral and legal concern seems to be reserved for the less common, more
secretive practice of “rendition,” in which officials of the executive
branch are protected because the abuse takes place outside the U.S., avoiding
monitoring by the Red Cross and due process. More so than other modes of torture,
this type of contract crime may be ordered mainly for reasons of deterrence—i.e.,
to teach an object lesson to all people who fall afoul of the U.S., regardless
of their national origin. European governments rightly consider it to be a blatant
violation of their local sovereignty and are investigating.
A Total War Strategy
The Bush administration’s increasing reliance on imprisonment, torture,
and assassination as elements in its “war on terror,” needs to be
explained from multiple angles, as part of a total war strategy for eliminating
new challenges to the U.S. global empire. Fear, racism, and colonial wars in
poverty-stricken Afghanistan and Iraq are historical frames that highlight the
scope and complexity of the problem. The collapse of separation of powers, the
decay of democratic processes and values, Congress’s unwillingness to
destroy the perception of presidential impunity, and the increasingly secret
nature of government combine to constitute a fourth frame. Let me touch briefly
on each.
From the earliest days of the U.S., fear and racism have been striking features
of U.S. culture. Although closely related, they are distinguishable. By fear
I mean the inordinate susceptibility of the U.S. public to fits of real panic,
during which fear and extremism override reason. Usually fear spreads when political
elites sound the alarm and rally the country to fight some unbelievably powerful
force that is out to destroy the world they inhabit. The threat can come from
within or from outside, from a modern or a “failed state,” or from
a social movement. But once defined, U.S. citizens imagine that only extraordinary
leaders, willing to ignore the law, can protect them from the menace. Under
strong presidents, citizens fight back in self-defense against the insidious
enemy, using catastrophic weapons created by their technological genius. The
enemy can be Indians, Blacks, or Chinese; it can be Britain in one period, Spain,
Japan, the Soviet Union, or international terrorists in another. In almost every
case, the enemy that their leaders exhorted them to hate later turns out to
be whoever had something we wanted. The pattern is old and recurs throughout
the history of U.S. empire. The most spectacular case of “punishing an
aggressor” with an unprecedented new super weapon was President Truman’s
nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By racism I mean attitudes of hatred and contempt directed toward those who
are unlike us, mainly for reasons of color. In multicultural, allegedly color-blind
U.S., with its many racial minorities, racism and de facto segregation continues.
When Bush declared his “war on terror,” this old dynamic assumed
forms suited to 21st century conditions. Racial profiling returned; civil rights
for minorities and immigrants eroded; and both developments went hand in hand
with war atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo,
Cuba.
The effects of racial bias can be seen in the world’s largest, expanding
prison system, where the percentage of Blacks, Latinos, and Hispanics remains
high and racial violence and mistreatment of minority inmates occurs frequently.
Not surprisingly, in the atmosphere of revenge galvanized by the 9/11 attacks,
racial violence quickly spread from the domestic prisons and police departments
to U.S. military prisons abroad. Abusive jailers and police officers from the
U.S. volunteered to fight and ended up torturing prisoners at camps in Kandahar,
Baghram, Guantanamo Bay, Mosul, Bucca in southern Iraq, and Abu Ghraib near
Baghdad.
The Pentagon also recruited patrol officers and officials from the federal
and state prisons for its war on terror and sent them to the U.S.-run prisons
in Iraq. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. state prison system
is far larger than the federal system and in 2003 held nearly 1.2 million inmates,
most of them ethnic minorities. Local jails contained 700,000 inmates; juvenile
facilities over 100,000. Racial violence and mistreatment of inmates by guards
is more likely to occur in the state prisons and local jails where the level
of discipline is lower, the use of force greater. But from the Brooklyn Metropolitan
Detention Center, where hundreds of Muslim detainees were recently abused, to
the U.S. military prisons spread throughout the world, wherever prisoners of
color have been tortured by guards, racism usually lies close to the surface.
Furthermore, race rather than national origin fundamentally shapes the U.S.
soldiers’ image of the terrorist. The Army sent to fight in Afghanistan
and Iraq was “whiter” than it had been since 2000 as a result of
five straight years of declining Army recruitment of black Americans. The 17,000
U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan reportedly turned virtually the entire country
into one huge secret prison in which military guards and CIA interrogators inflicted
gratuitous pain on the bodies of individual Afghani captives who are held incommunicado
without charge or trial, according to a March 19, 2005 report in the Guardian.
Whenever this happens the likelihood is great that they are exercising “racially-informed,”
irrational violence against both their victims and the entire society to which
they belong. The same phenomenon can be seen in Iraq where U.S. soldiers call
the inhabitants “sand niggers” and “ragheads.”
A third framework for understanding the torture scandal is the regressive,
colonial-like character of the current U.S. wars. Nothing illustrates this better
than the bloody struggle to control Fallujah, a Sunni city located west of Baghdad
on the edge of the Iraq desert, which before the U.S. invasion had a population
estimated at 300,000.
The initial skirmish in what became the first battle of Fallujah (March and
early April 2004) was fought after four U.S. military contractors were brutally
murdered by young Iraqis. The killings were in revenge for the murder in Gaza
of the paraplegic Sheik Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, by Israelis
who were flying U.S. helicopters. Marines went into Fallujah allegedly searching
for the killers of the civilian mercenaries but were forced out by its residents.
To redeem their honor they mounted a full-scale assault. After three weeks of
rebellion the casualty figures ranged from a low of 600 combatant and non-combatants
killed and over 1,200 injured to estimates ranging upward from 1,000.
The second battle to retake Fallujah from its inhabitants began five months
later in November 2004, after Marines again cut off food, water, and electricity
to the city in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Their illegal acts of collective
retribution were designed to empty the city of its women, children, and elderly
while preventing the departure of able-bodied Iraqi civilian males. When something
similar happened in Srebrenica, Bosnia in 1995 it was universally condemned
in Europe and the U.S. as “genocide.” The main difference was that
in Srebrenica the Serbs evacuated the women and children by truck while in Fallujah
the U.S. bombed them out.
As U.S. ground attacks on entrances to the besieged city of Fallujah increased,
aerial bombardment—torture from the air—commenced. A U.S. specialty
since 1945, the bombing of cities tends to take a primary toll on civilians
while seeking to force both noncombatants and combatants to sue for peace.
Iraqi popular resistance forces responded to these U.S. assaults by stepping
up attacks in Baghdad, Samarra, Ramadi, and elsewhere, killing and wounding
more foreign occupiers and their Iraqi collaborators by the week. Fallujah’s
struggle to end U.S. occupation spread the nationalist resistance.
The retaking of Fallujah during November and early December through ruthless
air, tank, and artillery bombardment resulted in the city’s complete destruction.
Under rules of engagement approved in Washington, U.S. forces reportedly used
banned napalm and poison gas, killed civilians holding white flags or white
clothes over their heads, murdered the wounded, killed unarmed Iraqis who had
been taken prisoner, and destroyed mosques, hospitals, and health centers protected
under international law. One of the most amazing, well reported scenes from
this battle took place at the Fallujah General Hospital where U.S. forces kicked
down doors, cut the telephone lines, molested doctors, forced patients from
their beds, and manacled their hands behind their backs. The hospital, said
U.S. military spokesperson, was releasing casualty figures useful for the propaganda
of the resistance fighters.
Fallujan residents were dispossessed of their homes and forced to live as refugees
in surrounding towns and villages. To this day no one knows how many people
died in the bloodbath. But a few months earlier, in September 2004, an Iraqi
mortality researcher and his interviewer, working on a public health study jointly
sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University, managed to enter
the city. What they discovered was such a high number of civilian deaths that
they decided to exclude the Fallujah data from their final, conservative estimate
of about 100,000 Iraqi civilians (mostly women and children) killed since the
U.S. invaded. In a population estimated at 24 million, that is the U.S. proportional
equivalent of 1.2 million deaths.
When legal restraints are removed during a war, needless death and destruction
occurs; invariably the main victims are highly vulnerable civilians. In World
War II, the “kill ratio” was one civilian death (mostly children,
women, and the elderly) for every soldier killed. The smaller wars fought after
1945 ran the civilian-soldier count up to 8:1. But in Iraq the kill ratio is
conservatively estimated to be much higher. Why do tens of millions of Americans
refuse to confront this reality? Perhaps because they never heard about the
Lancet study, thanks to the U.S. corporate media. Or perhaps misguided patriotism
and militarism, drummed into youth through film, television, and video games,
lead them to consider the enormous civilian loss and suffering as unavoidable
“collateral damage” or a product of military necessity. Whatever
the reasons, not only the Administration, but the mainstream press and many
citizens profess to care only about the lives of fellow Americans and remain
unconcerned about the barbaric treatment their soldiers mete out to Iraqis and
Afghanis.
U.S. Assertion of Dominion
The problem of widespread, individualized interrogation-by-torture is inseparable
from the pain and suffering inflicted on all those who resist U.S. assertion
of dominion. In late April 2004, as the initial battle for Fallujah was winding
down, the first photos appeared of uniformed, grinning U.S. soldiers torturing
Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. Since then, the illegal acts of the Bush administration,
its armed forces, and intelligence operatives have received relentless news
media attention abroad and only desultory attention within the United States.
Earlier, there had been news reports coming out of Afghanistan about teams
of U.S. Special Forces and their Northern Alliance allies committing war atrocities
at Baghram, Kandahar, and other places in Afghanistan. UN officials had documented
how uniformed U.S. officers connived in the mass killing of surrendered Taliban
soldiers at Dash-E Leili. NGOs in many countries, including the International
Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, had compiled massive
dossiers documenting, from early 2002 onward, U.S. soldiers severely beating
and kicking bound, helpless prisoners, and of Army medical personnel conniving
in the abuse. Often recessed into the background of such reports was mention
of U.S. forces treating Afghanis mercilessly, as subhuman, denigrating them
through the use of racial epithets, demeaning their national culture.
Many people in the U.S. took news of atrocity charges in stride. During 2003,
stories broke of Israeli military advisers being invited into Iraq and to Fort
Bragg, North Carolina to train U.S. assassination squads. Neither did video
pictures of U.S. helicopter pilots murdering wounded Iraqis lying on the ground
or the U.S. seizure without charge of foreign nationals and their shipment to
prisons outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts for purposes of torture. Well
before the obscene photos from Abu Ghraib and their broadcast on national television
struck a spark, the foreign place-names for atrocities committed by U.S. forces
were steadily increasing. But the U.S. chose either not to know or to passively
accept the president’s disregard of international law. When Bush boasted
in his State of the Union speech in 2003, “The course of this nation does
not depend on the decisions of others,” apologists for his unilateralism
chimed in that “lawful” and “unlawful” had ceased to
be meaningful terms.
By the time the torture scandal broke, Iraqi resistance against the U.S. presence
had intensified and public support for the war was waning. The Bush administration
rushed to deny that torture was intentionally ordered or widely practiced and
blamed all abuses on a few rotten apples, acting on their own. Neither Bush
nor Rumsfeld offered a public apology for torture nor admitted that they had
prior knowledge of it. Congress and the public accepted the official White House/Pentagon
version of events.
Yet the daily routine of U.S. war crimes was too widespread to be covered up.
The story of the prisons staffed with racists and sadists, just as in the U.S,
kept deepening; the number of prisoners kept on increasing—in Iraq, 8,000
at the time of the Abu Ghraib pictures, 10,500 as of March 2005; and in Afghanistan
500 as of January 2005.
Bush policy-makers had expressed from the outset a strong desire to inflict
pain on enemy captives. They had denied the occupied peoples proper prisoner-of-war
treatment, set aside the law of occupation, and ordered military strategies
of indiscriminate violence against all who resisted their aims. Documents generated
in the White House and the Departments of Justice and Defense appeared in the
press after lawsuits were brought by the ACLU. They bore out that the president,
by fiat, had set aside the Geneva Conventions, denied prisoner-of-war status
to Taliban and Al Qaeda captives taken in Afghanistan, and sent them for indefinite
detention to the naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba. This meant they would be interrogated
without legal restriction under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s
rules, which violated the Constitution, not to mention Bush’s worthless
public promise to treat them humanely.
The torture documents reveal a mindset within the White House and Pentagon
intent on destroying what remains of democratic processes. Right after the World
Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Bush issued a secret directive authorizing
the torture by proxy in foreign jails of those suspected of having information
about terrorist operations. Thereafter he used the “war on terror”
and his commander-in-chief authority to expand the little known “state-secrets
privilege,” for which no constitutional foundation exists, in order to
prevent the courts from discovering what crimes he has directed the CIA to commit.
The torture debate is about the Pentagon’s and the White House’s
cover-up of the massive war crimes committed by members of the U.S. armed forces
and CIA against Afghanis and Iraqis. But at a deeper level it is part of a larger
debate in which the issues at stake are:
Bush’s usurpation of power and his attempt to elevate the myth of presidential
sovereignty
Bush’s illegal attempt to exempt the U.S. from the Geneva Conventions
and his Administration’s invention of the false category of “unlawful
combatants” as a way of legitimating indefinite confinement and torture
The evocation of “presidential secrecy” by executive officials to
prevent the federal courts from prying into matters of national security both
as they concern the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s global prison systems
and Bush’s dereliction in the performance of his duties
The federal Constitution’s modeling of the presidency on monarchy and
its failure to protect from periodic presidential usurpations of power, which
is exactly what its chief author, James Madison, intended
Turning to government memoranda, we see the most senior-level bureaucrats, lawyers,
politicians, and soldiers—all of whom had sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution—debating,
over a two-year period, (a) how to justify Bush’s decision to use interrogation
techniques that were explicitly banned by international and domestic law; (b)
how to limit the president’s legal exposure in the event that a federal
district court tried to block him from getting around the law by issuing a writ
of habeas corpus; and (c) how to prevent a court from assessing whether U.S.
conduct in Afghanistan violated the norms of international law.
Another little known finding is that the U.S. may never have ratified any human
rights convention without adding reservations that exempted itself—not
the 1949 Geneva Conventions, not the subsequent protocols to it, and not even
the 1948 Genocide Convention, which is the first of the post-World War II human
rights treaties. Technically the Senate ratified the 1984 Torture Convention
in 1994, but only after changing the definition of torture to make it more restrictive
“than that set out in the Convention,” and thus more “interrogator-friendly.”
The torture documents show President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
using the legal opinions of their lawyers—including the now notorious
August 1, 2002 memo written by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee—to
assert a right to order the torture, maiming, and even murder of prisoners.
Drawing on his commander-in-chief authority and the advice of his counsel, Alberto
Gonzales, Bush suspended the Geneva Conventions, but later, in order to protect
himself, issued a written directive cautioning all military interrogators to
treat detainees “humanely.” At the same time, he allowed CIA interrogators
to continue using cruel and unusual methods of interrogation. Bush also authorized
the use of torture techniques against prisoners detained in the war on Iraq,
which initially had nothing to do with the war against the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
Rumsfeld took charge and turned the Pentagon into the “nerve center for
directing torture and conducting secret missions.”
Over the years since U.S. forces entered Afghanistan and later attacked and
occupied Iraq, U.S. soldiers have scoured villages, towns, and cities in both
countries, searching for “insurgents.” Overall, they succeeded mainly
in creating chaos and lawlessness, spreading armed resistance to their presence,
and generating a keen desire for future revenge against the United States. The
more U.S. forces have devastated Iraq, contaminated its land, destroyed its
cities, and mistreated the Iraqi people in their local communities and inside
their homes, the more resistance to U.S. presence has grown.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, as well as al-Qaeda suspects and Taliban
fighters, have been rounded up and imprisoned under medieval conditions. U.S.
soldiers, CIA agents (“case officers”), and mercenaries (“civilians”)
working for privatized military firms under contract to the Pentagon, are known
to have sadistically tortured large numbers of them while having their deeds
photographed and filmed so that they could be seen by friends back home.
The Logic of Torture
A fourth frame for understanding why torture became just another weapon in the
U.S. arsenal relates to the long decline in the spirit of democratic government
that preceded 9/11. The growing immunity of the military from Congressional oversight
is but an aspect of this phenomenon. At its heart is the corruption of the Congress
under one-party control and the connivance of Senators and House members in shielding
the president and his advisers from criminal liability for waging wars of aggression
in which they themselves were complicit. The U.S. was already out of step with
the rest of the world and sliding into an anti-democratic mode of governance long
before the rise of the religious right and the neo-cons hastened this process.
When a group of fundamentally dishonest ideological extremists took control of
the presidency and the Congress, the corrupt condition of the U.S. political system
began to be revealed in all sorts of criminal acts.
The conclusions I draw from this are, first, that in Europe during two world
wars the United States seems not to have stooped to officially ordering the
torture and mistreatment of prisoners of war, though only because arrayed against
it were fighting forces that held U.S. prisoners and could retaliate. But in
three Asian-Pacific wars—against Japan, North Korea, and the peoples of
Indochina—the greater capabilities of U.S. forces made the fighting far
more one-sided. In World War II, victorious U.S. troops in the Pacific confronted
an enemy equipped with inferior weapons, usually took no prisoners, and often
mutilated and murdered the wounded with impunity. The Japanese army too mistreated
Allied prisoners and civilians on the battlefield and in occupied territories,
but they alone were held criminally accountable for their actions. Vietnam and
later interventions were unprovoked colonial wars against much weaker enemies.
When going against the weak, the U.S. military has invariably used torture tactics
on a wide scale.
Bush built on the legacy of war crimes and atrocities ordered by past presidents,
including his own father and Bill Clinton, both of whom had issued presidential
directives authorizing “extraordinary rendition.” In 2001 Bush expanded
this practice without furnishing any meaningful guidelines. He is not the first
president who ever turned his back on the fundamental principles that underpin
the international order; but he and his top officials are certainly the first
to have shattered the torture taboo while openly and repeatedly expressing contempt
for international law. They are also the first to threaten the use of nuclear
weapons even against non-nuclear states.
Today in the United States no strong public pressure exists for upholding the
laws against torture of persons considered “enemy.” In 2002 a poll
indicated “that one-third of Americans favored the use of torture on terrorist
suspects.” The most recent Gallup poll, released March 1, 2005, suggested
that 39 percent would support torturing “known terrorists if they know
details about future terrorist attacks.” Clearly a large minority, whose
views this Administration represents, believes that it is acceptable, if not
wholly justified, to employ the tactics of torture in the fight against terrorist
suspects in order to extract information that might save innocent lives. What
this surely reflects is the passionate denial of the educated classes that the
U.S. has been deeply involved in the gravest of international crimes.
To intentionally inflict pain and suffering on helpless detainees, whether
or not they engaged in combat, is illegal and morally wrong, besides being cowardly
and counterproductive. The legal prohibition on torture is absolute and unambiguous
and can never be justified under any conditions. The only problem is that the
U.S. government never actually ratified any humanitarian law without inserting
loopholes that would allow it to make a claim of exemption.
The best available evidence suggests that torturing defenseless captives to
obtain information doesn’t deter terrorist attacks. The information extracted
under White House and Pentagon torture policy has proven singularly ineffective
in defeating a popular resistance movement that has the support of the local
population. In Iraq, Bush policies have only succeeded in creating terrorists,
fueling the flames of resistance to the U.S. presence, and breaking up the coalition
of governments that unwisely sent troops to Iraq. Furthermore, the history of
modern warfare shows that guerilla resistance movements do not depend on hierarchical
chains of command that can be broken by such interrogation methods. To stop
their pain, prisoners will say anything, rendering what they say unreliable.
Secretary of State Colin Powell found this out when he delivered his infamous
address to the UN Security Council in February 2003, “which argued the
case for a preemptive war against Iraq.” In his speech, Powell drew on
the testimony of an unnamed “senior terrorist operative” who had
told his interrogators that Saddam Hussein had offered to train Al-Qaeda operatives
in the use of ‘chemical or biological weapons.’” After the
U.S. invasion, it turned out that the terrorist, one Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi,
had been tortured by his CIA and Egyptian interrogators. Later, at Guantanomo,
Libi recanted and admitted that he had lied. So much for evidence obtained through
torture and the spin master who relied on it to justify aggression.
U.S. leaders have been intent on controlling the world ever since the Truman
administration ended the war with Japan in a five-month orgy of conventional
bombing before destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Their greed,
ambition, and lack of foresight have left them with no solution but to pit themselves
against the nationalism and desire for self-determination of weaker states throughout
the world. Presidents and generals solved the problem of discovering who the
enemy is by defining the entire population as enemy. When the “enemy”
is the civilian population who won’t do our bidding, not only do the kill
ratios have to be high, but reliance on torture, murder, and assassination also
becomes vital. This is why Afghanistan and Iraq are in the same class as Korea
and Vietnam: imperialism produces the logic of torture.