http://www.pressaction.com/pablog/archives/000835.html#000835
2003: Another torturous year ahead?
By Mickey Z.
"Nothing changes on New Year's Day..." (U2)
In the corporate media equivalent of a scoop, Dana Priest and Barton
Gellman of the Washington Post "broke" the story of US torture of Arab and
Afghan "detainees." The Dec. 26 article, perfectly timed to get lost in the
holiday shuffle, begins like a bad spy novel: "Deep inside the forbidden
zone at the US-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner
from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military
units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple
layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in
the war on terrorism-captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders."
Priest and Gellman report that those refusing to cooperate are "sometimes
kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted
goggles" or "held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with
a 24-hour bombardment of lights" (euphemistically termed "stress and
duress" techniques). And these are the lucky ones.
Other detainees (POW status conveniently denied) are handed over to "allies
of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between
right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred," write
Priest and Gellman who quote an unnamed official source as explaining: "We
don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so
they can kick the [expletive] out of them."
Former CIA inspector general Fred Hitz claims the Agency doesn't "do
torture" but if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations,
"we can use the fruits of it." This approach, called "operational
flexibility," is allegedly something new. At a Sept. 26 joint hearing of
the House and Senate intelligence committees, Cofer Black, then head of the
CIA Counterterrorist Center declared: "After 9/11 the gloves come off."
This is certainly news to the rest of the world where US-sponsored torture
is hardly a revelation.
There are many examples of direct US torture, i.e. a 1975 Senate
investigating committee exposed US methods of interrogating pairs of
Vietcong prisoners. In one case, when the first prisoner refused to speak,
he was thrown from an airplane at 3,000 feet. The second prisoner answered
all questions but was thrown from the plane anyway. Other techniques
involved cutting off fingers, fingernails, ears, or sexual organs of one
prisoner while the other looked on.
However, thanks to CIA and US training, the true American torture legacy
lies in the bloody fingerprints found across the globe. Consider SAVAK,
Iran's notorious Shah-era secret police created jointly by the CIA and
Israel. Amnesty International deemed SAVAK's history of torture as "beyond
belief."
In 1960s Greece, under the rule of paid CIA operative George Papadopoulos,
US-equipped police used methods like shoving "a filthy rag, often soaked in
urine, and sometimes excrement" down the throat of suspected communists.
During the CIA's holy war against the USSR in Afghanistan, the US-trained
and funded Moujahedeen drugged captured Soviet soldiers and kept them in
cages. A reporter from the Far Eastern Economic Review told of Soviet
soldiers killed, skinned, and hung in a butcher's shop. "One captive," he
reported, "found himself the center of attraction in a game of buzkashi,"
an Afghan form of polo using a headless goat as the ball. In this case, the
Soviet captive was used, alive. "He was literally torn to pieces," said the
reporter.
Ronald Reagan called the Nicaraguan contras "the moral equivalent of the
Founding Fathers." This noble group of "freedom fighters" regularly
attacked civilians, cutting off women's breasts and men's testicles,
gouging out eyes, beheading infants, using children for target practice,
and slitting throats and pulling the victim's tongue out through the slit.
One 14-year-old girl was gang-raped and decapitated. Her head was placed on
a stake as a warning to government supporters in her village. The chairman
of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch concluded "the US cannot avoid
responsibility for these atrocities."
Elsewhere in Latin America, Dan Mitrione, head of Orwellian-named US Office
of Public Safety trained the Brazilian police force in the 1960s. One of
the techniques Mitrione taught involved placing the end of a reed in the
anus of a naked man hanging suspended. The other end of the reed is soaked
in oil and lit. In Uruguay, Mitrione was called in to help deal with the
Tupamaros, a group William Blum calls "perhaps the cleverest, most
resourceful, and most sophisticated urban guerillas the world has even seen."
Under the guidance of Mitrione, the Uruguayan Senate found that torture had
become a "normal, frequent, and habitual occurrence." Techniques included
electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails,
and use of "a wire so thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between
the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase the electrical charge."
Such tactics were honed in Mitrione's own soundproof basement room. Blum
writes of Mitrione's use of four street beggars to demonstrate the effects
of different voltages on different parts of the body. All four men died.
Mitrione was eventually kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros. At his
funeral, White House spokesman Ron Ziegler stated: "Mr. Mitrione's devoted
service to the cause of peace in an orderly world will remain as an example
for free men everywhere." Imagine if he was allowed to take the gloves off.
As one official who has supervised the recent capture and transfer of
accused terrorists told Priest and Gellman: "If you don't violate someone's
human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job."
"Everything can change on a new year's day..." (Rage Against the Machine)
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/04/4217104
