The Other Gitmo: Where's the Outrage?

[Slyspy]

[QUOTE=Gawain of Orkeny]For US citizens no. For enemy combatants yes./QUOTE]

Silly me.

[Spetulhu]

[QUOTE=Slyspy]

For US citizens no. For enemy combatants yes./QUOTE]

Silly me.

Equality and freedom for all of us, and to hell with the rest?

[Aurelian]

My God, we've got so much evidence by now that the US has been torturing people that the mind reels. Gawain's right about one thing though: that the US military was teaching and using torture for many years before Gitmo. They were even teaching torture techniques to South American military officers at the "School of the Americas" during the 1980s and early 1990s. The DoD admitted it in 1996 LINK.

Gawain, you seem to indicate that testimony of torture from prisoners and their lawyers can't be considered evidence because they have some sort of self-interest... but how can you take official denials any more seriously? Certainly, the military and the government have as much self-interest in denying abuse as any prisoner would have in laying the charges. Besides, we're constantly catching the military in that kind of lie. They do it as a matter of course. Just think of the white phosphorus denials that the government had to retract a few days ago.

Anyway, here's a link to an interview with a US Army interrogator in Iraq who talks about some of the abuses that he witnessed and participated in during his time in Iraq. He mentions inducing hypothermia, using dogs, etc... and how frequently they were pulling innocent people off the street to make it look like they were capturing lots of terrorists. He points out what every professional interrogator knows: that you don't get good intel through torture... you get it by establishing a connection with the captive and making nice.

Just this morning there was an FBI counter-terrorism interrogator on the Today Show talking about this issue saying that you don't want to torture people because they'll give you false information to make you stop. You want to turn them by getting to know them... befriending them... so that you can go back and use them as a continuing source of information.

For US citizens no. For enemy combatants yes.

How about Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi? They were American citizens, yet into the gulag they went. They released Hamdi last year so that they wouldn't have to test the issue in court, and Padilla is still languishing in some secret prison somewhere. Essentially, they want to be able to call US citizens "enemy combatants" and hold them forever, too.

However I put the saftey of the US above the so called rights of terrorists and unlawful combatants.

You're making the argument that all tyrannies make: that national security trumps the rule of law. That's extremely un-American.

Without the rule of law, you have to trust the executive whenever they accuse somebody. That's a rejection of the entire intellectual framework behind our system. We don't just trust King Bush, or whomever, to make the call as to who should be locked up without trial or representation for the rest of their lives. Our system assumes that power is corrupting and needs to be checked and balanced.

If the Bushies can't make a reasonable case to hold somebody through our legal system I see no reason to assume that the person should be held. We know that a huge number of detainees are locked up on flimsy evidence, or no evidence. That story the other day about the two Afghan poets who were sold to the Americans and interrogated for years because they wrote an anti-Clinton satire indicates that somebody needs to be overseeing these cases.

[Aurelian]

Hmmm. New thought. Gawain, I think you are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. It's clear from your description of the tortures you suffered in Marine bootcamp that the Marines abused you physically and emotionally in order to break down your psyche and instill a sense of loyalty and identification with your captors. From Wikipedia:

In order to form military units which will remain loyal to each other even in life-threatening situations, the basic training ("training is a mildly traumatic experience intended to produce a bond") used by military trainers can be said to produce a mild form of the same symptom.

Similarily, the effects of the "hazing" system of induction into groups such as fraternities and sororities have been compared to the syndrome. In cultural anthropology a similar symptom is common to bride capture situations.

Loyalty to a more powerful abuser - in spite of the danger that this loyalty puts the victim in - is common among victims of domestic abuse (battered wives) and child abuse (dependent children). In many instances the victims choose to remain loyal to their abuser, and choose not to leave him or her, even when they are offered a safe placement in foster homes or safe houses. This syndrome was described by psychoanalysts of the object relations theory school (see Fairbairn) as the phenomenon of psychological identification with the more powerful abuser.

Clearly, you are a victim of the fiendish psychological conditioning that you suffered at the hands of the US military, and that is why you identify with the national security state apparatus instead of with the victims of Abu Ghraib, etc.

Dude, you're like a right-wing version of Patty Hearst.

[Watchman]

I understand a lot of the more "totally hardcore" type forces - the USMC and the French Foreign Legion spring to mind as examples - take that approach. Almost certainly with official sanction and intentionally. Apparently the idea is to strip the recruits of all human diginity, so that nothing is left for them to hang onto save total submission to the unit and espirit de corps.

Heck, cultural background differences aside, the old Imperial Japanese military had the same approach...

It seems to work, too. Well, expect when recruits suffer a total mental breakdown under the strain, run amok, go Full Metal Jacket or something of the sort (the memoirs of Foreign Legion vets are full of anecdotes), but apparently that's viewed as an agreeable price to pay.

[Watchman]

Oh yeah, and Gawain ? You were saying about the Geneva Conventions ?

Indeed, "following the events of September 11, 2001, a new category of detainee, enemy combatant (EC), was created for personnel who are not granted or entitled to the privileges of the Geneva Convention [sic]".(108) In its broadly-defined global "war", the administration has defined "enemy combatant" broadly:

"Any person that US or allied forces could properly detain under the laws and customs of war. For purposes of the war on terror an enemy combatant includes, but is not necessarily limited to, a member or agent of Al Qaeda, Taliban, or another international terrorist organization against which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict."(109)
Not only are these so-called "enemy combatants" denied the protections of the Geneva Conventions, they are also denied the protections of international human rights law because the US administration considers that they are held exclusively under "the laws and customs of war", regardless of where in the world they were taken into custody.

The leading authority on provisions of international humanitarian law, or the law of war, is the ICRC which has stated:

"Irrespective of the motives of their perpetrators, terrorist acts committed outside of armed conflict should be addressed by means of domestic or international law enforcement, but not by application of the laws of war… ‘Terrorism’ is a phenomenon. Both practically and legally, war cannot be waged against a phenomenon, but only against an identifiable party to an armed conflict. For these reasons, it would be more appropriate to speak of a multifaceted ‘fight against terrorism’ rather than a ‘war on terrorism’…What is important to know is that no person captured in the fight against terrorism can be considered outside the law. There is no such thing as a ‘black hole’ in terms of legal protection."(110)

Yet, in seeking to have the post-Rasul habeas corpus petitions of Guantánamo detainees dismissed, the executive has rejected the notion that the detainees have any rights under human rights treaty law or customary international law:

"Customary law is constantly evolving, thus implying that states can modify their practices to adapt to new or unanticipated circumstances or challenges… Even if customary international law proscribed ‘prolonged arbitrary detention’, it is not at all clear that petitioners’ detention fall within this rubric. The detention here is not arbitrary, but based on the Military’s determination that petitioners are enemy combatants. The treaties cited by petitioners as evidence of customary international law do not appear to deal with wartime detentions of this type, but rather with criminal-like matters, and petitioners cite no clear evidence of a consistent and widespread norm, followed as a matter of legal obligation, that detention of enemy combatants in a worldwide war against a terrorist organization is improper."(111)

Such an argument, if accepted, would give a government – any government – a blank cheque to ignore its obligations under international law for any situation that it defined as a "war", "new" or "unanticipated" or for any person that it defined as the "enemy". In this case, it follows President Bush’s assertion that the "war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm [which] requires new thinking in the law of war".(112) As revealed by a series of previously secret government documents, the thinking that has been done has been of a sort that looks to manipulate and bypass the USA’s fundamental international legal obligations. Thus, whatever "new thinking" has been done, the result has been old abuses, abuses which when committed by other countries warrant an entry in the US State Department annual human rights report.

From the same old Amnesty document, bold text added for emphasis. Geneva my arse.

[Aurelian]

Regarding evidence on the US use of torture, here's a bit from Andrew Sullivan's website on waterboarding. Sullivan is often a tool, but he gets the concept of what constitutes torture.

WATERBOARDING: An emailer thinks I am under-estimating the horrors of the technique backed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Wall Street Journal:

If anything, the now standard description of water-boarding understates the cruelty of the method. Those who were subjected to this method by South American security forces report that "they had been held under water until they had in fact begun to drown and lost consciousness, only to be revived by their torturers and submerged again. It is one of their worst memories" (Jennifer Harbury, 'Truth, Torture, and the American Way," pp. 15-16). As you note, the French used it in Algeria (there is a vivid depiction in the movie "The Battle of Algiers"). The United States used it heavily in the Philippines a hundred years ago; they called it "the water cure." The person who probably knows the most about this is Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College and author of a new history of torture, soon to be published by Princeton University Press.

Marty Lederman discusses the depraved, Orwellian editorial at the Wall Street Journal here. We do, in fact, have a documented case of the tactic. I discussed it earlier this year in reviewing the Schmidt Report. That Pentagon report confirmed that at Gitmo, one detainee was subjected to the following:

He was kept awake for 18 - 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 consecutive days, he was forced to wear bras and thongs on his head, he was prevented from praying, he was forced to crawl around on a dog leash to perform dog tricks, he was told his mother and sister were whores, he was subjected to extensive "cavity searches" (after 160 days in solitary confinement) and then "on seventeen ocasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject."

The latter is a polite word for "water-boarding." Later in the report, we are informed that this technique was deployed "regularly" as a "control measure." All this was "legally permissible under the existing guidance." Medical doctors were on hand to ensure that the victim didn't die. Water-boarding, in other words, is a specific technique directly authorized by Rumsfeld, described in the Schmidt Report, under the John Yoo rules, as legally permissible even for POWs under the Geneva Conventions. The Schmidt Report described this treatment as "humane." It is very important to focus on the specifics of what this president has authorized. When he says "We do not torture," he means that this technique is not "torture". A technique used by South American dictators is fine by Bush. This from a president who had the chutzpah to respond to Abu Ghraib by saying that the abuses did not reflect America's values. He was right. They reflect his administration's.LINK

Exactly. Anybody who thinks that waterboarding is not torture should be waterboarded until he confesses that waterboarding is torture. I don't think it would take very long. Probably even Cheney would agree that he was being tortured after the first couple of times he was drowned and revived.

Why is this hard to get? Why would anybody approve of it? Why do the 'values voters' have no values?