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ZNet Commentary<br>
Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America's war on
<br>
terror January 06, 2007 By George Monbiot<br><br>
After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that
<br>
every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised.
<br>
But you should never underestimate the human capacity for <br>
invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found
<br>
a new way of destroying a human being.<br><br>
Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen
<br>
detained as an "enemy combatant", released a video showing
a <br>
mission fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison <br>
dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs
<br>
and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his
<br>
hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison
corridor.<br><br>
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe
<br>
him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a
<br>
piece of furniture". The purpose of these measures appeared to
be <br>
to sustain the regime under which he had lived for more than three
<br>
years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out
<br>
cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly,
<br>
he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls
<br>
from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to
<br>
have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that
<br>
his mind is no longer there.<br><br>
The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "does
not <br>
appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against
<br>
him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments
<br>
in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, ie, post-traumatic
<br>
stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of
<br>
prolonged isolation". José Padilla appears to have been <br>
lobotomised: not medically, but socially.<br><br>
If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective:
<br>
the authorities held him without charge for three and half years.
<br>
Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped
<br>
their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have
<br>
now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with
<br>
support for terrorism. He is unlikely to be the only person <br>
subjected to this regime. Another "enemy combatant", Ali
al-Marri, <br>
claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory
<br>
deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows
<br>
what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA's
<br>
foreign oubliettes.<br><br>
That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while <br>
prosecuting its "war on terror" can no longer be
seriously <br>
disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a
<br>
coalition of academics and human-rights groups, has documented the
<br>
abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in <br>
Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. This, it says, is <br>
necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain <br>
unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse <br>
themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions", and
subjected to <br>
prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.<br><br>
The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military
<br>
at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13
<br>
days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and
<br>
unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the
<br>
same airbase were "commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls,
<br>
bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived
<br>
of sleep" while kept, like Padilla and the arrivals at
Guantánamo, <br>
"in black hoods or spray-painted goggles".<br><br>
Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib
<br>
prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques:
"stress <br>
positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation". The
famous <br>
picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to
<br>
his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once.
<br>
Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what
<br>
might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position -
<br>
maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He <br>
appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be
<br>
electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took
<br>
photos. Everything else was done by the book.<br><br>
Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much
<br>
sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have
<br>
been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank;
<br>
in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or
<br>
failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet
<br>
been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US
<br>
torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to
<br>
take pictures of each other.<br><br>
But Padilla's treatment also reflects another glorious American
<br>
tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are <br>
currently held in isolation - a punishment only rarely used in
<br>
other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in <br>
Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might
<br>
scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch
<br>
or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary
<br>
confinement in the US for more than 20 years.<br><br>
At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the
<br>
isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22 and a
<br>
half hours a day, then released into an "exercise yard"
for <br>
"recreation". The yard consists of a concrete well about 3.5
metres <br>
in length with walls 6 metres high and a metal grille across the
<br>
sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.<br><br>
The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio
<br>
reveals, more than 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay
<br>
are now in the psychiatric ward, and there's a waiting list. <br>
Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein,
<br>
a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to
severe <br>
anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases
<br>
of sensory deprivation, people go crazy." People who went in
bad <br>
and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted
<br>
so far - in Texas and Washington state - both show that the <br>
recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are
<br>
worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners.
<br>
If we were to judge the US by its penal policies, we would perceive
<br>
a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither <br>
forgiveness nor redemption.<br><br>
From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have
<br>
extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, <br>
deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing
<br>
to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical
<br>
or mental - produces the result that people will say anything to
<br>
make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in
<br>
the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It
<br>
is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they
<br>
claim to be confronting.<br><br>
President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats
<br>
to the "values of civilised nations": terror, cruelty,
barbarism <br>
and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover
<br>
where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves.
<br>
They appear to have succeeded.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.monbiot.com/" eudora="autourl">www.monbiot.com<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
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