Let’s start with a piece in the Guardian:
Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant”, released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk – taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture”. The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for more than three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
This riveting article is entitled “Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America’s war on terror“, and it attempts to expose how torture is not an exception, or a corner case, but is rather business as usual.
That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human-rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions”, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.
Don’t consider the Guardian, or perhaps just the “comment is free” section, a reliable source? How about the New York Times and the Washington Post?
The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Padilla and the arrivals at Guantánamo, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles”.
At least we’re seeing some changes, like Rumsfeld being sued, even if he does want a judge to dismiss the charges. At least someone’s trying to hold the top guys accountable. I’m with the Making Light crew and echo their sarcastic remarks on Rumsfeld’s motion:
Yeah, because being beaten, suspended upside down from the ceiling by chains, urinated on, shocked, sexually humiliated, burned, locked inside boxes and subjected to mock executions is so much part of legitimate military operations.
Imagine if the prisoners in Dachau had been able to bring a suit against Heinrich Himmler and actually bring him to court. How terrible it would have been had he been distracted from his duties.
Up to this point, of course, we’re only talking about torturers that are theoretically involved in the war on terror, and people who have been following the news for the last couple of years can’t be at all shocked to find this out. What is perhaps more shocking is that fact that this level of torture routinely is used on US citizens in domestic prisons. There are some comments on this in the Guardian piece, but the case is much more thoroughly made in the BBC documentary Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons.
Here’s an excerpt from the description of the documentary:
The film features actual videos recorded by prison surveillance cameras and correction officers themselves, which reveal incidents in which inmates are brutalized, often for minor infractions, with stun guns, tasers, dangerous restraining devices, attack dogs, chemical sprays, and beatings by guards. These disturbing scenes are supplemented by interviews with former prisoners, a warden, a prison doctor, inmates’ relatives, attorneys, and footage from a California Senate inquiry and a murder trial of four guards.
If you’ve got 50 minutes or so, you can watch the whole doc at Google Video, at least as long as no one makes a copyright complaint. I’ll embed the video here, too. It’s worth watching, if for no other reason than to make it harder to pretend this stuff doesn’t happen.
