Torture Is Torture
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Tuesday 19 September 2006
Bush's "program" disgraces all Americans.
I wish I could turn to cheerier matters, but I just can't get past this torture issue - the fact that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a "high-value" terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture. This just can't be happening.
It's past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of "alternative" questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is "the program." Of course, he won't fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons - and who knows where else? - but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous "waterboarding," which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.
It is not possible for our elected representatives to hold any sort of honorable "debate" over torture. Bush says he is waging a "struggle for civilization," but civilized nations do not debate slavery or genocide, and they don't debate torture, either. This spectacle insults and dishonors every American.
There is one ray of encouragement: the crystal-clear evidence that the men and women of our armed forces want no part of torturing anybody. The members of the Republican resistance - Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - have impeccable Pentagon connections and are not operating in a vacuum. Bush admitted in his news conference Friday that he had spoken to "the professionals" and that they would not carry out "the program" unless Congress specifically told them to.
In support of its torture bill, all the White House could manage to squeeze out of five top Pentagon lawyers was a four-sentence letter of non-objection that had all the enthusiasm of a hostage tape.
Colin Powell's strongly worded rejection of torture should have embarrassed and chastened the White House, but this is a president who refuses to listen to critics of his "war on terrorism" - even critics who helped design and lead it.
There should be no need to spell out the practical reasons against torture, but, for the record, they are legion. As Powell and others have argued, if the United States unilaterally reinterprets Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to permit torture, potential adversaries in future conflicts will feel justified in doing the same thing. Does the president want some captured pilot to be subjected to the tortures applied in the CIA prisons?
And, as has been pointed out by experts, torture works - far too well. Torture victims will tell what they know, and when their knowledge is exhausted they will tell their torturers what they want to hear, even if they have to invent conspiracies. The president says that torturing al-Qaeda kingpins foiled serious plots against America, but how do we know those plots were real? How can we be sure that some of the detainees at Guantanamo aren't shopkeepers or taxi drivers who were snatched because Khalid Sheik Mohammed ran out of real terrorists to implicate and began naming acquaintances so he wouldn't get waterboarded again?
But we shouldn't have to talk about the practicalities of torture, because the real question is moral: What kind of nation are we? What kind of people are we?
Bush's view of the world is based on the idea of American exceptionalism: that this country is unique, that its ideas and values are not just worthy or admirable but superior to any others. This attitude annoys the rest of the world to no end - a lot of other countries think they're pretty special, too - but accept for the moment that the American system is in fact the best of all systems and that the great experiment begun by the Founding Fathers was a signal event in the history of mankind. Accept, if you will, Bush's view that the United States is steadfastly blessed by a loving God.
What do you imagine God might think about torture, Mr. President?
Go to Original
Gitmo Detainee Suffered Year-Long Abuse, Court Filing Claims
By Andrew Selsky
The Associated Press
Monday 18 September 2006
A Saudi has been held in solitary confinement for a year at the Guantanamo Bay prison and is now so mentally unbalanced he considers insects his friends, lawyers said in a motion filed Monday seeking the man's removal from isolation.
Shaker Aamer, a 37-year-old resident of Britain, was placed in isolated confinement Sept. 24, 2005, and has been beaten by guards, deprived of sleep and subjected to temperature extremes, according to the motion filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
However, Aamer has said he had contact with fellow prisoners as recently as the beginning of June, one of his lawyers, Zachary Katznelson, said in a declaration to the court in Washington. Neither lawyer could immediately be contacted to explain the apparently contradictory information.
The treatment violates Geneva Conventions protections, Aamer's lawyers argued. The U.S. military denied he is being mistreated.
The allegations surfaced as President Bush and Congress wrestle over legislation to set rules for interrogating and trying terror suspects. Bush officials argue they need to establish ground rules so suspects can be interrogated to prevent horrors like the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the 16-page filing, Aamer's lawyers said that since he was put into isolation 360 days ago, except for infrequent meetings with his attorneys, he has had contact only with the Americans running the prison on this U.S. Navy base in southeastern Cuba.
"His only consistent contact with living beings beside his captors is with the ants in his cell. He feeds them and considers them his friends," Katznelson said in a statement filed with the court.
"There is no question in my mind that he is mentally unstable," he added.
The motion, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press, said Aamer lives in a 6-by-8-foot cell containing a steel bunk, steel toilet, steel sink, a Quran and a thin mattress. The cell is contained entirely within a wooden shack.
Katznelson said that on June 9 "the day before three Guantanamo detainees committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells" military police beat Aamer because he resisted providing a retina scan and fingerprints.
"They choked him," the lawyer said. "They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. ... They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out."
The motion said the treatment of Aamer, who is fluent in English and is known to military guards as "the Professor," violates Article Three of the Geneva Conventions, which states prisoners "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely."
Army Capt. Dan Byer, a Guantanamo spokesman, denied any of the roughly 450 Guantanamo detainees are subjected to such treatment. He said regulations prevent him from speaking about individual detainees, but that detainees are treated in conformance with the Geneva Conventions.
He discounted the allegation that Aamer was kept in solitary confinement.
"No detainee is in a situation where they do not have available human contact 24 hours a day," Byer said, but he declined to discuss whether Aamer has been kept apart from other detainees for a year.
Aamer told his lawyer the air conditioner in his cell is often turned off, leaving him sweltering in the tropical heat, or turned up full blast "so the cell is freezing cold."
Aamer claims he was working for a charity organization when he was captured in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The detainee won a measure of fame at the prison last year when he met with Army Col. Mike Bumgarner, who was then the warden, to end a hunger strike by detainees.
Aamer brought together a six-man prisoners council that attempted to negotiate improved conditions and advocated that detainees be tried or sent home, his lawyers said, but the talks failed and Aamer was put in solitary confinement.
Go to Original
Canadians Fault US for Its Role in Torture Case
By Ian Austen
The New York Times
Tuesday 19 September 2006
Ottawa - A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.
The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.
"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O'Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.
The report's findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.
The report's criticisms and recommendations are aimed primarily at Canada's own government and activities, rather than the United States government, which refused to cooperate in the inquiry.
But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition " the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation " draw new attention to the Bush administration's handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.
"The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar's case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion," Justice O'Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. "They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar's case in a less than forthcoming manner."
A spokesman for the United States Justice Department, Charles Miller, and a White House spokesman traveling with President Bush in New York said officials had not seen the report and could not comment.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada planned to act on the report but offered no details. "Probably in the few weeks to come we'll be able to give you more details on that," he told reporters.
The Syrian-born Mr. Arar was seized on Sept. 26, 2002, after he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home from a holiday in Tunisia. On Oct. 8, he was flown to Jordan in an American government plane and taken overland to Syria, where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He was freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada.
Mr. Arar's case attracted considerable attention in Canada, where critics viewed it as an example of the excesses of the campaign against terror that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. The practice of rendition has caused an outcry from human rights organizations as "outsourcing torture," because suspects often have been taken to countries where brutal treatment of prisoners is routine.
The commission supports that view, describing a Mounted Police force that was ill-prepared to assume the intelligence duties assigned to it after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Arar, speaking at a news conference, praised the findings. "Today Justice O'Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation," he said. "I call on the government of Canada to accept the findings of this report and hold these people responsible."
His lawyer, Marlys Edwardh, said the report affirmed that Mr. Arar, who has been unemployed since his return to Canada, was deported and tortured because of "a breathtakingly incompetent investigation."
The commission found that Mr. Arar first came to police attention on Oct. 12, 2001, when he met with Abdullah Almalki, a man already under surveillance by a newly established Mounted Police intelligence unit known as Project A-O Canada. Mr. Arar has said in interviews that the meeting at Mango's Cafe in Ottawa, and a subsequent 20-minute conversation outside the restaurant, was mostly about finding inexpensive ink jet printer cartridges.
The meeting set off a chain of actions by the police. Investigators obtained a copy of Mr. Arar's rental lease. After finding Mr. Almalki listed as an emergency contact, they stepped up their investigation of Mr. Arar. At the end of that month, the police asked customs officials to include Mr. Arar and his wife on a "terrorist lookout" list, which would subject them to more intensive question when re-entering Canada.
However, the commission found that the designation should have only been applied to people who are members or associates of terrorist networks. Neither the police nor customs had any such evidence of that concerning Mr. Arar or his wife, an economist.
From there, the Mounted Police asked that the couple be included in a database that alerts United States border officers to suspect individuals. The police described Mr. Arar and his wife as, the report said, "Islamic extremists suspected of being linked to the al Qaeda movement."
The commission said that all who testified before it accepted that the description was false.
According to the inquiry's finding, the Mounted Police gave the F.B.I. and other American authorities material from Project A-O Canada, which included suggestions that Mr. Arar had visited Washington around Sept. 11 and had refused to cooperate with the Canadian police. The handover of the data violated the force's own guidelines, but was justified on the basis that such rules no longer applied after 2001.
In July 2002, the Mounted Police learned that Mr. Arar and his family were in Tunisia, and incorrectly concluded that they had left Canada permanently.
On Sept. 26, 2002, the F.B.I. called Project A-O and told the Canadian police that Mr. Arar was scheduled to arrive in about one hour from Zurich. The F.B.I. also said it planned to question Mr. Arar and then send him back to Switzerland. Responding to a fax from the F.B.I., the Mounted Police provided the American investigators with a list of questions for Mr. Arar. Like the other information, it included many false claims about Mr. Arar, the commission found.
The Canadian police "had no idea of what would eventually transpire," the commission said. "It did not occur to them that the American authorities were contemplating sending Mr. Arar to Syria."
While the F.B.I. and the Mounted Police kept up their communications about Mr. Arar, Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs was not told about his detention for almost three days. Its officials, acting on calls from worried relatives, had been trying to find him. Similarly, American officials denied Mr. Arar's requests to speak with the Canadian Consulate in New York, a violation of international agreements.
Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials "believed" quite correctly "that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria."
Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar's whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.
American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.
Mr. Arar said he appealed a recent decision by a federal judge in New York dismissing the suit he brought against the United States. The report recommends that the Canadian government, which is also being sued by Mr. Arar, offer him compensation and possibly a job.
Mr. Arar recently moved to Kamloops, British Columbia, where his wife found a teaching position.
--------
Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
truthout.org |
