chilling commentary:
Abu Ghraib: the rule, not the exception
Americans are no novices to inflicting pain and humiliation, says torture expert MILES SCHUMAN. U.S.-sanctioned torment has a long and diverse pedigree
By MILES SCHUMAN
UPDATED AT 10:19 AM EDT Friday, May. 14, 2004
The International Committee of the Red Cross has revealed over the past days that the gross human-rights abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison were not confined to a few soldiers. Indeed, it appears they were well-known to U.S. government and military officials while they occurred. As a physician who has worked with many survivors of torture in Canada -- and has lived in Guatemala, Haiti and Mexico, working with survivors of state-sponsored violence -- the images of the detainees in Abu Ghraib represent a hauntingly familiar pattern of abuse.
The black hood covering the faces of naked prisoners in Abu Ghraib was known as la capuchi in Guatemalan and Salvadoran torture chambers. The metal bed frame to which the naked and hooded detainee was bound in a crucifix position at Abu Ghraib was la cama for a former Chilean patient who survived the U.S.-installed regime of General Augusto Pinochet. In her case, electrodes were attached to her arms, legs and genitalia, just as they were attached to the Iraqi detainee poised on a box, threatened with electrocution if he fell off. The Iraqi man bound naked on the ground with a leash attached to his neck, held by a smiling young American recruit reminds me of the son of peasant organizers who recounted his agonizing torture at the hands of the tonton macoutes, U.S.-backed Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier's right-hand thugs, in Port-au-Prince, in 1984.
The very act of photographing those tortured in Abu Ghraib to humiliate and silence parallels the experience of an American missionary, Sister Diana Ortiz, who was tortured in Guatemala in 1989. Before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus, she reported: "My hand was burned over 100 times with cigarettes. I was gang raped repeatedly. . . . My last few minutes in detention, I met Alejandro, whom the torturers referred to as their boss. He was tall and fair-skinned and spoke halting Spanish, with a thick American accent. His English was American, flawless, unaccented. When I asked him if he was American, his answer was evasive: 'Why do you want to know?' He reminded me that my torturers had made videotapes and taken photos of the parts of the torture I was most ashamed of. He said if I didn't forgive my torturers, he would have no choice but to release those photos and tapes to the press [Congressional Human Rights Caucus Briefing on Torture, June 25, 1988]."
The same sadistic choreography has taken place at the U.S. military base at Bagram in Afghanistan, where named witnesses informed The New York Times that detainees were stripped and hooded "with their arms raised and chained to the ceiling, their feet shackled."
This infernal landscape illustrates methods of torture consistent with U.S. military-intelligence teaching manuals. One example from the manuals produced by the U.S. Army's School of the Americas and declassified by the U.S. government, advises that in order to forcibly recruit spies, "The counterintelligence agent could cause the arrest of the employees' parents, imprison the employee, or give him a beating as part of the placement plan." It suggests that many other techniques could be used, limited only by the agent's imagination.
A 1986 report by the El Salvador Human Rights Commission, founded by Archbishop Oscar Romero, and smuggled out of the infamous Mariona Prison in San Salvador, refers to 40 kinds of torture inflicted on political prisoners, and the presence of Americans as supervisors. Graduates of the School of the Americas include military officers and leaders implicated in torture and mass murder in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina and Haiti, among other Latin American countries.
Two CIA manuals obtained by The Baltimore Sun in 1997, have specific relevance to the torture methods used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One manual written by the CIA in 1963, titled Kubark Counter-Intelligence Interrogation, states: "Interrogations conducted under compulsion or duress are especially likely to involve illegality. . . . Therefore, prior approval at the higher level must be obtained for the interrogation of any source against his will under any of the following circumstances: If bodily harm is inflicted; if medical, chemical or electric methods or materials are used to induce acquiescence."
Such methods could not have been far from the thoughts of those who applied electric wires to the Iraqi detainee pictured at Abu Ghraib. In his case, there was reportedly no potential current to cause shock. But as aptly noted by The Guardian in this connection, the CIA's 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Manual, used in Honduras, advises: "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain triggers fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
The types of torture practised by individuals representing the U.S. government or their surrogates have varied slightly from place to place over time, depending on the particular social, cultural or religious norms that need to be subverted, in order to inflict the greatest pain and humiliation.
This subversion often goes hand in hand with gender-based violence. Examples include the rape of nuns such as Diana Ortiz by, and under the supervision of, male torturers, and the sexual assault of Muslim men by, and under the supervision of, enlisted women.
The ultimate purpose of torture, however, is always the same. It is not the extraction of information, which is notoriously unreliable under such conditions.
It is, rather, the destruction of one's voice and identity, the transformation of a human into an object (thus the hood over the face), like the Orwellian deconstruction of thousands of former lives into "collateral damage," or the "rendering" of individuals to another country for so-called interrogation.
From my experience as a physician, the Abu Ghraib images are not an exception to the rules. They represent the rules, I believe, by which the U.S. government and military exercise power over a non-servile population to optimize the economic and political interests of an elite few in the U.S. and abroad. What is not the norm, what is exceptional, is the graphic revelation to the world of these horrors. In his book A Miracle, A Universe, New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler crystallizes the torturer's message to the tortured: "Scream. Scream as much as you like. It doesn't matter. No one is listening. No one will ever hear you. No one will ever know." The torturer, like the state sponsoring him, depends on the obscurity of the victim and silence of witnesses to continue his crimes.
We are all witnesses now.
Miles Schuman, a family physician in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut, counselled refugees, and documented torture for the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture and the Clinique Santé Accueil in Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, and in Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. |
