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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Torture Is Now Part of the American Soul
By <http://www.alternet.org/authors/5120/>George Monbiot,
<http://www.guardian.co.uk>The Guardian. Posted
<http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=12&date%5BY%5D=2006&date%5Bd%5D=18&act=Go/>December
18, 2006.
You might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had
already been devised. But never underestimate the human capacity for
invention. United States interrogators have found a new way of destroying a
human being.
After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every
possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should
never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States
interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human
being.
In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose 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 over 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 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.
The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "does not
appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is
unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as
the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder,
complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation." Jose
Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.
If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the
authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then,
threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims
that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with
some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.
He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another
"enemy combatant," Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same
total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South
Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into
the CIA's foreign oubliettes.
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 Guantanamo 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.
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 Jose Padilla and the
arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, "in black hoods or spray-painted goggles."
Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
reflect standard CIA torture techniques: "stress positions, sensory
deprivation, and sexual humiliation." The famous picture of the hooded man
standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these
techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time
has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress
position -- maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He
appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be
electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos.
Everything else was done by the book.
Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in
investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a
few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the
authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The
DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture
practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until
they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.
But Padilla's treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition:
solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in
isolation -- a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some
places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in
sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on
end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in
solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.
At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the isolation
wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22-and-a half hours a day,
then released into an "exercise yard" for "recreation." The yard consists
of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a
metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and
forth, alone.
The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals,
10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric
wing, and there's a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement,
according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer
from "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ...
under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy." People
who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies
conducted so far -- in Texas and Washington state -- both show that the
recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than
for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge
the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast:
a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.
From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted
a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact
with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining
information: torture of all kinds -- physical or mental -- produces the
result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and
the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over
another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into
everything they claim to be confronting.
President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the
"values of civilized nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He
asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden.
They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.
source:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/45613/
===
-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
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