Tracing the Trail of Torture
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But Abu Ghraib was -- and remains -- only a symptom of a much deeper problem.
The Guantanamo Treatment
"Since the start of the war on terror, the intelligence community, led by the CIA, has revived the use of torture, making it Washington's weapon of choice," writes Alfred McCoy in his new book, A Question of Torture.
When the infamous Abu Ghraib photo of the prisoner on a box draped in black, head covered with a sack, arms outstretched with electrical wires attached to his fingers, was made public, it had a deeper resonance for McCoy than simply documenting a war crime of the present moment.
"In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of CIA torture," McCoy told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview. "It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental techniques" that, as his book makes vividly clear, the CIA pioneered in breakthrough research on torture, funded to the tune of billions of dollars in the 1950s. In his book, he adds: "The photographs from Iraq illustrate standard interrogation practice inside the global gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated, on executive authority, since the start of the war on terror."
Rather than placing blame merely on the handful of guards in Abu Ghraib who were reprimanded (and in a few cases jailed) for their crimes against humanity, McCoy believes that they -- and the interrogators there -- were simply "following orders" and, like Karpinski, considers that "responsibility for their actions lies higher, much higher, up the chain of command."
When I interviewed Ali Abbas in Iraq, his descriptions from Abu Ghraib bore a remarkable similarity to those given by detainees released from the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and from the little noticed American mini-gulag in Afghanistan.
"They shit on us, used dogs against us, used electricity and starved us," he told me. "They cut my hair into strips like an Indian. They shaved my mustache, put a plate in my hand, and made me go beg from the prisoners, as if I was a beggar."
Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York in a statement on the detention experiences of three men they represent who were held in both Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay reveal, for example, similarly over-the-top treatment. And such treatment long preceded anything recorded at Abu Ghraib. Starvation rations were common and, in Sherbegan Prison in Afghanistan in December, 2001, one of the detainees, Shafiq Rasul, described the situation as follows: "We all had body and hair lice. We got dysentery and the toilets were disgusting. It was just a hole in the ground with shit everywhere. The whole prison stank of shit and unwashed bodies."
