Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → U.S. torture policy → Gitmo in particular

The ACLU managed to get the U.S. government to cough up more documents about its torture policies.

They’re starting to put them on-line if you’re curious (though some are a little redacterrific).

And the New York Times got some interviews with people who’ve seen Guantánamo from the inside. No surprise that among the things they’re hiding there is torture.

Did I say “torture?” I must have meant abuse, which, as Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun notes, seems to be the officially-agreed-upon euphemism for torture-when-we-do-it.

The Red Cross has been visiting Guantánamo Bay to inspect conditions and to minister to certain needs of the prisoners held there. They have bought this rare access with their silence — by policy they do not comment publicly about what they see on the other side of the barbed wire, and in return they are allowed to be the only group independent of the U.S. government that is given any substantial access to the prison and the prisoners.

This puts the Red Cross in a delicate position. The Dubya Squad frequently responds to criticism about conditions at Guantánamo by noting that the Red Cross is allowed to visit — the implication being that the Red Cross would blow the whistle if Gitmo were really a gulag or an Abu Ghraib. The Red Cross, meanwhile, is under this gag order, which prevents it from speaking out even as it is being used as a fig leaf in this way.

In fact, the Red Cross has criticized conditions at Gitmo in the past, but it limits its public criticism to policies that are already public knowledge, like the lack of due process. The Red Cross’s position on what it has observed of the conditions of detention is not for us to know.

Yesterday, though, some White House memos summarizing the Red Cross’s concerns were leaked, giving us some idea of what the Red Cross is telling the folks in charge:

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.…

The report of the June visit said investigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.” Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly “more refined and repressive” than learned about on previous visits.

But I think we can expect the Red Cross reports to continue to get more alarmed and indignant and ignored:

There has to be something in how he won, in how the election was fought, that gave this Administration the distinct impression that it had been handed a “get out of the Geneva Conventions free” card. That’s because the Administration was handed precisely such a gift — by John Kerry.

In the name of “electability,” the Kerry campaign gave Bush five months on the campaign trail without ever facing serious questions about violations of international law. Fearing he would be seen as soft on terror and disloyal to US troops, Kerry stayed scandalously silent about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. When it became clear that fury would rain down on Falluja as soon as the polls closed, Kerry never spoke out against the plan, or against the illegal bombings of civilian areas that took place throughout the campaign. Even after The Lancet published its landmark study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the invasion and occupation, Kerry repeated his outrageous (and frankly racist) claim that Americans “have borne 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq.” His unmistakable message: Iraqi deaths don’t count. By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone’s lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanization of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are insufficiently important to risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked.

The real-world result of all the “strategic” thinking is the worst of both worlds: It didn’t get Kerry elected and it sent a clear message to the people who were elected that they will pay no political price for committing war crimes. And this is Kerry’s true gift to Bush: not just the presidency, but impunity.

Yet another way in which I’m hopelessly out-of-touch with contemporary American values, I guess. I still sometimes wake up in the morning thinking I’m in a country where the alarms will go off and the newspapers will switch to their big-font headlines if the Red Cross reports that we’re torturing prisoners by deliberate policy. Nope: ho hum.

More torture disclosures from Gitmo:

FBI agents witnessed “highly aggressive” interrogations and mistreatment of terror suspects at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba starting in 2002 — more than a year before the prison abuse scandal broke in Iraq — according to a letter a senior Justice Department official sent to the Army’s top criminal investigator.

In the letter obtained by The Associated Press, the FBI official suggested the Pentagon didn’t act on FBI complaints about the incidents, including a female interrogator grabbing a detainee’s genitals and bending back his thumbs, another where a prisoner was gagged with duct tape and a third where a dog was used to intimidate a detainee who later was thrown into isolation and showed signs of “extreme psychological trauma.”

One Marine told an FBI observer that some interrogations led to prisoners “curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain,” according to the letter dated July 14, 2004.

When the U.S. wants to hold someone prisoner without anything resembling due process of law, without judicial oversight, and (according to its lawyers) without any of the protection of international treaties and U.S. laws prohibiting torture, it sends them to a little U.S. outpost in Cuba called Guantanamo Bay.

So the U.S. government has a lot of nerve trying to score cheap points about the human rights record of Cuba’s dictatorship. Moral authority is a great thing to have, but it has to be earned. Castro can take his cheap shots too.

Cuba unfolded two gigantic billboards on Friday in front of the United States diplomatic headquarters in the island, with photographs of the tortures in the Abu Ghraib prison of Iraq and the word “Fascistas” together with a Nazi swastika.

The images were put up after Cuba demanded that the United States Interests Section in Cuba take down a Christmas billboard with a shining ornament that says “75,” in allusion to the dissidents imprisoned by the Cuban government in 2003. The billboards unfolded by Cuba show Iraqi prisoners bleeding and hooded during torture by soldiers in Abu Ghraib with a caption that says “Made in USA” in the middle of the high-traffic Malecón of Havana.

If there is anyone left who was unconvinced that the United States practices torture by deliberate policy, but who is susceptible to evidence, I’d like to welcome that person to the ranks of the disgusted and disillusioned.

Among the highlights of the new documents uncovered by the ACLU:

• Even people on the inside are calling the interrogation techniques practiced at Gitmo “torture” now. One memo says that the torturers in the Department of Defense were impersonating FBI agents during torture and interrogation — “If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done by the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [be] left holding the bag before the public.”
• A memo that makes frequent mentions of interrogation techniques that were beyond-the-pale for the FBI but were “authorized by the President under his Executive Order.”
• An internal FBI memo that reads in part: “As requested, here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO. ¶ On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MP’s what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”

How often will new revelations about the sick U.S. torture policies come to light in 2005, I wonder.

From today’s New York Times:

Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guantánamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands — someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot.

But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East.

After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base’s brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives.

The account of Mr. Kahtani’s treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military’s longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo operated.

Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment.

While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.

Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantánamo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was the commander of the Guantánamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner.

“We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner,” General Miller told reporters in March 2004. “Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner.”

His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was “satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they’ve not been mistreated, they’ve not been tortured in any way.”

Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass wall during General Hood’s tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee sharing a milkshake and fries from the base’s McDonald’s and appearing to chat amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however, that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald’s meal was presented to at least three sets of journalists.

It goes on… finally ending with this paragraph:

It is unclear whether the Justice Department’s new, broader definition of torture, posted on the department’s Web site late Thursday, would have affected operations at Guantánamo.

Now that all of those FBI memos about torture at Gitmo have become public, the U.S. military have decided to launch an investigation.

Goes to show that there’s a big difference between:

• “Sir, our investigators have found that we’ve been torturing detainees at Gitmo and have left them naked and shivering in their own feces for 24 hours at a time.”
• “Sir, the ACLU is about to leak to the press that we’ve been torturing detainees at Gitmo and have left them naked and shivering in their own feces for 24 hours at a time.”

The first one prompts a “ho hum… file that one under ‘W’ for ‘Who Cares?’ ” while the second one prompts a “quick: another investigation to investigate the previous investigation!”

I’d become a little cynical about the ACLU — they seemed to spend a lot more effort on fundraising and identity politics than on protecting civil liberties. But they’ve redeemed themselves and then some, and now I feel ashamed for doubting them. They’re rising to today’s challenges admirably, at a time when so many other institutions are letting us down.

Perhaps you already noticed this evidence of the batshit insanity at the front of the parade: After three prisoners at Guantánamo were “found hanged” there recently, Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., who runs the joint, said of these reported suicides (and I am not making this up):

They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.