With the Gloves Off

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" Zepp " <zepp

Thu, 26 May 2005 06:01:17 -0700

[Zepps_News] With the Gloves Off - New York Times

 

 

 

 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/opinion/26herbert.html?hp>

 

With the Gloves Off

 

 

By BOB HERBERT

Published: May 26, 2005

 

A photo of President Bush gingerly holding a month-old baby was on the

front page of yesterday's New York Times. Mr. Bush is in the habit of

telling us how precious he thinks life is, all life.

 

The story was about legislation concerning embryonic stem cell research,

and it included a comment from Tom DeLay urging Americans to reject " the

treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more

sacred than others. "

 

Ahh, pretty words. Now I wonder when Mr. Bush and Mr. DeLay will find

the time to address - or rather, to denounce - the depraved ways in

which the United States has dealt with so many of the thousands of

people (many of them completely innocent) who have been swept up in the

so-called war on terror.

 

People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be

tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or

in some cases simply made to " disappear " in an all-American version of a

practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships.

All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom.

 

The government would prefer to keep these matters secret, but we're

living in a digital age of near-instantaneous communication. Evidence of

atrocities tend to emerge sooner rather than later, frequently

illustrated with color photos or videos.

 

A recent report from Physicians for Human Rights is the first to

comprehensively examine the use of psychological torture by Americans

against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The

employment of psychological torture, the report says, was a direct

result of decisions developed by civilian and military leaders to " take

the gloves off " during interrogations and " break " prisoners through the

use of techniques like " sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep

deprivation, forced nudity, the use of military working dogs to instill

fear, cultural and sexual humiliation, mock executions, and the threat

of violence or death toward detainees or their loved ones. "

 

" Although the evidence is far from complete, " the report says, " what is

known warrants the inference that psychological torture was central to

the interrogation process and reinforced through conditions of

confinement. "

 

In other words, this insidious and deeply inhumane practice was not the

work of a few bad apples. As we have seen from many other

investigations, the abuses flowed inexorably from policies promulgated

at the highest levels of government.

 

Warfare, when absolutely unavoidable, is one thing. But it's a little

difficult to understand how these kinds of profoundly dehumanizing

practices - not to mention the physical torture we've heard so much

about - could be enthusiastically embraced by a government headed by men

who think all life is sacred. Either I'm missing something, or President

Bush, Tom DeLay and their ilk are fashioning whole new zones of

hypocrisy for Americans to inhabit.

 

There's nothing benign about psychological torture. The personality of

the victim can disintegrate entirely. Common effects include memory

impairment, nightmares, hallucinations, acute stress disorder and severe

depression with vegetative symptoms. The damage can last for many years.

 

Torturing prisoners, rather than making the U.S. safer, puts us all in

greater danger. The abuses of detainees at places like Guantánamo and

the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have come to define the United States in

the minds of many Muslims and others around the world. And the world has

caught on that large percentages of the people swept up and incarcerated

as terrorists by the U.S. were in fact innocent of wrongdoing and had no

connection to terrorism at all.

 

Bitterness against the U.S. has increased exponentially since the

initial disclosures about the abuse of detainees. What's the upside of

policies that demean the U.S. in the eyes of the world while at the same

time making us less rather than more secure?

 

The government, like an addict in denial, will not even admit that we

have a problem.

 

" We're in this Orwellian situation, " said Leonard Rubenstein, the

executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, " where the statements

by the administration, by the president, are unequivocal: that the

United States does not participate in, or condone, torture. And yet it

has engaged in legal interpretations and interrogation policies that

undermine that absolutist stance. "

 

E-mail: bobherb

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