Maura Stephens: Why torture is OK

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Maura Stephens: Why torture is OK

 

Thursday, October 20 @ 09:48:59 EDT

Topic: War & Terrorism

 

 

How can a " civilised society " tolerate the inhumane

treatment endured by the people in Abu Ghraib,

Guantanamo Bay and other American prisons?

 

Maura Stephens, openDemocracy

 

Imagine that you are on your way to work, coffee in

hand, one December morning when three men in United

States military uniforms, armed with guns, approach

you. They say your name; you acknowledge it.

 

One of them slams you in the chest, knocking your

briefcase and coffee to the ground, but not before the

hot beverage spills on your hand, burning you. The men

throw a heavy plastic black hood over your head. You

can see nothing. It is very hard to breathe. You are

confused and scared out of your mind. You do not have

any idea what these men might want. What happened to

the quiet day you were expecting? How can you get word

to your family? Nobody knows where you are. They will

be paralysed with worry.

 

You are helpless: this cannot be. This is a free

country, not a totalitarian state. This is " the

greatest country in the world. " Things like this

happen in other places, not here. Innocent people are

protected here; innocent people are not jailed and

abused for no reason, not here.

 

 

 

You are thrown into the back of a pickup truck with a

lot of other people. Even through the hood you can

smell the fear of others bound and hooded like you.

You call out: " This is a mistake! Why am I here? I

have done nothing! " You are punched hard in the

stomach; it knocks the wind out of you. The truck

moves; you are jostled against those next to you.

 

Eventually the truck stops and you are hauled off,

stumbling. You go down hard on one knee because your

arms are tied behind you. You are hauled up, twisted

by the elbow on your already swollen arm, then herded

along with the others; all are quiet except for the

occasional cough or sneeze as you shuffle along,

prodded in the side occasionally by something sharp

and metal, and eventually you hear a huge metal door

open. You are tossed inside a room, your hood removed.

Your handcuffs are still very tight. Your scalded hand

and your bruised knee are throbbing. The other people

in the room look as terrified as you are; you count at

least thirty-five other prisoners. There is no sink or

running water other than one toilet, which already

reeks of human excrement and urine.

 

Soon you are brought in front of a gang of armed men

in an office sitting behind a desk. You are made to

strip completely naked while being asked questions you

don't understand about people you do know and care

about. You cannot answer; you don't have a clue what

the questioners are getting at. They hood and handcuff

you again without letting you don even your underwear.

Next they force you to crawl a hundred yards and then

climb a set of stairs on your knees, naked, your arms

behind you, unable to see, struggling for breath the

entire time. Your panic is rising, you see no way out.

 

There is no way out. Over the next five and a half

months you are kicked, beaten, stomped, punched, hung

backward by your hands, made to go days without sleep,

starved, left uncovered in the cold, sprayed with

freezing cold water, your teeth chattering so hard you

think your brains will simply turn to pulp. Men take

turns pissing on you. They poke the barrel of a gun up

your anus. They electrocute you. They gleefully pummel

your infected hand. They take your photograph as they

mock you. Not one of them treats you in any way like a

human being. You hold onto your sanity by a thread.

 

No protection

 

Put yourself in the position of this prisoner. It

could very easily have been you. If you're a United

States citizen, it could still be you in the

not-too-distant future. Or it could be someone you

love with all your heart, someone you would die to

protect.

 

There is no protection in the current US law for any

innocent person who undergoes such treatment. You

could be treated thus just for sport, really, and your

abusers could claim they " suspect " you of some sort of

terrorism, thus leaving them free to do as they will

with you, without oversight or accounting.

 

The story just touched on above is that of at least

one man in Abu Ghraib - an innocent man who was

tortured and abused at the hands of US military

personnel in such unimaginable ways it makes me sick

to contemplate them.

 

His abusers, remember, were liberating his country

from an evil dictator. Their commander-in-chief claims

to be on the side of good versus evil.

 

I have spoken to other victims of abuse at the hands

of US military in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. They have

similar ghastly tales, and by now there has been

enough irrefutable evidence aired in the media that

even most US people, with their over-reliance on a few

poor " news " sources, are aware that the stories of

torture are very real and unspeakably horrifying.

 

No accountability

 

I have also spoken to US citizens who think along the

same lines as one reader who wrote in response to a

brief article I published on a talk by Seymour Hersh,

the investigative journalist. The reader stated: " I

don't really have much of a problem with the 'torture'

[Hersh] uncovered at Abu Ghraib. Throwing hoods over

their heads and only letting them sleep a couple of

hours at a time is nothing, compared to the fate the

victims of 9/11 suffered. Do critics of the military

really think you just nicely ask suspected terrorists

for information, and they'll tell you? "

 

This man, no doubt, loves his parents and his wife and

children, and donates to his church and to hurricane

victims' funds. I imagine that in September 2001 he

gave money to New York City relief efforts. His

friends probably say about him: " He's a great guy -

he'd give you the shirt off his back. "

 

I wonder how the people of a nation that considers

itself the epitome of enlightenment and education, a

so-called " civilised society, " can draw such bizarre

distinctions and tolerate the inhumane treatment

endured by the people in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay

and other US - and probably UK - prisons.

 

I wonder how. But I must point out that we could not

have expected otherwise.

 

Any time transparency and accountability are

eliminated, horrific abuses such as those that finally

came to light are absolutely inevitable. The public

should not have been so shocked at the revelations of

torture by US soldiers. Every soldier I have spoken

with quietly attests to the fact that military

training by its very nature turns the enemy into

subhumans in the minds of those being trained. The

problem with this is that it also subverts the

humanity of the soldiers.

 

The US congress and citizenry basically shrugged at

the news nearly four years ago that people were being

held completely incommunicado, without charges, in

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They were equally unresponsive

to subsequent reports of inhumane treatment of the

detainees, who still were not charged. Habeas corpus

is the most fundamental of rights, yet nobody seemed

to mind that it was being tossed aside " in the

interests of national security. "

 

There was barely a blip in the US media when Human

Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the

International Committee of the Red Cross reported in

the summer of 2003, while my husband and I were in

Iraq and speaking to representatives of these groups

who were monitoring prisons, that abuses and torture

were going on in that country. So we should not have

been the least bit surprised at the revelations of

gross torture - and murder - at Abu Ghraib.

 

Yet this kind of abuse of human rights goes against

everything I thought the United States stood for, and

I believe most Americans still think the United States

stands for. Most Americans have been rather meek and

accepting as the Bush administration has made such

abuse of human rights and hostility toward

international treaties into standard operating

procedure.

 

This administration has answered to nobody - not even

the American people, its ostensible boss. It has done

business as it sees fit, ignoring solemn international

agreements with impunity while demanding compliance by

other countries, and putting itself above every law,

including many that were crafted by the United States

in partnership with other nations. And this

administration is not guilty of benign neglect in the

mistreatment of its prisoners; it actually

institutionalised such abuse and endorsed torture as a

preferred protocol.

 

But what kind of " civilised society " could allow such

systemised abuse of human beings? What kind of society

does the United States want to be? This abhorrent,

arrogant abuse of power must be stopped. There is no

moral or ethical justification for it. We ourselves

are made victims when our government so incapacitates

us with terror that we lose our own decency and

compassion. We cannot allow such blind, incoherent

fear and cold-heartedness to take us over. We cannot

allow hatred and ignorance to destroy all the good

that we claim to have in abundance. We cannot devolve

into beasts. Yet that is what happens when we allow

ourselves to behave in such subhuman ways.

 

How can it be that the members of congress of the

United States do not have the most basic, decent

humanity to realise that the abuse our military

personnel have perpetrated against prisoners is an

abomination when it is carried out on anyone,

including " other " (non-US) people? At the very least

US lawmakers can justify eliminating such practices

because they put their " own " soldiers and citizens in

harm's way. Ignoring the carefully conceived Geneva

Conventions and ducking possibly legitimate

accusations of war crimes is the kind of behaviour

that the USA would normally point to as an indication

of tyranny under someone else's rule. And without a

doubt the US administration's disdain and disregard

for international treaties that protect prisoners of

war places captured US soldiers and civilians in both

current and future wars at much greater risk: if we

don't protect their human rights and dignity, why

should they give a damn about ours?

 

No defence

 

The man at the top of this story is Hajji Ali, whose

image is in the photos we've all seen by now of a

hooded prisoner standing on a box attached to

electrocution wires. He insists that he is innocent of

any wrongdoing whatsoever, and he believes that " 99%

of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib " with him are also

innocent of any connection to attacks against US

military personnel. He is now telling his story and

working to help other abused prisoners.

 

His story took place in Baghdad, at the time a

protectorate of the United States, but it could just

as easily have happened in Miami, Florida, or Hoboken,

New Jersey, or Flagstaff, Arizona. Similar stories do

happen daily in US prisons, where nobody suffers

consequences for abusing inmates.

 

Torturers torture because they can, because they see

nothing wrong with it. Just like abusive men find

nothing wrong with beating their women and children.

Torture is tolerated because the majority of US

society seems to believe, like the reader who " doesn't

really have much of a problem with the 'torture' " ,

that such actions are acceptable and necessary to weed

out the " evil ones. "

 

The United States is being ruled by a man who believes

that he is on a divine mission, and he cannot be held

accountable to anyone. Apparently the abuse and

torture of any number of innocents is a forgivable

offence in the eyes of his God and the God of his

fellow believers.

 

 

 

Source: openDemocracy

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-village/torture_2938.jsp