Truth about Torture

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/110205Y.shtml

 

Truth about Torture

By Michael Hirsh

Newsweek

 

07 November 2005 Issue

 

A courageous soldier and a determined senator demand clear standards.

 

Army Capt. Ian Fishback is plainly a very brave man. Crazy brave,

even. Not only has the 26-year-old West Pointer done a tour in Iraq

and one in Afghanistan, he has had the guts to suggest publicly that

his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, lied to Congress. After making headlines a

month ago for alleging that systematic interrogation abuses occurred

in Iraq-and that the Pentagon was not forthright about it-the

plain-spoken Fishback went back to Fort Bragg, N.C. He is now

practicing small-unit tactics in the woods for a month as part of

Special Forces training. After that, he hopes to fight for his country

once again overseas.

 

Fishback's courage in taking a lonely stand may be paying off.

Inspired by his example, " a growing critical mass of soldiers is

coming forward with allegations of abuse, " says Marc Garlasco of Human

Rights Watch, the New York-based activist group that first revealed

Fishback's story. One of them is Anthony Lagouranis, a Chicago-based

Army specialist who recently left the military. He supports Fishback's

contention that abuses in Iraq were systematic-and were authorized by

officers in an effort to pressure detainees into talking. " I think our

policies required abuse, " says Lagouranis. " There were freaking

horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet

smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by

Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a softball-sized blister

to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep

deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used dogs. "

 

Fishback has also won a devoted and powerful ally in Sen. John

McCain, who says that the captain's tale " is what I view as the tip of

the iceberg in the military today. " Fishback's account has proved to

be a prime exhibit in McCain's long-running feud with Rumsfeld over

conduct of the Iraq war. In a long letter to Congress obtained by

NEWSWEEK, Fishback told McCain and others in Congress that when the

Defense secretary testified before Congress in the aftermath of the

2004 Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, Rumsfeld did not accurately represent

what was occurring in Iraq.

 

Fishback said that many of the brutal practices shown in the Abu

Ghraib photos-which the Pentagon called the work of a few rogue

soldiers " on the night shift " -were actually " in accordance with what I

perceived as U.S. policy. " After he heard Rumsfeld testify in May 2004

that the U.S. forces were following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq,

Fishback wrote: " I was immediately concerned that the Army was taking

part in a lie to the Congress, which would have been a clear violation

of the Constitution. " Based on what he saw, Geneva rules for prisoner

treatment were not being followed, he says. And for 17 months, a

frustrated Fishback tried to get a clear answer about what standards

were being used- consulting his superior officers, Army lawyers, even

a professor of philosophy at West Point, Col. Daniel Zupan. He says he

never got an answer. A devout Christian, Fishback held soul-searching

discussions with fellow officers in Bible class about what he should

do. In the end he went to Human Rights Watch for guidance.

 

Like Fishback, McCain has grown keenly frustrated by the lack of

clarity in the Bush administration's interrogation policies. The

Arizona senator, a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, is now

battling the administration over an amendment he has attached to the

new defense appropriations bill. It would set down, once and for all,

what is allowed in interrogation rooms. In simple, clear language, the

two-and-a-half-page amendment forbids cruel, inhuman or degrading

treatment " regardless of nationality or physical location " -and defines

such treatment as the same as that which is prohibited under the U.S.

Constitution. In a rebuke to President George W. Bush last month, the

GOP-controlled Senate voted 90-9 to approve the McCain amendment.

 

The Bush administration has consistently maintained that it is not

U.S. policy to abuse prisoners. But Bush has threatened to veto the

entire appropriations bill if it contains McCain's language-all in an

effort to preserve the right to treat prisoners in whatever way the

president decides is necessary. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney,

with CIA Director Porter Goss in tow, met with McCain to try to

persuade him to exclude the CIA from any restrictions. The

administration also sought to cut out the term " regardless of physical

location, " McCain said in an interview. The Washington Post, in a

harsh editorial, later branded Cheney " the vice president for

torture. " Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said she had no

comment on the McCain meeting. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck also

declined to talk about it. But John Yoo, a former Justice Department

official who drafted an August 2002 memo that justified rough methods,

said last week that the administration should continue to treat

terrorists differently overseas because they " do not operate according

to the Geneva Conventions. "

 

Critics, many of them inside the military, say Yoo and other

administration hawks have never understood that U.S. observance of

Geneva rules is not dependent on what the enemy does. As McCain puts

it: " This isn't about who they are. This is about who we are. These

are the values that distinguish us from our enemies. " He says the

administration could make things worse than they already are by

putting a law on the books that will, in effect, authorize abusive

practices at overseas facilities. " We aren't going to allow any

weakening of language, " McCain told NEWSWEEK. If the present bill is

vetoed or watered down, he adds, " we will certainly put it on another

piece of legislation. I think we could get 90 votes tomorrow. " Even at

senior levels of the Pentagon, some officials are uneasy about the

administration's opposition to the McCain amendment. " The uniformed

military is appalled by Cheney's stand, " says a Pentagon official who

would talk only if he were not identified.

 

For a year and a half now, the administration has sought to make

the Abu Ghraib scandal go away. When questioned about abuses, the

Pentagon regularly cites the sheer numbers of punishments it has

administered to U.S. personnel-230 cases in all, including jail

sentences, demotions and other nonjudicial discipline.

 

But Defense officials rarely point out that no senior officers or

civilian officials have been charged since Abu Ghraib. Other officers

say they too are seething over the lack of accountability at senior

levels. Colonel Zupan, the West Point philosophy teacher, says he

himself should have acted when he was deployed in Afghanistan and

heard of similar abuses. " I didn't raise my eyebrows about it, " he

said. " I think it was wrong of me. And if I didn't, as a field

officer, then how are we going to be too harsh on an enlisted soldier? "

 

The Army has sought to paint Fishback as a lone malcontent. Paul

Boyce, an Army spokesman, says the Army Criminal Investigation

Division was investigating the captain's allegations. He calls

Fishback's long letter " verbiage " and says he had no comment on the

questions raised about Rumsfeld's veracity. But NEWSWEEK has obtained

corroboration for Fishback's central point in the Army's own files.

According to papers released by the Defense Department in September in

response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union,

supporting documents for an inspector-general probe in July 2004 show

that abuses were much more widespread than the Army acknowledged. In

one IG document, an Army sergeant testifies that putting detainees in

stressful positions and pouring water on them " seemed to be something

all interrogators " in the Fourth Infantry Division were doing.

 

Before heading into the Fort Bragg woods this week, Fishback told

NEWSWEEK that he doesn't want to talk to the media now. " I will just

say: I support clear standards in accordance with American values, " he

said. Judging from the firestorm he started, he may someday get them.

 

 

 

Go to Original

 

Vice President for Torture

The Washington Post | Editorial

 

Wednesday 26 October 2005

 

Vice President Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that

may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch:

He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by

Americans. " Cruel, inhuman and degrading " treatment of prisoners is

banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan

administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department

annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating

it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that

would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it

is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an

open advocate of torture.

 

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential

power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret

detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it

has refused to register those detainees with the International Red

Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have

" disappeared, " like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice

Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh

interrogation techniques for some of these people, including

" waterboarding, " or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the

deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been

implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan

and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some

aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA.

Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and

there has never been a public report on the agency's performance.

 

It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of

an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice

president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's

decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention

Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S.

military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of

documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and

Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly

one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of

suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that

President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it

contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading

treatment by any U.S. personnel.

 

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats, and the amendment,

sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote

of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a

House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not

just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel,

inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy.

The Senate's earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a

betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered

as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

 

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