"We Can Use the Fruits of It"
2003: Another Torturous
Year Ahead?
by Mickey Z.
Dissident Voice
December 30, 2002
"Nothing changes on New Year's
Day..." (U2)
In the corporate
media equivalent of a scoop, Dana Priest and Barton Gellman of the Washington
Post "broke" the story of US torture of Arab and Afghan "detainees."
The December 26 article, perfectly timed to get lost in the holiday shuffle,
begins like a bad spy novel: "Deep inside the forbidden zone at the
US-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the
detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a
cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina
wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on
terrorism-captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders."
Priest and
Gellman report that those refusing to cooperate are "sometimes kept
standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles"
or "held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour
bombardment of lights" (euphemistically termed "stress and
duress" techniques). And these are the lucky ones.
Other detainees
(POW status conveniently denied) are handed over to "allies of dubious
human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and
wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred," write Priest and
Gellman who quote an unnamed official source as explaining: "We don't kick
the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick
the [expletive] out of them."
Former CIA
inspector general Fred Hitz claims the Agency doesn't "do torture"
but if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, "we can
use the fruits of it."
This approach,
called "operational flexibility," is allegedly something new. At a
Sept. 26 joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees, Cofer
Black, then head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center declared: "After 9/11
the gloves come off."
This is
certainly news to the rest of the world where US-sponsored torture
is hardly a
revelation.
There are many
examples of direct US torture, i.e. a 1975 Senate investigating committee
exposed US methods of interrogating pairs of Vietcong prisoners. In one case,
when the first prisoner refused to speak, he was thrown from an airplane at
3000 feet. The second prisoner answered all questions but was thrown from the
plane anyway. Other techniques involved cutting off fingers, fingernails, ears,
or sexual organs of one prisoner while the other looked on.
However, thanks
to CIA and US training, the true American torture legacy lies in the bloody
fingerprints found across the globe. Consider SAVAK, Iran's notorious Shah-era
secret police created jointly by the CIA and Israel. Amnesty International
deemed SAVAK's history of torture as "beyond belief."
In 1960s Greece,
under the rule of paid CIA operative George Papadopoulos, US-equipped police
used methods like shoving "a filthy rag, often soaked in urine, and
sometimes excrement" down the throat of suspected communists.
During the CIA's
holy war against the USSR in Afghanistan, the US-trained and funded Moujahedeen
drugged captured Soviet soldiers and kept them in cages. A reporter from the
Far Eastern Economic Review told of Soviet soldiers killed, skinned, and hung
in a butcher's shop. "One captive," he reported, "found himself
the center of attraction in a game of buzkashi," an Afghan form of polo
using a headless goat as the ball. In this case, the Soviet captive was used,
alive. "He was literally torn to pieces," said the reporter.
Ronald Reagan
called the Nicaraguan contras "the moral equivalent of the Founding
Fathers." This noble group of "freedom fighters" regularly
attacked civilians, cutting off women's breasts and men's testicles, gouging
out eyes, beheading infants, using children for target practice, and slitting throats
and pulling the victim's tongue out through the slit. One 14-year-old girl was
gang-raped and decapitated. Her head was placed on a stake as a warning to
government supporters in her village. The chairman of Americas Watch and
Helsinki Watch concluded "the US cannot avoid responsibility for these
atrocities."
Elsewhere in
Latin America, Dan Mitrione, head of Orwellian-named US Office of Public Safety
trained the Brazilian police force in the 1960s. One of the techniques Mitrione
taught involved placing the end of a reed in the anus of a naked man hanging
suspended. The other end of the reed is soaked in oil and lit. In Uruguay,
Mitrione was called in to help deal with the Tupamaros a group William Blum
calls "perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful, and most sophisticated
urban guerillas the world has even seen." Under the guidance of Mitrione,
the Uruguayan Senate found that torture had become a "normal, frequent,
and habitual occurrence."
Techniques included electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under
the fingernails, and use of "a wire so thin that it could be fitted into the
mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase the electrical
charge."
Such tactics
were honed in Mitrione's own soundproof basement room. Blum writes of
Mitrione's use of four street beggars to demonstrate the effects of different
voltages on different parts of the body. All four men died.
Mitrione was
eventually kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros. At his funeral, White House
spokesman Ron Ziegler stated: "Mr. Mitrione's devoted service to the cause
of peaceful in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men
everywhere."
Imagine if he
was allowed to take the gloves off.
As one official
who has supervised the recent capture and transfer of accused terrorists told
Priest and Gellman: "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of
the time, you probably aren't doing your job."
"Everything
can change on a new year's day..." (Rage Against the Machine)
Mickey Z. is the author of Saving Private Power: The Hidden
History of "The Good War" (www.softskull.com) and the upcoming
book, The Murdering of My Years: Artists & Activists Making
Ends Meet. He
can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.