Squeezed

QUESTION: Is this a fair evaluation of the U.S. policy on torture: we do not torture detainees but we want to have an exception for the CIA in case it’s ever necessary —
MR. ERELI: No, I think there is a clear statement of policy — is the Administration’s statement of policy, which is available to you. I’ll endeavor to get you the site. It should be on a website somewhere and you can read it for yourself. It’s exhaustive.

Posted by: b | Nov 13 2005 21:16 utc | 3

An Orwellian piece of editorial shit from the Wall Street Journal

Two persistent sources of confusion in this debate have been misreadings of the Geneva Conventions and sloppy (or willfully distorted) use of the word “torture.” The Geneva Conventions are very strict about which detainees qualify for the protections of “prisoner of war” status: They must, for example, have fought in uniform and shown some respect for the laws of war, such as avoiding attacks on civilians.
What’s more, any form of manipulation, including positive reinforcements such as better rations, are forbidden when it comes to interrogating legitimate POWs. Recognizing guerrillas and terrorists as POWs would be a form of unilateral disarmament, and, worse, would legitimize their behavior. The U.S. was respecting, not skirting, international law when it refused to classify them as such.

Posted by: b | Nov 13 2005 21:25 utc | 5

“Will they ever learn?”
Learn what? That might does not equal right? That the best tool for fixing a broken watch isn’t necessarily a sledgehammer? No. But they have learned a few other things.
These people have learned patience. They have learned craft. They have learned to utilise fear. And these lessons are not only applicable towards consolidating their authoritarian grip in the United States, they have learned to apply these lessons to people everywhere.
Photos like the one of the juvenile in the “humane restraint chair” are, unlike the photos of abuses from Abu Ghraib, internationally illegal (unless you can argue that the chair, and not the prisoner, is the “public curiosity” here). But they have learned to get around international law.
They have learned from their past mistakes and remain with us more powerful and pervasive than ever… and all the while they have remained true to their dictum that “(w)hen you’ve got ’em by their balls, their hearts and minds will follow”.
Maybe we are the ones who refuse to learn. Amongst our axioms are the “quaint” beliefs (to paraphrase Gonzalez) that humans are basically good and that no population will tolerate injustice and corruption for very long. This does not seem to be borne out by the evidence and these core beliefs of ours are the very things that are used to manipulate us over and over again. I will call the US administration many unflattering things, but to suggest that they are stupid or incapable of learning does us far more harm than it does them.

Posted by: Monolycus | Nov 13 2005 22:11 utc | 7

A brief glimpse into our denied, wilfully forgotten, history … and a clear insight into why the Latin Americans and Iranians, amongst others, object to their experience of the ‘reality’ of our foreign policy and export of U.S. style ‘democracy’ & ‘freedom’ …

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 11, 1979 A19
Torture’s Teachers
———————————————————————-
By A.J. Langguth
… Dan Mitrione, the United States policy adviser [CIA, Uruguay, 1970]…
… I see that I too had resisted acknowledging how drastically a man’s career can deform him. I was aware that Mr. Mitrione knew of the tortures and condoned them. That was bad enough. I could not believe even worse of a family man. A Midwesterner. An American.
Thanks to Mr. Hevia, I was finally hearing Mr. Mitrione’s true voice:
“When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician.
“Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die…
“Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist…

Posted by: Outraged | Nov 13 2005 22:56 utc | 9

how hard it is to stay even tempered – when you have before your eyes the birth of the american einsatzgruppen
the workers of this particular toil – are the inheritors of the legacy of kaltenbrunner, heydrich, beria, yagoda, & the armies of death squads that wander iraq under the flag of occupation are the mirror of those who wandered through the east burning everything to the ground
that is their real history & it is a continuing history – it is the history of illegal state formations gone mad like the police battalions, the secret police, the gestapo, the sd
& the americans are there. it is not hyperbole . it is the reality for anyone who has confronted u s power whether it was patrice lumumba or anyone in the middle east who can offer some form of vision outside that of the greedridden & diseased empire
b’s correct with the wapo editorial – these people who shit ink over spilt blood legitimise directly the horror show it is in the end their entertainement perhaps more than the paractitioners of torture – for they are surely torturing their public lying in such a way that the truth has to scream to be heard

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 14 2005 0:28 utc | 11

some graduates from the university of terror

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 14 2005 2:13 utc | 13

Mark Twain’s observation that “there is no distinct, native American criminal class–except Congress.”

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 14 2005 2:32 utc | 15

For G-d’s sake, that’s a European or American in that chair! Look at his neck, hands and torso. He’s from the South, probably Texas or Arkansas.
This is another Rovian setup like the fake Bush Air Reserves records that destroyed Rather’s career, and exploded the MSM investigation into Bush’s AWOL during Viet Nam, just as they were getting close to proving it, conclusively.
The Left Blogistan is going to run with this, then BushCo will prove it’s a fake, and there goes the ball game, you klutz’s! It’s a setup photo, I’ll prove it. There’s nothing in that not allowed under Geneva Convention! When’s the last time you saw an Iraqi with size 12 feet and a Shick shave!

Posted by: tante aime | Nov 14 2005 5:21 utc | 17

Pretty upscale clogs and nice laundered white tee shirt. I think you’re on to something tante aime.
Could these guys really be that stupid?
But then Rather took the bait. Sometimes, I imagine, we can all be quite gullible even while consciously trying not to be.

Posted by: Juannie | Nov 14 2005 6:37 utc | 19

There’s a lot of chatter about Bush being drunk at the Virginia governor’s race appearance. That might be more wishful thinking. Bush, the president who loves his sleep and in deteriorating physical health, was just back from one of his few overseas trips where he got blasted but by a bad reaction to him. What might be more likely he was just exhausted holding onto the podium.
Yeah, somebody did a heck of job turning the story from Bush ducking on his Naty Guard duty to a story on fake docs. And this from the administration that runs on fake docs.

Posted by: christofay | Nov 14 2005 7:08 utc | 21

Unless… tante aime and aschweig are really saboteurs who wanted me to disagree with them so as to discredit the Left when it was revealed that the photo actually is fake… except that they’d anticipate that I’d be on to that ploy, so they’d make sure the photo wasn’t fake first just to set me up. But then, they’d have to realise that I would see through that gambit and realise that they would know that I knew they were setting me up, so they would make sure that the photo is faked!
We could do this all day. Meanwhile, Bushco defends torture.

Posted by: Monolycus | Nov 14 2005 7:18 utc | 23

NYT: Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.
The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE’s teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went “up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques” for “high-profile, high-value” detainees. General Hill had sent this list – which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees’ phobias – to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.
…
Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General Mowhoush’s death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America’s image. That’s because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner’s will rather than to extract useful intelligence.
A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model’s embrace by the Pentagon’s civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 – when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying – this policy had visceral appeal. But it’s the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

Posted by: b | Nov 14 2005 7:31 utc | 25

Of course the policy should be tied to national interest. Then what? It goes underground again. Hidden from public scrutiny. But if it makes people feel better that our President doesn’t endorse torture, that’s good. And all will be well since we won’t have to face it.

Posted by: jm | Nov 14 2005 7:43 utc | 27

Torture in Maine’s prison
Inside the Supermax: Testimony from six prisoners and a videotape; the head of Corrections promises reform
BY LANCE TAPLEY
“The mission of the Maine State Prison is to provide a safe, secure, and humane correctional environment for the incarcerated offender.”
— prison Web page
Five hollering guards wearing helmets, face shields, and full body armor charge into a mentally ill man’s cell. The first attacker smashes a big shield into him, knocking him down. The attackers jump on him, spray Mace into his face, push him onto his bed, and twist his arms to his back so they can handcuff him. They connect the cuffs by a chain to leg irons. Then they take him into the corridor, cut off all his clothes, and carry him naked and screaming through the cellblock, continuing to Mace him. They put him in an observation room where they bind him to a restraint chair with straps. He remains there naked and cold for hours, yelling and mumbling…

Posted by: Outraged | Nov 14 2005 10:36 utc | 29

Outraged, Monolycus – I am in no position to comment on the physical features of the occupant. The circumstances surrounding the photo are suspect. First of all, embedded journalists have too often been used to sculpt the news. Secondly, since embedded journalists are subject to content review, I have to agree with the conclusion, “the military obviously believes that there is nothing to hide here.” Finally, the framing of the photograph, with the soldier in the background appearently paying no attention to the camera leads me to believe that this is a photograph of torture for the sake of publicity (perhaps an even more sickening idea). Either it is going to be proved a fake, or, it going to be “see – Americans don’t torture.” This looks to me to be an attempt to reframe the torture debate.

Posted by: aschweig | Nov 14 2005 13:40 utc | 31

They have a chair like that at my local sheriff’s office – only pointing this out to tie into Outrage’s above: too much obsessive emphasis on control, restraint and submission everywhere in the culture.

Posted by: Tantalus | Nov 14 2005 17:26 utc | 33

@aschweig
The photo was not being used to make or break a case that the US government is engaging in extralegal and inhumane treatment of detainees (more accurately, political prisoners). The photo itself is only peripherally relevant and only appears as an illustration to the Newsweek article, which is why I thought tante’s observations about it being used to “set us up” were silly, borderline hysterical and probably disingenuous on his or her part. The scandal here is the debate itself and not any piece of material evidence we have been presented.
You do raise a valid about how the photo and the article are employed to subtly reframe the debate, and I am not taking any umbrage with that. With the wording of the article, that particular photo could as easily have been a man eating a cold dinner or getting a stern finger-waggling from the warden. It just goes hand-in-hand with the “See? We’re not so bad!” meme that they are trying to push. They weren’t going to run a photo of a water-boarding in progress or somebody being sodomized with a chemical light in that context, so I’m not sure why that particular pic’s authenticity is even in question. Seems to me that the photographer was better trained in “focus” than we’re being.

Posted by: Monolycus | Nov 14 2005 22:38 utc | 35

Per r’giap’s posts –
Costa Gravas made a very good movie in 1973 about the demise of Dan Mitrione in Uruguay in 1970 at the hands of an urban guerilla group, the Tupamaros. The lightly fictionalized screenplay was written by Franco Solinas, who ealier created the screenplay for “Battle of Algiers.” “State of Siege” was dismissed by many U.S. critics, but Vince Canby/ NYT mostly got it.
Some of Canby’s comments are perhaps more interesting from the perspective of our own times.

Finally, [the movie] is an examination of our capacity to be shocked, a capacity that may have begun to run out with the disclosures about the Bay of Pigs, so that now, when we read the stories about the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation and Chile, we are as much inclined to laughter as we are to grief or even to surprise. We shrug and ask ourselves, in effect, what will they do next? Self-interest carried to the limit is no longer evil, or a matter for review by one’s conscience, but a kind of dumbfounding rascality, a high form of scalawaggery.
What makes “State of Siege” so harrowing is not that it is all true (I’m not in a position to know), but that it could be true, and all of us could be responsible. This is more important, I think, than carping over details of the film…

and

“State of Siege,” which opened yesterday at the Beekman, also raises the question about what the American Film Institute was up to when it first booked the film to open its new Washington theater at the Kennedy Center. It should have been apparent to anyone who had seen it that “State of Siege” would ruffle a lot of people in Washington, but then to cancel it, as was done last week, suggests incompetence of an order as scary as outright censorship.

Or it suggests the indirect, covert censorship more common in the U.S. One wonders does Canby truly disapprove of AFI incompetence, or is he covering himself in order to report the dust-up? One might settle for even such artful dodges in today’s NYT, if it got the stories out.
Curiously, the NYT posts on the web a more recent, brief review by Hal Erickson, which one has to click through to arrive at the original Canby review. The contrast between the two reviews reflects the sad state of much contemporary critique and analysis, the newer bearing little resemblance to Canby’s review and so little relation to the movie that it is doubtful Erickson ever saw it. Says Erickson in summary:

Despite its up-to-date radicalism, State of Siege adheres to time-honored Hollywood formula, with ugly, vulgar bad guys vs. handsome, articulate good guys.

In fact, contrary to Mr. Erickson’s review, perhaps the most brilliant insight of the movie’s creators was to cast Yves Montand (neither ugly nor vulgar) as Philip Michael Santore/Dan Mitrione. The evil that Santore perpetrates is clear, but the viewer does not see him torture. Throughout the film Montand’s presence is intelligent and sympathetic.
This is a challenge we Americans continually fail to meet: to recognize and turn away from seductive evil, that comes bearing gifts, dressed in modest manners, a common creed, and the cogency of high ideas. Not the jackbooted Nazis, psychopathic foreigners, lawless druglords, Jokers, Penguins, all our cultural shorthand for Manichean villains, with whom we populate our nightmares and our stories, when we imagine face of evil.

Posted by: small coke | Nov 15 2005 6:53 utc | 37

small coke,
on that review of the review, i’ll have to give it a watch

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 15 2005 9:19 utc | 39

US sweep of arrests after Iraq invasion leads to few convictions

Official US figures help support this. The number of Iraqis detained by the US and other foreign forces has more than doubled in a year and a half. The number of attacks has also more than doubled. “It is difficult to think of anything better calculated to create antagonism among the Iraqi population than detention against which there is no right to challenge or to appeal,” the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell, said yesterday. He added: “Acting wholly contrary to accepted principle and without regard to legal obligations will inevitably make the struggle much more difficult. For the Iraqi government to have such a subordinate role until the point of conviction simply underlines the fact that they are a long way from having sovereignty over their own country.”

Posted by: Outraged | Nov 15 2005 14:01 utc | 41

@ justwatching:
too true.
@ smallcoke:
Costa-Gavras would also, presumably, have been making a point about the Greek junta that was still in power at that point. The junta was a CIA-complicit military dictatorship complete with gulags, torture, suppression of civil liberties and an emphasis on religio-moral behaviour. This happened within NATO, in our lifetime, but seems to have disappeared down the memory-hole. The coup took place a couple of years after Lyndon Johnson told the Greek ambassador, re. Greco-Turkish squabblings over Cyprus, to “fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good…. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long.”
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Posted by: Tantalus | Nov 15 2005 14:15 utc | 43

@Small Coke
Short version: Yes.

Posted by: Outraged | Nov 15 2005 16:40 utc | 45

Judging from the height, skin color, jawbone and nasal structure of the “victim” in this picture, I would say that it is staged, with an American playing the role of torturee. The soldier behind the glass sure looks like a Nazi in dress and demeanor………

Posted by: Malooga | Nov 15 2005 20:35 utc | 47