The Columbia Journalism Review has a recommendable piece about journalism in Afghanistan. Crossfire in Kandahar. Part of it is a tale of a journalist, Mohammad Nader, captured and interrogated by the U.S. military seemingly for talking on the phone to a Taliban spokesperson. The journalist is raided from his home at night, brought into a prison and gets interrogate every few hours.
Nader looked forward to the interrogations. His questioners seemed like good people, he told me, and the translators they worked with were particularly adept. The sessions also gave him an excuse to leave his cell, a dark room about ten feet long and eight feet wide. The cell disturbed him. Pictures occasionally appeared on the wall. Nader described them as photographs projected from somewhere else by means of a light beam or laser. One image showed a person with two broken legs. Later, a picture of a bloodstain appeared on the wall. Nader wondered if it was the blood of the prisoner who had occupied the cell before him. Another picture showed two dogs fighting. The stomach of one of the dogs was ripped open and puppies spilled out. Nader tried not to look at the images, lest he grow frightened. The doctor gave him sleeping pills, but he spent his three nights in NATO custody wide awake. Unfamiliar music played, and he could hear the voices of children calling, “Baba, baba!”—the Afghan word for father. He was convinced these were the voices of his own children, recorded somehow through his phone or another device the Americans had planted in his house.
Seeing pictures on the wall and hearing voices would be typical for a person who is in solitary confinement for some longer time. But Nader is only there for three days. He is an experienced cameraman and knows about pictures.
Could such things as projected pictures an the prison cell wall be some new method to put people "off balance" before interrogations? This seems like some "simulation" of the effects of solitary confinement in the hope of inducing the same helplessness and mental disturbance that solitary confinement induces. As such I could certainly be defined as torture.
The CJR writer later questions a high ranking U.S. press officer about this.
He declined to comment on Nader’s account of the disturbing pictures projected on the wall of his cell, except to say that NATO forces abide by the Geneva Conventions and by detention rules laid down in a U. S. Army field manual.
As we know the U.S. always says that it abides by the rules, even while it breaks them.
Nader's story sounds quite believable and, as we know, military interrogators have always been creative in their methods. But such methods are unlikely to be secret for long. Such things come home to roost. At latest when their use spills over into the United States as it inevitable will. Therefore, I believe, we will hear much more of this new torture method. Hopefully before someone becomes insane over seeing pictures on a prison wall.