Torture at Abu Ghraib: the norm, not the exception

"When something like this comes to light, the United States acts quickly and swiftly to bring people to justice and to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again".  (Whitehouse Press Briefing by Scott McClellan, May 10, 2004)

Deep Blade Journal has emphasized often ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) that torture of prisoners under US auspices is hardly an aberration.

Contrary to the whitewash McClellan and other administration officials wish to promote, the United States is mostly concerned with keeping quiet its atrocious policies and practices. These practices are then clandestinely approved and repeated again, and again, and again.

Take for example the torture training center generally known as the School of the Americas, now officially renamed (in an attempt at image cleansing) the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). A new story in LA Weekly by Doug Ireland describes how the US Congress has maneuvered below the radar to renew appropriations for the institution, "where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years". An amendment with 128 cosponsors to cut off WHINSEC appropriations was killed procedurally in the House of Representatives. The US Senate is now the final hurdle before the School's funding is renewed.

The LA Weekly reminds readers of the documentary history of US-promoted torture recently revealed in documents obtained by the National Security Archive through Freedom of Information act requests and released to the public in May 2004.  This article by Thomas Blanton and Peter Kornbluh appearing on Counterpunch for May 12, 2004 provides an excellent summary of how

CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described "coercive techniques" such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.... [Also,] a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney warn[ed] that U.S. Army intelligence manuals...incorporated the earlier work of the CIA for training Latin American military officers in interrogation and counterintelligence techniques [and] contained "offensive and objectionable material" that "undermines U.S. credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment."

Ireland writes, "Abu Ghraib torture techniques have been field-tested by SOA graduates", and goes on to quote a May 14 Toronto Globe and Mail piece by Dr. Miles Schuman, a physician with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture:

The black hood covering the faces of naked prisoners in Abu Ghraib was known as la capuchi in Guatemalan and Salvadoran torture chambers. The metal bed frame to which the naked and hooded detainee was bound in a crucifix position in Abu Ghraib was la cama, named for a former Chilean prisoner who survived the U.S.-installed regime of General Augusto Pinochet. In her case, electrodes were attached to her arms, legs and genitalia, just as they were attached to the Iraqi detainee poised on a box, threatened with electrocution if he fell off. The Iraqi man bound naked on the ground with a leash attached to his neck, held by a smiling young American recruit, reminds me of the son of peasant organizers who recounted his agonizing torture at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes, U.S.-backed dictator John-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier’s right-hand thugs, in Port-au-Prince in 1984. The very act of photographing those tortured in Abu Ghraib to humiliate and silence parallels the experience of an American missionary, Sister Diana Ortiz [who was tortured and gang-raped repeatedly under supervision by an American in 1989, according to her testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus].

The depraved story of how seriously the United States has in the past taken its own declared "steps to make sure it doesn't happen again" should give little comfort to current and future detainees facing torture at the hands of the empire.

Thanks to The Angry Arab News Service for the LA Weekly link.