We don't torture?

The wholly-owned US subsidiary in Iraq has more torture there than ever; President to get blank check to define torture techniques and keep them secret

UN Envoy: More Torture in Iraq Today than Under Saddam

The United Nations’ leading campaigner against torture has issued a grim assessment of Iraq under US occupation. Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, says more Iraqis are being tortured today than when Saddam Hussein was in power. His comments come one day after the UN said more than sixty-six hundred Iraqi civilians were killed in July and August.

Funny how in all the recent protestations from President Bush--``The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it -- and I will not authorize it''--there is no longer much of his once-common campaign talk of how the Iraqi people are free of torture.

Torture/Geneva fix: make it secret
The new Republican ``deal'' on detainee treatment allows President Bush ``to write secret rules on how to treat suspected terrorists during interrogations.'' Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, the ``abuse can continue'' because President Bush will be able to write ``his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order.''

The list of ``techniques'' used on detainees will be kept secret under the dubious argument that the detainees do not know what they are, so we don't want to let them know how to prepare for them.

Well, we do know what the methods and techniques are. They fall under the misnomer of ``psychological'' techniques. And contrary to common wisdom, they are effective in destroying a human being--these offenses are torture.

Historian Alfred McCoy explains this in his book A Question of Torture, and in this article on TomDispatch

...thanks to recent revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we are now all too familiar with these methods, even if many Americans still have no idea of their history. Upon careful examination, those photographs of nude bodies expose the CIA's most basic torture techniques -- stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation.

For over 2,000 years, from ancient Athens through the Inquisition, interrogators found that the infliction of physical pain often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information -- the strong defied pain while the weak blurted out whatever was necessary to stop it. By contrast, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm used two new methods, sensory disorientation and "self-inflicted pain," both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily to their torturers. A week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly in Guantanamo), offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations."

Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan War, Agency and allied interrogators have often added to their no-touch repertoire physical methods reminiscent of the Inquisition's trademark tortures -- strappado, question de l'eau, "crippling stork," and "masks of mockery." At the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance, American interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect similar to the strappado. Instead of the Inquisition's iron-framed "crippling stork" to contort the victim's body, CIA interrogators made their victims assume similar "stress positions" without any external mechanism, aiming again for the psychological effect of self-induced pain

Fools in the media paint this as just some sort of fun and games, Geneva shmeeva. These are minimum just deserts for those who the president says want to kill us. But they miss the point.

It's impossible for any human being with an ounce of soul to not see how these techniques so dear to Bush are not humiliating, degrading, cruel, and inhuman tortures. They are the tools of domination, not of protection. And therein lies the reason why President Bush wants to rewrite the rules for his own benefit and not tell the damning secrets.