The CIA's use of torture
The London newspaper The Independent has provided a chilling summary of the known facts surrounding the CIA's use of torture.
According to the article, several CIA agents have publicized what is going on because they were appalled by what has been going on:
In light of European outrage over the apparent presence of secret prisons within the EU, Condoleeza Rice has already indicated that she will go on the offensive on the matter. She has already implicitly suggested that the CIA's techniques are a good thing because they have produced valuable results. According to Rice, these tactics have "stopped terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives, in Europe as well as in the U.S. and other countries." Although she denies that the US carries out torture, the reality is that she is simply engaging in semantics without justifying that claim with any specifics.
Among the torture tactics that the CIA has used, according to the Independent article, are the following:
According to the article, several CIA agents have publicized what is going on because they were appalled by what has been going on:
Details of the secret prisons and the methods used in them have emerged mainly from CIA officers themselves, who said the public needed to know 'the direction their agency has chosen'.The CIA even had some apparent difficulty finding interrogators who would use such practices:
just over a dozen CIA interrogators were trained and authorised to use the 'enhanced interrogation' techniques. At least three had declined involvement.What is important in this issue is that the CIA is currently able to do all of this with impunity. The fact that the CIA is keeping prisoners in secret sites, in violation of international law and human rights standards, means that they are allowed to act without any international supervision. This need for secrecy has always been an important matter for human rights violators who commit the most egregious outrages. According to the article:
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.
These incidents are in addition to the increasingly well-documented practice of "rendition": flying suspects to Middle Eastern countries where torture and deaths in custody are routine. "If you want a good interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them dead, you send them to Egypt or Syria," one former CIA agent is reported as saying. The McCain amendment, however, will have no impact on foreign torturers. It is mainly aimed at halting the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib, where routine humiliations degenerated into sadism.
Yet only the low-ranking military police caught on camera in Abu Ghraib have been prosecuted. America's covert forces are operating in a climate of impunity, described by Cofer Black, then CIA counter-terrorism chief, who told a congressional committee in 2002: "After 9/11, the gloves were off." At one point, according to Newsweek, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it could not be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies organ failure or death.
In light of European outrage over the apparent presence of secret prisons within the EU, Condoleeza Rice has already indicated that she will go on the offensive on the matter. She has already implicitly suggested that the CIA's techniques are a good thing because they have produced valuable results. According to Rice, these tactics have "stopped terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives, in Europe as well as in the U.S. and other countries." Although she denies that the US carries out torture, the reality is that she is simply engaging in semantics without justifying that claim with any specifics.
Among the torture tactics that the CIA has used, according to the Independent article, are the following:
It will be interesting to see if the European heads of state back down on this issue. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has already made plain her intention of being more of a lapdog to US imperialism. Despite all the attention that this issue has been given in recent days in the European press, one has to wonder if the leaders of those nations will simply be too intimidated by the US to do anything about it.
THE ATTENTION GRAB: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him. Israel, the only democracy to have openly debated coercion of prisoners, declared this legal in 1987, but the Supreme Court ruled it out in 1999
THE ATTENTION SLAP: Interrogators may deliver "an open-handed slap", which is "aimed at causing pain and triggering fear"
THE BELLY SLAP: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage
STANDING FOR HOURS: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to a ring bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are claimed to be effective in yielding confessions
COLD TREATMENT: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept at around 10C, and constantly doused with cold water. Misapplication of this technique is blamed for the death of a detainee in Kabul
WATERBOARDING: The prisoner is bound to a board, head slightly below the feet. Plastic is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him, or his head is lowered into a bath. The gag reflex is automatic; few can endure more than a matter of seconds
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