Continuities of Torture in US wars

All wars are savage, barbaric, immoral, as well as often illegal with respect to international law. They are also often in recent times asymmetric, in the sense that one side has enormous supplies of modern weapons and resources, while the other side is bereft of tanks, cannons, fighter aircraft, navies, predatory drones, advanced electronic communications, and the other deadly accoutrements that accompany such warfare. Certainly all this is true in the US/Allied wars on and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Richard Falk refers to such warfare as “one-sided” in one of the articles in a recently published collection titled The United States and Tortures: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse, edited by Marjorie Cohn. Here is some relevant text from Falk’s article.

“The United States and some of its allies, rely on and seek to sustain and enhance a posture of military dominance enabling the pursuit of political goals throughout the world. And this dominance basically relies upon American technological superiority in warfare that enables it to inflict limitless devastation on a foreign country anywhere on earth without fearing retaliation at home. It is an accepted idea in national defense planning in all countries to develop the most effective weaponry that is technologically and financially feasible. The disposition is reinforced by strategic thinking about how to inflict maximal damage in battlefield situations and as an instrument of coercive diplomacy. The US government, without any serious domestic challenge, has carried this image of national security to absurd limits, currently with an annual military budget about equal to that of the entire rest of the world” (p. 122).

US and its allies have devastated or compounded the devastation of the infrastructures, economies, medical and educational systems of Afghanistan and Iraq, killed tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians, created the conditions that facilitated such carnage, and wounded many others, physically and/or psychologically. These foreign interventionists have created refugee populations, produced homeless families, intensified and expanded already impoverished populations, and imprisoned tens of thousands of people arbitrarily, with an absence of due process and often with no or scant credible evidence of guilt.

In the process, the waste of American lives and resources in particular has been mind-boggling and -nauseating. The steep expenditures on the wars have helped to drive the US more deeply into debt, to leave other pressing national needs under-supported or ignored, and to create a heart rending situation in which the medical needs of hundreds of thousands of wounded or psychologically impaired veterans, not mentioning their families and communities, will often remain in need of health care for many years.

Torture – the continuities

I focus in this essay on just one aspect of the US-dominated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My principal argument is that the US has been itself the perpetrator of torture in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. These are well documented claims and accepted by informed people throughout the world.

The issue here is that torture does not go away when US or allied troops turn over prisons and prisoners to Iraqi or Afghan military authorities. It continues, though the US distances itself from the consequences. The culpability in now indirect rather than direct, but there is still culpability.

For some years now, the US military has been in the process of turning over US-controlled prisons and/or the prisoners to their Afghan and Iraqi military and police forces, trained and armed by the US. This process is not new. It is a process that was employed by the US in the Philippines at the turn of the century, as documented by Alfred W. McCoy in his book Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State and in many instances since then.

The example of Iraq – three sources

Tens of thousands of Iraqi men spent years in American prisons in Iraq. The prisons or detention centers and prisoners have been transferred to Iraqi officials, who are known for the brutal treatment of prisoners. The last detention center was handed over the Iraq’s justice minister in July of 2010. From torture to torture.

>#1 - Leila Fadel reports on this event and provides background information in an article for the Washington Post Foreign Service, “Some worry about abuse as US hands over final detention center to Iraq, published on July 16, 2010. Here are excerpts from the article.

“That moment closed a controversial chapter of the U.S.-led occupation, after seven years in which tens of thousands of Iraqis have passed through American detention centers. Often they were never charged with a crime. At Abu Ghraib, some were infamously abused and humiliated.

“Now human rights groups and Iraqis worry that detainees will be subjected to abuse in Iraq's crowded prison system. Torture was rampant during the reign of Saddam Hussein, deposed in the U.S.-led invasion. In the past two years, hundreds of torture cases in Iraqi facilities were confirmed by the country's Human Rights Ministry. This year, a secret prison was uncovered where inmates had been beaten and sodomized.

“’Unfortunately, Iraq is prone to detention and torture abuses, whether it's the former regime, the occupying powers or now the Iraqi government,’ said Samer Muscati, an Iraq expert at Human Rights Watch. ‘Under international law, you're not supposed to transfer detainees if they will get tortured. But how long can the Americans hold on to them? There is no ideal solution, but the Americans have a responsibility.’”

#2 Amy Goodman interviewed Malcolm Smart, the Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North African Programs, on Democracy Now, September 20, 2010.

AMY GOODMAN: Amnesty International has released a new report that finds more than 30,000 prisoners are being held in Iraq without charge, including 10,000 prisoners who were recently transferred from US custody. Amnesty’s report is called "New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq." [….]

MALCOLM SMART: Well, I think part of the problem is really a problem of impunity. This has been going on for all too long, and there’s a culture of abuse that has taken root. It was certainly there during the days of Saddam Hussein, but what we wanted to see from 2003 was a turning of the page, and that hasn’t happened. So we see secret prisons, people being tortured and ill-treated, being forced to make confessions. And the courts, although routinely detainees claim that they were made to sign false confessions, the courts are really not investigating those and coming to grips with them. And the perpetrators are not being held to account. They’re not being identified. On a number of occasions, the government has reacted by saying it will appoint inquiries after secret prisons have been disclosed and their locations have been found and prisoners in them have been found to be in a very severely ill-treated position. But the outcomes of those investigations have not been made known. [….]

MALCOLM SMART: Likewise with deaths in custody. We have in our report details of several cases where deaths are alleged to have occurred as a result of torture or ill treatment. Now, the standard practice of any authority in that situation, required by national law and required by international law, is to carry out an independent investigation. What were the causes, what was the circumstances, of the death? Now, this hasn’t happened. And again, we’re calling attention to the need for the government to show the political will to take measures against the torturers.

AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm, there were 10,000 prisoners, in your Amnesty report, transferred from US custody in Iraq to Iraqi custody—US basically transferring prisoners to a system that tortures them, unclear what happened to them in US custody.

MALCOLM SMART: [….] Since the beginning of 2009, under what’s called the Status of Forces Agreement, the two governments agreed to transfer custody of the prisons and prisoners to the Iraqi forces. Now, many of those detainees held by the US forces had been held without charge or trial for years without any means to challenge their detention. We’ve not made the claim that all those people are innocent of crimes….And here, we saw this Status of Forces Agreement at the end of 2008 making the way for the transfer, with no human rights safeguards written into that, although, quite clearly, US forces know that the record of Iraqi forces is a very grim one.

AMY GOODMAN: And the US is pouring millions, if not billions, into Iraq. The US forces are still there. They could do something.
MALCOLM SMART: Well, you know, I’m being told that the US forces now see it as an Iraqi issue, and the last of the prisoners, except for 200 who remain in US custody, have been handed over. In some cases, as we describe in our report, actually, the US recommended some of the people they had detained be released. But, in fact, the Iraqi authorities have continued to detain them.

>#3 - David Leigh and Maggie O’Kan, “Iraq war logs: US turned over captives to Iraqi torture squads, Guardian, Oct. 24, 2010 – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/24/iraq-war-logs-us-iraqi-torture. Here are excerpts that capture another aspect of the torture reality in Iraq.
[….]

“Fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks.
“The 400,000 field reports published by the whistle blowing website at the weekend contain an official account of deliberate threats by a military interrogator to turn his captive over to the Iraqi ‘Wolf Brigade’.

“The interrogator told the prisoner in explicit terms that: ‘He would be subject to all the pain and agony that the Wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees.’
[….]

“Within the huge leaked archive is contained a batch of secret field reports from the town of Samarra. They corroborate previous allegations that the US military turned over many prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos.
[….]

“The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films : ‘US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing,’ while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.

“An interview conducted by Maass in 2005 at the improvised prison, accompanied by the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.

“The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects. The then interior minister in charge of them was alleged to have been a former member of the Shia Badr militia.” [….]

The example of Afghanistan

Gareth Porter provides background information on the situation of the transfer of prisoners from US and NATO forces to Afghanistan military/police forces and the perpetuation of torture. Porter’s article, “The Torture Mill,” appeared in Counter Punch on April 27, 2011.

“Starting in late 2005, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan began turning detainees over to the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS), despite its well-known reputation for torture.

“Interviews with former U.S. and NATO diplomats and other evidence now available show that United States and other NATO governments become complicit in NDS torture of detainees for two distinctly different reasons. [….]

“The transfers to the NDS were a direct violation of the United Nations Convention against Torture, which forbids the transfer of any person by a State Party to "another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." [….]

“….the detainees were turned over the NDS, which had long had a reputation for torturing suspected enemies of the state, starting when it was the secret police and intelligence agency during the Soviet occupation. That reputation had continued under the government of President Hamid Karzai. [….]

“By the time U.S. and Canadian military commanders began large-unit sweeps in areas where the Taliban had been operating in 2004-2005, the George W. Bush administration had already decided to consider all Afghans in detention as "unlawful combatants".
“But most of the Afghans picked up in those sweeps were not Taliban fighters. After U.S. and NATO forces began turning over detainees to the NDS, the intelligence agency's chief Amrullah Saleh told NATO officials that the agency had to release two-thirds of the detainees who had been transferred to it, according to the NATO diplomat. [….]

“In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen published May 16, 2007, Canadian Brig. Gen. Jim Ferron, then the intelligence chief for NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command in Afghanistan, referred to the intelligence motive for both detention and transferring detainees to NDF. [….]

" much of the information provided by detainees was "not truthful and is aimed at deceiving military forces". Ferron explained that detainees went through "basic questioning" by NATO interrogators about "why they joined the insurgency" and the information was then turned over to NDS. [….]

“Ferron said senior NDS officials had assured him that "detainees are treated humanely." But only three weeks earlier, the Toronto Globe and Mail had published a series of investigative articles based on interviews with detainees turned over by the Canadians who had been tortured by NDS. [….]

“The British and Dutch also joined with U.S. officials in trying to get the Afghan government to shift responsibility for detainees from NDS to the Afghan Ministry of Defence, the NATO diplomat recalled.

“But there were two problems: under Afghan law, there was no provision for long-term legal internment, and a 1987 Afghan law gave NDS the responsibility for handling security cases through its own "security courts".

“The U.S. and its two European NATO allies wanted President Hamid Karzai to remove those legal obstacles to long-term detention by the Defence Ministry. "The idea was that Karzai would declare a state of emergency, so the government could hold people for the length of the conflict," the diplomat said. [….]

“But Karzai refused to declare a state of emergency, according to the NATO diplomat, because he didn't want to make concessions to the Afghan parliament to get it. Meanwhile, Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak "wanted nothing to do with detainee policy", said the NATO diplomat. [….]

“During 2009, ISAF transferred a total of 350 detainees to NDS, according to official data provided to IPS by a knowledgeable U.S. source. An even more detainees were transferred to NDS by U.S. troops operating separately from the NATO command, according to the source.”

Implications

State authorities and a compliant media can create an atmosphere of lawlessness and inhumanity by demonizing “enemies of America” and creating a climate of fear in the American population. But also the US government can break the law when the population is kept ignorant of relevant information because “national security” is said to be at stake.

We may think that the scandals that brought to light the terrible treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are now behind us or in the process of being fixed. Then we learn they go on, sometimes under the authority of those who US forces have trained and for whom they have set examples. Through it all, though, the brutish and callous treatment toward the “enemy” is perpetuated by the darker, but essential, aspects of war.