Torture is like porn—it is difficult to define but we know it when we see it. The fancy language of diplomats and statesmen who deny the reality on the ground in their torture chambers is ordinary lies. Every torturing country finds lawyers and wordsmiths to say that they are not making porn, not engaged in the business of torture—but they are.
The politicians’ lip service to veterans as they withhold life-protecting armor, cut benefits, cheat veterans out of service-connected disabilities, and deny essential rehabilitation and mental health services is a counterfeit patriotism. It is as counterfeit as George Bush’s patriotic claim that “we do not torture.” Torture is our new national policy.
Torture wounds everything it touches.
• It scars the bodies and spirits of those who are tortured.
• It infuriates the society that is tortured, and in this sense U.S. policy destroyed the legitimacy of its own claim and ability to bring civil society to Iraq.
• It scars the soldiers and police who respond to their commanders’ orders or green light to torture. We know that soldiers who commit atrocities are much more likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder than the high rate of that stress disorder in those who see combat.
• It scars the society that tortures. It will take generations to rebuild the tarnished reputation of our armed forces.
• It wounds the future. It inflicts pain on the families and loved ones of tortured and torturers alike. Our nation’s reckless abandonment of the Geneva Convention to safeguard POWs has made it impossible for us to appeal to those standards on behalf of our own soldiers taken captive in future wars.
The torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and Bagram and Qaim and Bucca and Gardez and Mercury and Cropper and the salt pit and all the other islands in our war-on-terror prison archipelago was not the acts of a few bad apples or rogue soldiers. It was U.S. policy.
• The President set aside the Geneva Conventions in February 2002.
• The Secretary of Defense, over the protests of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, sent that directive to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo.
• Secret prisons were built.
• Prisoners were not registered.
• The Red Cross was locked out.
• Commanders did not respond to reports of abuse.
• Investigations of prisoners who were beaten, burned, chilled, heated, dehydrated, humiliated, sexually assaulted across Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo were superficial, biased, or curtailed.
• Death certificates of prisoners who were murdered during interrogation were routinely locked up at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology instead of being forwarded to an international organization as we were obligated to do.
• Documents were classified to conceal crimes, rather than to protect national security. Some documents were altered to conceal the breadth of the abuses. One man even has two death certificates. A child who died of untreated tuberculosis in a CIA prison has no death certificate.
• And then, when the pictures from Abu Ghraib leaked, lies and cover-ups began. Investigations were limited in scope to conceal the extent of the crime. Investigations were carried out only by two-star generals so that the two-star generals—generals Miller, Sanchez, Pappas, Fast, and others who were in charge of the torture system—were immune from investigation because of a military rule that a person can only be investigated by a person of higher rank.
• Punishment was light, sparse, largely symbolic, and aimed at the frontline troops.
I want to make it perfectly clear that the overall command failures to protect our soldiers made this worse.
• For the first time, we put a POW facility on an active battlefield, again in violation of the Geneva Conventions and Defense Department doctrine. The guards who dealt with prisoners also were dealing with incoming rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and sniper fire. They were stressed out and some struck out.
• The uncertain length of deployments, which were erratically extended and then repeated, damaged morale and increased anger and stress.
• There was a lack of training in prison management and proper detention.
• The CIA and private contractors had no rules, and they mingled with and gave orders to regular soldiers.
• The final Command failure was the failure to give a clear mission that could be won by the military strategy and resources. Demoralized soldiers, without a sense of a clear mission goal and progress to that goal are in what Lifton has called an “atrocity producing situation.”
The responsibility for American military torture in the war on terror lies with senior civilian officials and military commanders. They walked. The frontline soldiers took the hit.
Never forget.
Steven Miles is a Minneapolis physician and author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House 2006). |
