July 30, 2008

DOES U.S. MIGHT REALLY MEAN RIGHT?

In a world flooded with propaganda claiming to be news and commercials pretending to be information it was no surprise that a call to charge American officials with war crimes vanished through the porous part of our notoriously biased mass media system.

As always the basic question for any action in our mercenary society is how much will it cost, in this case how much would the United States have to pay in reparations to the victims of torture and other war crimes if some of its senior officials were convicted?

  The answer, of course, is that the U.S., deeper in debt then ever, can not afford to see senior administrators, all the way up to the White House, convicted by independent tribunals on charges of having ordered or sanctioned abominable torture methods at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, thus turning the use of torture into an official policy.

According to Naomi Klein’s bestseller “ The Shock Doctrine” the American fascination with modern torture goes back to the 1950s and 60s when the CIA paid the late psychiatrist, Dr Ewen Cameron, to experiment with electric shocks on his patients. Cameron, now considered the father of shock therapy and modern torture, apparently believed by erasing a person’s memory with the help of often massive electric shock treatment he could rebuild the patient’s personality, a theory that badly failed. However his methods, so, Klein and others contend, were taught by the CIA to Latin American interrogators during the military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s and are now the bases of torture methods at Guantanamo and detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These torture practices have been detailed recently in a chilling report by the Nobel Prize winning group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and are based on interviews with eleven suspected terrorists who were released without charges after being subjected to horrendous tortures and humiliations. The eleven were obviously deemed innocent which leaves the question how bad is the treatment for those deemed guilty.

The PHR report virtually coincided with U.S. legislation reconfirming the President’s right to order the arrest and detention ad infinitum of anyone suspected of planning or assisting terrorist acts against ‘the interests of the United States.’ This means someone threatening in anger to throw a spanner into the assembly line of General Motors could be held in jail forever – if it pleases the man in the White House and his advisers.

In presenting the PHR report the doctors who examined the released detainees said the severity of the tortures ‘was sadly second to none.’

One prisoner said the types of tortures included being beaten, stripped naked, subjected to intimidation by dogs, hooded, thrown against a wall and given electric shocks from a generator.

Prisoners said sexual humiliation was common. One prisoner said a naked woman entered the room and smeared him with what he believed was menstrual blood.

Another prisoner said he was forced to lay face-down in urine. He was then sodomized with a broomstick.

The President of PHR, Leonard Rubenstein has demanded ‘’There must be accountability, whatever their place in the chain of command.’ His spokesman, Allen Keller, added: We have violated the golden rule we have preached for years: Don’t torture. Now we call it enhanced interrogation techniques….’’
  
But perhaps the most damaging comment came from U.S. retired army general Antonio Teguba, the man who conducted the official investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal which led to jail terms for ten soldiers but no punishment for officials.

In a foreword to the PHR report General Teguba wrote there is ‘’no longer any doubt that the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.’’
ends