Torture was deliberate U.S. policy - Not just a few ‘bad apples’!

By Dave Bernt

The Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal has continued to spread like wildfire as new revelations of torture and abuse spread throughout Iraq and beyond. It is now clear that the "few bad apples" defense of the Bush administration is a cover-up of a widespread technique of soliciting information from prisoners of war.

In fact, evidence is now appearing that the general use of torture and intimidation against prisoners in U.S. hands was a deliberate policy adopted at the top and in conscious circumvention of the Geneva Conventions and all other human rights treaties that the U.S. has signed.

According to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally approved a "special access" program providing for the extension of the atrocious and illegal methods used against a small group of Al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan to prisoners taken in the suppression of resistance in Iraq.

Moreover, the June 7 issue of The Nation magazine reported that over two years ago, on Jan. 25, 2002, advising the president that his policies could lead to court cases against the government for violating the War Crimes Act.

The solution Gonzales offered was adopted; prisoners taken in the so-called War against Terrorism were declared by the White House to be outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions.

So far, the Army has admitted that 37 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. In most of those cases, officials did not conduct autopsies and claim they are unable to determine the causes of death. There is evidence in some cases, however, of excessive brutality by U.S. forces. Several deaths occurred under suspicious circumstances, such as being "shot while trying to escape."

In Iraq, new reports of torture and abuse have come to light from human rights reports, prisoner testimonials, and U.S. Army investigations. These include reports of sexual abuse of female as well as male prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

In Samarra, north of Baghdad, soldiers from the California National Guard are accused of engaging in "a prolonged pattern of abuse". This was revealed in an internal Army report obtained by The New York Times, which detailed the findings in its May 26 issue.

According to the report, the Guardsmen "struck and pulled the hair of detainees" and forced into asphyxiations numerous detainees in an attempt to obtain information" in interrogations that lasted as long as 10 weeks. The report also detailed the death of an Iraqi officer who died in the custody of U.S. occupation forces. Major Gen. Abed Hamad Mowhoush died "after being shoved head first into a sleeping bag, and questioned while being rolled repeatedly from his back to his stomach," according to The Times.

The torture abuse revelations have also spread to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. The same Army investigation reported by The New York Times said that two deaths occurred in the Bagram Collection Point. Two detainees died there within a week, and both deaths were ruled as homicides. One of the death certificates reads, "homicide as a result of blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease."

The torture in Army prisons also extends to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where thousands of illegally detained prisoners of the Afghan war have been subject to the same torture techniques as in Abu Ghraib.

In the May 16 London Observer, David Rose detailed the accounts of one prisoner who was detained for two years in Guantanamo Bay. Tarek Dergoul, a British national who was released in March, said of his detention, "I was in extreme pain and so weak that I could barely stand. It was freezing cold and I was shaking like a washing machine. They questioned me at gunpoint and told me that if I confessed I could go home.

"They had already searched me and my cell twice that day, gone through my stuff, touched my Koran, felt my body around my private parts. And now they wanted to do it again, just to provoke me, but I said no, because if you submit to everything you turn into a zombie.

"I heard a guard talking into his radio, "ERF, ERF, ERF," and I knew what was coming—the Extreme Reaction Force. The five cowards, I called them—five guys running in with riot gear. They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting; in all I must have brought up five cupfuls.

"They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows."

John Sifton, a New York-based official from Human Rights Watch who has interviewed numerous former Guantanamo prisoners in Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Rose that "much of his [Dergoul’s] story is consistent with other accounts of detention conditions in both Afghanistan and Guantanamo. It is now clear that there is a systemic problem of abuse throughout the U.S. military's detention facilities—not merely misbehaviour by a few bad apples."

More reports of prison abuse are appearing every day, suggesting that what has been discovered so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

All people concerned with human rights must demand that the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other country subject to the brutal U.S. colonial forces be freed from torture and other human rights abuses. This can only be achieved by the immediate withdrawal of U.S. and other occupation forces from all of these countries.

This article first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.