Duncan Campbell in Los
Angeles
Saturday January 25, 2003
The United States is condoning the torture and illegal interrogation of
prisoners held in the wake of September 11, in defiance of international
law and its own constitution, according to lawyers, former US intelligence
officers and human rights groups.
They claim prisoners have been beaten, hooded and had painkillers
withheld.
Some prisoners inside American penal institutions and detention camps
have been subjected to interrogation techniques which do not leave
injuries, but which lawyers consider to be abusive. Others have been sent
to countries where electric shocks and more conventional forms of torture
have been used, according to the claims.
Wayne Madsen, a former US navy intelligence officer, points to two
forms of what he calls torture being practised by America or its partners
in the wake of September 11. The first consists of techniques such as
sleep deprivation and shining harsh lights at detainees which, Mr Madsen
labels "torture lite". He says this is being practised on
hundreds of inmates held by the US at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for suspected
Taliban and al-Qaida connections.
The second, less subtle, kind of torture is being inflicted on
prisoners taken by the US military to third-party countries with lax
human-rights records. Mr Madsen, now a commentator on
intelligence-gathering, said he understood that prisoners who were
believed to have information had been taken to countries including Egypt,
Morocco and Syria where such full-blown torture techniques were used.
The allegations come as the debate continues in the US on whether
torture is justified in extreme "ticking bomb" cases where
thousands of lives might be saved through pre-empting terrorist attacks.
The idea that in such cases, permission for torture could be granted by
judicial warrant was first raised shortly after September 11 by the
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
"I hear from former agents that it [torture] was done and that it
is done," Mr Dershowitz told the Guardian.
His position was that if an interrogator believed that torture was
absolutely necessary to save lives, they would have to appear before a
judge. "Such a procedure would require the judges to dirty their
hands by authorising torture warrants or bear the responsibility for
failing to do so."
Mr Dershowitz, who has acted for such clients as OJ Simpson and Claus
von Bulow, said that after the subject was raised last year his position
on the issue was distorted, and he had received unwelcome support
"from a lot of yahoos who said, 'great, let's torture everyone.' But
there was also a lot of praise from people for bringing the topic out from
below the radar screen and putting it on the agenda."
Mr Dershowitz said he believed that the US currently "freely
subcontracts its torture to Jordan, Egypt and the Philippines".
While the official US position is that torture is not used and that all
international conventions are observed, within some agencies of law
enforcement the reality appears to be one of "don't ask, don't
tell".
'Stress and duress'
At a hearing last September of the House and Senate intelligence
committees, Cofer Black, then head of the CIA counterterrorist centre,
said of the treatment of suspects: "This is a very highly classified
area, but I have to say that all you need to know is there was a 'before
9/11', and there was an 'after 9/11'. After 9/11 the gloves come
off."
One official, who has supervised the capture and transfer of prisoners,
told the Washington Post last year: "If you don't violate someone's
human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job. I don't
think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was
the whole problem for a long time with the CIA."
The report suggested that CIA interrogators at Bagram air base in
Afghanistan kept al-Qaida members standing or kneeling for hours in
painful positions, and deprived them of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment
of light.
This practice comes under the general interrogation heading of
"stress and duress". "Our guys may kick them around a
little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath," said one
official.
Other prisoners have been taken to Diego Garcia - the Indian ocean
island leased from Britain - where interrogators have impersonated
nationals of countries known to use torture, in an effort to loosen the
tongues of captives.
"It is as American as apple pie," William Goodman, legal
director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, said of the claims that
such techniques had been used. "Dershowitz is not a lone voice. He
speaks for a segment of the population, and there is clearly some thought
being given to this." Mr Goodman said that the law clearly prohibited
the use of torture.
The LA-based constitutional lawyer Stephen Rohde said that the US was
already violating the Geneva convention by its interrogation of prisoners:
"Donald Rumsfeld has been boasting about the information [from
prisoners] as a valid reason for holding them indefinitely without lawyers
and without charging them. We are violating the Geneva convention by
interrogating them."
The Taliban prisoners should only have been required to give their
name, rank, serial number and date of birth, he said. Lawyers representing
those being interrogated have expressed their concern.
"I have never seen clients treated so badly" said Randy Hamud,
the San Diego-based lawyer who has represented a number of the Arab men
detained last year, some of whom are still in custody. "The
constitution has been cast aside. The United States is no longer the moral
leader of the world."
Mr Hamud represents men detained because they had contact with some of
the September 11 hijackers who had been based in San Diego. He said he
believed that the polygraph (lie detector) test was being used as an
interrogation technique. "They were given polygraph tests and then
told that they had failed them so they would have to come up with
information about other people," he said.
One of his clients, Osama Awadallah, he said, was physically abused by
guards when detained in New York. "Female officers observed them
while they were having their strip search," he said. "It was
very humiliating. They were kept in conditions like a meat locker."
Mr Hamud said he believed that some prisoners were kept in other
countries where surrogates carried out torture and passed on the
information to the US. "For instance, they have used Jordanian
surrogates in Jordan. The FBI and federal law enforcement authorities have
been showing a pattern abroad of having people arrested and taken to
states with a history of, shall we say, excessive interrogation
techniques, such as Egypt or Syria."
Peter Keane, the dean of the law faculty at Golden Gate University in
San Francisco, said that none of the statements emanating from the
prisoners held without charge would be admissible in court. "They
would be presumed to be compelled statements," he said.
'Parasitic relationship'
Mr Keane said that the last time prisoners were interrogated and held
in such a way was during the American civil war, when nearly 8,000
Confederate prisoners were held and questioned.
The civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman is part of a group which has
initiated a lawsuit on behalf of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay.
"They are using sensory deprivation to induce a feeling of
depression so that they become receptive to any human contact," he
said. He suggested that the interrogators were trying to develop a
long-term "parasitic relationship" with subjects.
Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch, said that a modern interrogation
technique was to develop a total dependency between the prisoner and the
interrogator. "That does not count as a human rights violation,
however," she said.
She said that of the 750 who had been held on immigration charges in
the wake of September 11, 110 had been charged with unrelated offences,
and 80-100 were still inside. Getting information about many was almost
impossible, she said.
A Human Rights Watch inquiry found that the authorities had held
detainees "for prolonged periods without charges, impeded their
access to counsel, subjected them to coercive interrogations and
overridden judicial orders to release them on bond during immigration
proceedings."
Amnesty International claims that prisoners have been subjected to
prolonged solitary confinement. The organisation cited the case of Rabid
Haddad, a Lebanese national who was charged with overstaying his tourist
visa and who was held in solitary confinement in the metropolitan
correctional centre in Chicago. According to his letters from prison, his
cell windows were whited out so he has no view, and he is allowed only one
15-minute call to his family every 30 days.
"These detentions have been surrounded by extreme secrecy, which
creates the potential for abuse," said an Amnesty spokesperson in
Washington.
"Our research confirms that basic rights have been violated,
including the rights to a humane treatment, to be informed of the reasons
for the detention, to have prompt access to a lawyer, to be able to
challenge the lawfulness of the detention and to be presumed innocent
until proven otherwise." Source: The Guardian
