More on Guantanamo Bay Torture
For those who ask for references when I talk about the torture reports coming out of Guantanamo Bay, there's another one today from the New York Times. It isn't so much a detail of the tortures, but it's clear that psychologists were consulted on how best to capitalize on fears and phobias to "increase stress levels and exploit fears" in order to break prisoners.
Of course, a lot of folks out there don't recognize psychological torture as legitimate torture. I've had a number of debates with folks (in person and on other blogs) who seem to believe that if it doesn't involve pain and/or bodily damage, it's not torture.
However, there are lots of instances of torture which are not physical (or at least not painful) in nature. The old Chinese Water Torture, for example, which involves dripping one drop of water on the forehead about once a minute with no other stimulii, so the victim has nothing to focus on but that next annoying drop.
Psychological tortures can be as effective or moreso than physical ones. If someone has an extreme phobia, exploiting that can be just as debilitating as physical pain and discomfort.
All in all, a very interesting report, coming out around the same time as a report on Dick Cheney's comments on prisoner treatment:
"They got a brand new facility down at Guantánamo," Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNN. "We spent a lot of money to build it. They're very well treated down there. They're living in the tropics, they're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people."
Everything they could possibly want, he says. I don't know about that. Most people want to be away from people exploiting their fears and weaknesses. Most people want to be free. So they most certainly do NOT have everything they could possibly want. But then, I can't remember the last time I heard a sentence out of Dick Cheney's mouth that didn't immediately make me go "Hmmmm, that doesn't quite match the reality I live in." He's the teflon Veep, he gets caught time and again in falsehoods but they never stick. (For those who are going to demand an example, how about the assertion that he'd never met John Edwards before the debates (implying that Edwards shirked his Senatorial duties), when there is photo and video of the two shaking hands and talking taken months earlier.)
Mr. Cheney categorized the prisoners as "terrorists," "bomb makers" and "facilitators of terror" who would "go back to trying to kill Americans" if freed. And that's invariably true... of some of them. But as I've mentioned before, there are a lot of reports that we got a lot of these people originally based on wide-net sweeps (grabbing everyone with a certain name because we had evidence that someone with that name was a terrorist) and based on rewards paid out. There are plenty of examples of people turned in by neighbors and/or relatives, because those neighbors and/or relatives didn't like them much, and wanted the reward money.
And if we're treating them so well, why is there this report that the UN has been asking for over a year for access to assess the conditions at Guantanamo, and has received no response? According to that report, the UN has evidence of torture taking place there, and would like to verify it. The U.S. response to the charge is that the International Red Cross is already seeing to prisoner conditions, but really, if we have so little to hide, why not shut down all of the allegations before they get a foothold, by letting the UN in as well?
A quote from the article says pretty much what I've been trying to say for a while: "We are very disappointed that a country that always was very... positive about high human rights standards... and which is also reminding other states that they should actually co-operate fully with the special mechanisms of the UN commission on human rights itself is not living up to these standards." Which leads me to another question: Why, if the U.N. is so corrupt and untrustworthy, was it so important that we unilaterally go into Iraq on the basis of Saddam Hussein's refusal to obey the U.N. resolution? Keep in mind, that was our only real, legal reason for the Iraq war. Why do we have a record of relying on organizations like the UN and Amnesty International when they're providing justification for wars we want to start, but then dismissing those same groups as unreliable when they go against our purposes?
But back to the topic of torture. We should not be torturing people. It's against international law, it's against U.S. law, it violates the moral foundation of our country, and it diminishes us. Not merely in the eyes of the world (although it does that as well), but in our own morality, and in (if we're anything like the moral people we hold ourselves up to be) our own eyes.
And that, my friends, is criminal.
Copyright (c) June 24, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net
posted by Liam at 6/24/2005 01:42:00 AM
3 Comments:
Two things; one is that the New York Times NEVER presents two sides to any issue. In the vernacular of the neo-conservatives, they are a liberal rag so anything they say editorially or present as news will be from that slant. The second, is that I (in my opinion of the UN) would never trust the UN to observe something and then present the truth about it. It is like the ICC in that they have their own political agenda and will present the "facts" to fit their need. I agree that it looks bad, but caution is called for.
Friday, June 24, 2005 7:51:00 PM
Hmmmm. Interesting, though, that the Administration has finally admitted to the torture... although they downplay it as "isolated cases" and that "the guilty [are] in the process of being punished".
So now, after maintaining that the prisoners were being treated better than they'd been treated in their lives, they finally half-heartedly admit it.
And as to the comments about the NY Times, I think part of the problem with media these days is they do too LITTLE actual reporting, gathering and verifying facts to present, replacing it with TOO MUCH presenting of two sides of an issue.
That's not to say I want a bias, but part of why we're such a divided nation is that we don't have access to facts. We have access to conservative spin and liberal spin, and occasional conspiracy theorist spin, and we're left to decide what to believe based not on any real facts, but on whose message sounds the most convincing.
The Republicans right now are masters of repeating something with single-minded determinism, refusing to deviate, until by repetition it enters the subconscious and starts to resonate as truth... without anyone ever having determined the veracity or lack thereof of any of it.
So if they're actually only reporting the liberal spin, then shame on them. But if in fact they're reporting independently verified facts and avoiding either side's spin, then good for them. And keep in mind, to hear the Administration tell it, anything that doesn't exactly match Party message is liberal bias.
If the Administration were to take it upon itself to say that fire is actually cold, then anyone reporting that fire was in fact hot (because, well, it IS) would be branded as reporting liberal bias.
I generally recognize bias when I see it, but I no longer take this Administration seriously when they talk about left wing bias, because so often they've cried wolf.
Get caught in a lie too many times, after having called those who initially caught them in it biased against them, they really start to lose credibility.
Liam.
Friday, June 24, 2005 9:15:00 PM
Liam, you are at least sympathetic to the left and I to the right, but we can definetly agree that each newsmedia slants their coverage to the side with which they agree before they report. I personally think that with the advent of talk radio and blogs such as yours, that the entire truth is getting out....and that is great.
Friday, June 24, 2005 10:06:00 PM
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