"Why was Mohammed Jawad tortured?" Major Frakt asked. "Why did military officials choose a teenage boy who had attempted suicide in his cell less than five months earlier to be the subject of this sadistic sleep deprivation experiment?" Officers at Guantánamo said they did not believe he had any valuable intelligence information, and he was not even questioned during the "frequent flyer program." "The most likely scenario," Major Frakt said, "is that they simply decided to torture Mr. Jawad for sport, to teach him a lesson, perhaps to make an example of him to others."
That is the 3rd paragraph of a piece in New York Review of Books by Anthony Lewis. The first two tell us about Jawad, wo was 17 when he was arrested in 2002, accused of throwing a grenade that wounded two American soldiers in Afghanistan. Arriving in Guantanamo in Feb. 2003, the following December he attempted suicide. And then, as we read in the final sentence of the 1st paragraph:
The following May he was subjected to what Guantánamo officials called the "frequent flyer program." Every three hours, day and night, he was shackled and moved to another cell—112 times over fourteen days.
they simply decided to torture Mr. Jawad for sport, to teach him a lesson, perhaps to make an example of him to others
Major Frakt was Mohammad Jawad's military lawyer, and in an act of remarkable courage - and in my mind the highest standards of the military the legal profession, chose to expose what had happened to Jawad in the closing argument he made on Jawad's behalf.
And thus we have the context for an essay review, entitled as is my diary, Official American Sadism. It's occasion is the review of three remarkable works about the. atrocities done in our name. One is a traditional book, The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power, by Jonathan Mahler. The other two are available online, and for these I will quote exactly as they appear at the head of the Lewis piece:
Guantanamo: Beyond the Law
a series of five articles by Tom Lasseter
in the McClatchy Newspapers, June 15–19, 2008, available at www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees
and
Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact
a report by Physicians for Human Rights, with a preface by Major General Antonio M. Taguba
Physicians for Human Rights, 130 pp., available at brokenlives.info
In a further quote about Frakt, Lewis notes a reference to "enablers," a list that includes such familiar names as Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales, Addington, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Lewis then writes
Major Frakt's reference to "the enablers" raised a fundamental question: How did the United States government get into the business of torturing prisoners? Sleep deprivation was by no means the only harsh technique used on prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere. Others included forcing prisoners into stress positions, exposing them to harsh lights and extreme hot and cold temperatures, sexual humiliation, nudity, and waterboarding, the "water cure" that inflicts partial suffocation. [1]
Since the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was exposed, in April 2004, the Bush administration has maintained that any mistreatment was the work of a few "bad apples." No action has been taken against any higher-up, military or civilian. But a steady accumulation of disclosures, capped in June by a Senate committee report and hearing, has made it clear that abusive treatment of prisoners was a deliberate policy that came from the top—the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the White House.
Again, let me repeat part of what I have just quoted: abusive treatment of prisoners was a deliberate policy that came from the top—the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the White House
Let me make things simple. You should read what Lewis has written. And then, without a doubt, you should continue on to read about the works that are the occasion of Lewis writing this essay, which is so much more than a review. You will in the encounter selections from the works that occasion the piece. And because two of the three are available online, you will not have to wait to begin following the path that Lewis so clearly lays out for us.
There is no excuse for anyone who is not willfully blind not to comprehend. Let me now quote two more paragraphs, from the beginning of the 2nd part of the piece, before Lewis begins with a detailed examination of the Lasseter work:
The Bush administration has made determined efforts to suppress all information about the mistreatment of its prisoners. Videotapes of at least two particularly horrendous interrogations were destroyed. In legal hearings, at Guantánamo and elsewhere, government lawyers have objected to disclosure of interrogation methods, arguing that it would alert al-Qaeda members to what they would face if captured. We still do not know what was done to Jose Padilla, an American held for years in solitary confinement as an alleged enemy combatant and now reportedly suffering long-term psychological damage. [2]
Nevertheless, any American who wanted to know about the cruelties his government has inflicted on prisoners and how they came about could have learned a good deal by this spring. A number of experts on the law and on the facts of torture have published commentary frequently in print and blogs, and I have benefited greatly from their writing. This past spring the scholar of international law Philippe Sands published his valuable book Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values [3] ; Vanity Fair printed a lengthy extract from it. Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups have published important reports on the abuse of prisoners.
any American who wanted to know about the cruelties his government has inflicted on prisoners and how they came about
It should not be that we have to want to know. We should be obligated to know, to understand.
I am Jewish by background. My mother's mother was born in Bialystok, and my grandmother's immediate family fled that city during a time of pogroms to come to New York City where some 40 years later I was born, after a war whose horrors included the liquidation of the Jewish community in that source of my ancestry. In the aftermath of that horror, as the world finally became aware, despite Deniers, of the magnitude of the Holocaust as the destruction of European Jewry came to be known, we have come to know a phrase perhaps most popularized by a not particularly attractive organization found by Meir Kahane, the Jewish Defense League: Never Again was supposed to be a rallying cry, and over time it was applied not merely to atrocities against Jews; it was also utilized by some to argue for intervention in other situations of genocide or the first steps in that direct. Its words expressed more than hope - it was to be a mandate that flows from the idea that if we remained silent at atrocities of any magnitude that we became complicit in the full horror that ensued.
And yet - if we are not willing to hold our own officials to the highest standards of contact, if we allow rationalization of what is beyond mere misconduct, we then become complicit in the full extent of the horror, which after all is being perpetrated ostensibly in our name. "We the people" means that we are sovereign, that we are those in whose names any actions taken by this government fall. That is, if we remain silent, if we do not apply to our own leaders the same standards we applied to leaders of Germany and Japan in the aftermath of the war that saw the destruction of my extended family in Bialystok, the cousins my great-grandmother tried so hard in the 1930's to get out, the words Never Again become a taunt that can be aimed directly at us.
There is an understandable human desire to want to avoid dwelling on the ugliness of war and its side affects. But we have no choice. One could argue that under international law the refusal of our Congress and Courts to take action given what they already officially know makes them complicit and susceptible to prosecution as complicit in war crimes, in crimes against humanity. We could start with the basic truth that the "war" during whose prosecution the atrocities about which Lewis is writing began was itself an aggressive war that violates international standards. Whether or not the Congress in voting for AUMF had full knowledge is by now irrelevant, given what they know now, and yet our national legislature has refused to exert its power to end the conflict.
But we need not have that argument. Since the Darby photos of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib became known, we have had no doubt of the kinds of crimes being committed. We have had multiple official reports. And no one of importance in the chain of responsibility has been held accountable. And so long as that situation continues, ultimate responsibility in the eyes of the rest of the world will fall on all of us. For if we are not responsible, we can no longer claim to be a representative democracy where the ultimate sovereign is the American people.
Let me return to Lewis.
Torture by officials is prohibited by US criminal law as well as by the international Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. According to the new book by Jane Mayer, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a report last year that interrogation methods used by the CIA on a high-level prisoner "categorically" constituted torture. Her book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, [5] says the ICRC report was sent to the CIA, the detaining authority, which "shared it with the President and the Secretary of State." Mayer writes that the report "warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the US government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."
There will be no American prosecution of the enablers as long as George W. Bush is president. But it may not be safe for the prominent among them to travel privately abroad. Someone may try to assert the universal jurisdiction over gross violators of human rights that was upheld by the House of Lords when General Pinochet was served in Britain with a Spanish warrant.
But it is insufficient for us to depend on other nations to do what we ourselves should be doing. Perhaps we lack the courage of Mandela and de Klerk to have an honest examination of what has been done by those in authority. It would be hard to fully prosecute so many who bear responsibility for what has been done.
Somehow this country has to reassert its historic repugnance at the use of torture. And that may not be easy. A recent poll showed that Americans' support for the torture of alleged terror- ists has risen from 36 percent of those asked in 2006 to 44 percent this year. We were shocked by the Abu Ghraib photographs. Since then a good many of us have become desensitized to the use of torture.
We WERE shocked, and now we have become desensitized to the use of torture We must be re-sensitized.
Lewis ends this remarkable piece with words that I have previously quoted in a comment on an open thread when I first wrote about it.
But in any event the cost of the policy to America's reputation—and its national security—has been enormous. It has aroused much of the Muslim world to hatred of the United States. And it has sapped the belief of many Americans in the righteousness of their country.
In the end the cure, if there is to be one, will have to come from leaders who reassert the primary place of law in the American character: from a president who does not seek unrestrained power, from an attorney general and other officials who respect the law. It is not too late to return to a government of laws, not men.
A government of laws, not men That is baseline.
But it is also insufficient. It is not just that mean of zeal chose to rationalize the use of unacceptable techniques in the name of obtaining information that would keep America safe. It is not even that in that process we allowed our thinking to be skewed by arguments over ticking bomb scenarios. None of that would justify the use of the three words in the title both of this diary and of Lewis's essay. It is sadism because those involved enjoy the pain and destruction that is done and it does not matter if useful information is obtained or further attacks on the United States are deterred. Let's deal with the latter. IF we believed such deterrence was the justification, we would not officially be so ashamed of the actions at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gitmo and elswhere: we would trumpet them as illustrations of how America would apply its full powers against any who dared to threaten us. But that has not been the reaction of our leaders. They know the torture did not occur for those reasons. And despite arguments about the information obtained, only a fool believes that any information of value can be detected among all the false information that inevitably comes about when people subject to torture will say anything to try to end the pain and suffering to which they are being subjected.
Sadism is the derivation of pleasure as a result of inflicting pain, or watching pain inflicted, on others, as we can read in Wikipedia or in any dictionary. Those doing it derive pleasure - how horrifying. And yet, from the picture at Abu Ghraib, we know that truth applies to actions done by our military and our intelligence officials. There is too much information already in the public record to allow anyone to pretend that such actions were merely the result of low level personnel acting without official sanction. What occurred was the direct result of policies approved at the highest levels of the American government, at least to the level of the Office of the Vice President. Many of these policies apparently are still in effect. After all, we know that just because one memo is disavowed and rescinded when it is made public does not mean that there are not other memoes that reinstate and continue the policy of the original. We have seen with Pooindexter's Total Information Awareness that a prohibition by the Congress meant only that the Department of Defense did not official continue the actions that represented the policy, they merely outsourced the work to other entities that they could claim were therefore not covered. And such an approach is not new - think of how the Boland Amendment was bypassed by the actions of Iran Contra that became disclosed only when an American survived the crash of a plane resupplying the Contras in direct violation of the policy of the Boland Amendment
The horrors are not isolated actions. They are the direct result of official policies promulgated from the highest reaches of our government. And we the American people and our elected officials bear ultimate responsibility. These were done in our name, by our government.
I urge all to read the Lewis piece, and to go beyond, to read the works he is reviewing. I further urge that you beseech anyone in authority to whom you have access to similarly read, and more: to insist on accountability.
It was - nay, since it still goes on, it is - Official American Sadism I care not that Antonin Scalia argues that since it is not done as the result of a sentence applied as a consequence of a criminal conviction that it is not barred by the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. One who parses the text of the Bill of Rights in such a fashion is more than an embarrassment, he is someone who would have been rejected by George Washington and the vast majority of the Founding Fathers.
We all need to do far more than what I do here - I write about the words of Anthony Lewis who writes about the words of others who write about the atrocities done in our name. Our actions must be so much more.
But as the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, we can start by opening our eyes, not averting them when the words we read begin to make us nauseous. We can insist on others having their eyes wide open. And we can begin to build the mass repugnance necessary to fully reject the Sadism done so officially, to try to ensure that it not again occur.
Thank you for reading. My words are of course insufficient, and not so well put together. Lewis and those about whom he writes are important, and also not enough. But we can start here.
Not in my name. Never again. Only words.
Perhaps. But words can be the start of the necessary actions.
Peace.