HELIOLITH

So you haven’t heard much of Abu Ghraib in the news lately? Maybe it’s all sorted out? You have faith that the guilty parties are being brought to justice? Good– it’s too sensitive a subject to talk about openly anyway. Let’s move on to our wish lists for the holidays right? Unfortunately this is something we need to talk and think about. Do you support torture? Should our government be involved in torture? What is Kerry’s official stance on torture? (If you figure that one out, or know already, please leave a comment).

“When truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” (Quoted by John Pilger in this well written article on, “The Media’s Culpability for Iraq.“) McCoy from Znet explains, “There is, in sum, an ignorance, a studied avoidance of a deeply troubling topic, akin to that which shrouds this subject in post-authoritarian societies.”

Well with the lack of media attention, I’ve been wondering what’s been happening. I read enough in the weeks following the scandal to learn that it wasn’t just a “few bad apples,” but I wasn’t clear as to how far up the chain of command the government was willing to admit criminal abuses. Criminal that is, by the standards of the Geneva Convention, since our constitution unfortunately doesn’t discuss the ethics of war. Except for a sporadic back page article, there is too much silence.

Today, a lawyer for one of the soldiers charged has reported that the government is trying to intimidate witnesses and lawyers into not traveling to Iraq to defend or testify.

Perhaps the gullible were placated when Bush came out and said, “I have never ordered torture… I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.” Unfortunately, we know better than to believe Bush, especially when he speaks eloquently. Some prefer to explain his errors as ignorance, but his old Harvard professor remembers him as pathological. Nonetheless, in the same article in the San Francisco Examiner, we read how Rumsfield explicitly approved grabbing, yelling, stress positions, use of 20-hour interrogations, especially the stripping naked, and threatening with dogs (which were are quite severe forms of punishment in the cultural context of the middle east).

Robert Fisk wrote on Friday, “Why have we suddenly forgotten Abu Ghraib?” For what happened to all those videos which members of Congress were allowed to watch in secret and which we–the public–were not permitted to see? He quotes Seymour Hersh’s article from the New Yorker describing a small part of the horrors, including the women, and the children, things I will not reprint here.

The best summary I’ve read of the historical context of modern-day torture is by Alfred W. McCoy at Znet. He writes that

CIA torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century. A survey of this history shows that the CIA was, in fact, the lead agency at Abu Ghraib, enlisting Army intelligence to support its mission. These photographs from Iraq also illustrate standard interrogation procedures inside the gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated globally, on executive authority, since the start of the President’s war on terror.

He quotes General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly in Guantanamo), as he summarized standard operating procedures “unwittingly”:

“We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees,” the general said. “We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations.”

Really? Cross your fingers and hope to die? McCoy offers interesting insight into the emotional trauma and disorders suffered by the perpetrators of torture, and how the worst part of human nature expands dangerously when sanctioned as appropriate, leading to often horrific improvisations that are “only occasionally effective.”

McCoy ends by elucidating a choice: we can join the world in condemning this crime, or the U.S. can continue clandestine torture hoping for good intelligence, indifferent to public opinion. Although I’ve quoted him heavily, there is no substitute for reading the whole thing for yourself.