Most of the torture debate has revolved around the practice of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ that we now know the Bush administration approved.
But there are still some other ‘methods’ which remain to be incorporated into the current debate – sexual humiliation, and I don’t just mean forced nudity, as you will see below. We should also remember what we were told about the people who were accused of engaging in these methods, and who were actually arrested for them: they did it all on their own, with no direction from the top.
Already cracks in this absurd story are beginning to appear and it may not be long before the entire edifice of deception crumbles. One of the officers involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal is arguing that a new Senate report exonerates all those who were involved – that, after all, one lone corporal and his barely literate sidekick were not the ‘masterminds’ of a systematic, prolonged campaign of physical and psycho-sexual torture. The AP quotes Senator Carl Levin:
“In my judgment,” Levin said, “the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan to low-ranking soldiers.”
So in addition to sanctioning torture, which is bad enough in itself, the administration also very likely scapegoated lower-level flunkies to cover up its crimes. Of course the excuse “I was only following orders” is no excuse at all – I think Corporal Garner should be in prison whether he was ordered to do what he did or not.
But I want to keep fresh in our minds other forms of torture that occurred at Guantanamo Bay. Snickering juveniles may find some of this amusing, but a Catholic I am appalled and sickened by some of these ‘techniques’. They were outlined by former Army sergeant Erik Sarr in his book Inside the Wire.
These specific techniques are noted in a 2005 article:
One female civilian contractor used a special outfit that included a miniskirt, thong underwear and a bra during late-night interrogations with prisoners, mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren’t their wives.
In another case, a female interrogator trying to break a male detainee
removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner’s back and commenting on his apparent erection.
I’ll save the best for last:
“She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee,” [Sarr] says. “As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, ’Who sent you to Arizona?’ He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred.
“She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward” — so fiercely that he broke loose from one ankle shackle.
“He began to cry like a baby,” the draft says, noting the interrogator left saying, “Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself.”
This isn’t the only time or place psycho-sexual torture occurred. In the documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, the female soldiers involved in tormenting prisoners recount how they were told by interrogators to point at the penises of naked male prioners and laugh. Even worse, male prisoners were told that the female screams they heard were the sound of their wives and sisters being raped by US soldiers. One detainee – who was never even charged with a crime – recounts:
“And they asked me, ‘Have you ever heard voices of women in this prison?’ I answered, ‘Yes.’ They were saying, ‘Then you will hear your mothers and sisters when we are raping them.’ “
All of this, for me, brings a new dimension to the torture debate. We are arguing endlessly over waterboarding, but in all truth some of us, perhaps most of us would rather be waterboarded than endure this sort of psycho-sexual humiliation.
These are by any stretch of the imagination obscene offenses against human dignity. And yet, they don’t cause the sort of physical pain that we typically associate with torture, or even with ‘enchanced methods’ such as sleep deprivation, loud music, or solitary confinement for long periods of time.
These are deep assaults on the human soul, attempts to anihilate a person’s integrity and moral character. In one of the cases above, as his interrogation took a turn for the worse, the article says,
“The man closed his eyes and began to pray”
Who do we identify with more in these situations? The heartless, perverted tormentor? Or the victim?
We need to keep in mind the Bybee memo – the legal reasoning that justifies these inhuman practices. I quote the judge:
“We conclude that for an act to constitute torture as defined in [U.S. Code], it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,”
What is more difficult to endure than a demonic assault on your soul?
In closing I make no assumptions about my readers, since there are many different convoluted arguments swirling around in the blogosphere to justify torture. Some people will argue that it hasn’t yet been proven that the administration ever specifically sanctioned these techniques – and that they would never approve them. I believe it will be shown conclusively that these psycho-sexual techniques were approved – and I already believe the scapegoats who say that they were ordered to do what they did.
Either way, everyone has their own understanding of “what is difficult to endure”. In spelling out the maximum limits of torture as organ failure and death, a window was left open for the torture of the spirit.
Update: having read through the Senate report, I wish to reproduce here its conclusion (#19):
The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2,2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In