Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

"Outlawed" is a video created by WITNESS and tells the story of torture and extraordinary rendition practiced by the Bush Administration. According to WITNESS:

"Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror’" tells the stories of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed, two men who have survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide. "Outlawed" features relevant commentary from Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.S. President George W. Bush, Michael Scheuer, the chief architect of the rendition program and former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA, and Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State.

WITNESS is a human rights organization founded by Peter Gabriel that documents human rights abuses by using the power of video. I received a copy of this video when I attended the Extraordinary Rendition and Torture Teach-in at Georgetown University Law Center last month. It was an event organized by Amnesty International and others as part of Torture Awareness Month.

[Cross posted at Bloggers Against Torture]

Two months after the United Nations Committee Against Torture released its report criticizing the Bush’s Administration’s use of torture, the United Nations Human Rights Committee followed up with its own report. The committee criticized the United States for its continued practice of torture and of using extraordinary rendition to send detainees to countries that practice torture. The Committee also criticized the Bush Administration’s holding of persons secretly and without charge.

According to the Committee report:

The Committee was concerned by credible and uncontested information that the State party had detained people secretly for months and years on end. It was also concerned that for a period of time the State party had authorized interrogation techniques such as prolonged stress positions and isolation, sensory deprivation, hooding, exposure to cold or heat, and 20-hour interrogations. While the Committee welcomed the assurance that those techniques were no longer authorized under the present Army Field Manual, the United States should ensure that the Manual only permitted techniques consistent with the prohibition contained in article 7 of the Covenant, and that those techniques were binding on all agencies of government and others acting for them. The Committee also noted with concern shortcomings in relation to the independence, impartiality and effectiveness of investigations conducted into allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in detention facilities in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other overseas locations, and into alleged cases of suspicious death in custody in those locations.

The Committee was further concerned that the State party appeared to have adopted a policy to send, or to assist in sending, suspected terrorists to third countries for purposes of detention and interrogation, without the appropriate safeguards to prevent treatment prohibited by the Covenant.

Just as it did when confronted with the report from the UN Committee Against Torture, the Bush Administration defended itself by stating that the Human Rights Committee and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whose implementation the Committee is charged with monitoring, do not apply to the War on Terror. Specifically the Bush Administration argued that the Covenant only applied when the State Party (United States) committed torture on its own territory. In other words, if the United States tortures a detainee on foreign soil, the Committee does not have jurisdiction. The Bush Administration’s position was presented by Matthew Waxman, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Department of State:

The United States believed that the law of armed conflict – international humanitarian law – provided the proper legal framework regarding some of the questions raised by the Committee, Mr. Waxman noted. The United States was aware of the views of members of the Committee regarding the extraterritorial application of the Covenant, including the Committee’s General Comment No. 31. The United States, however, had a principled and long-held view that the Covenant applied only to a State party’s territory. Article 2, paragraph 1, of the Covenant stated explicitly that States parties were required to respect and ensure the rights in the Covenant to all individuals "within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction". That plain meaning of the treaty language was also confirmed by the Covenant’s own negotiating record. It was in light of its principled and longstanding view on the scope of the application of United States obligations under the Covenant, that the United States had not included in its formal response to the Committee’s written questions information regarding activities outside of its territory or governed by the law of armed conflict.

The Committee however was not persuaded by the Bush Administration’s argument.

Having lost the moral high ground and having butchered the definition of torture, the Bush Administration is now left with making mind-bending arguments that defy common sense. Torture is torture only if it is practiced in the United States. Torture is not torture when practiced by the United States on foreign soil. This is the basis for the existence of Guantanamo Bay and an unknown number of CIA secret prisons across the globe. The Bush Administration has been getting a lot of bad legal advice. The only person who might perhaps have been impressed by these arguments is the late George Orwell.

 [Cross posted at Bloggers Against Torture]

On April 29, 2003 Waleed bin Attash was arrested by police in Karachi, Pakistan. He is suspected of planning the attack on the USS Cole. He has since been "disappeared" into the secret detention centers of the Central Intelligence Agency. Six months earlier, his 17-year-old brother, Hassan bin Attash was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to American forces. Hassan is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay.

According to his lawyer, Hassan was initially sent to a U.S. run "Dark Prison" in Kabul, Afghanistan for about a week. He was then flown to Jordan on an extraordinary rendition flight. While in Jordan he was severely tortured  by Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, or GID. He was interrogated about his brother, Waleed bin Attash. According to his lawyer, Mark Falkoff, one favorite torture technique of the GID was to "beat the soles of his feet and then placed them in salt water". Ultimately, he signed "whatever was asked of him."

Hassan was moved from Jordanian custody back to the "Dark Prison" in Kabul on January 8, 2004. He was moved again to a prison in Bagram before ultimately arriving in Guantanamo Bay in May 2004. He has been there ever since. To keep it all in the family his 70-year-old father was picked up and detained in Saudi Arabia under U.S. orders.

Of Hassan, his lawyer had this to say:

“I couldn’t tell you whether he was guilty or innocent,” Falkoff said. “I have no clue because we haven’t been able to talk to him about anything other than the abuse he suffered, and the judge in his case refused to require the government to justify his detention. I don’t know what evidence the government claims to have against him or even the charges.”

Regardless of the his innocence or guilt, which apparently the U.S. government does not need to prove or pretend to prove, Hassan has been subjected to the grand tour of the U.S. torture archipelago. It now appears that his 70-year-old father has been subjected to the same. All of this because, it seems, of being related to an alleged al Qaeda operative. It begs the question why Osama bin Laden’s brothers and family are not subjected to the same treatment. Instead the Bush Administration flew them out of the U.S. immediately after September 11th without even questioning them. Could it be that torture is only doled out to those who do not have money and influence?

It looks like we have learned a thing or two from The Sopranos. 

 [Cross posted at Bloggers Against Torture]

This morning I attended a teach-in at the Georgetown University Law Center on Torture and Extraordinary Rendition. The panelists discussed the issue of torture, current torture cases, and pending legislation that will attempt to stop the Bush Administration from torturing. There were many legal, constitutional, and practical arguments put forth as to why torture should not be practiced. However, one argument stood out amongst all the rest. That argument was made by Nora Mislem - a woman, a mother, a torture survivor. In this post I want to tell you her story as best as I can convey with written words. Her story is her argument against torture.

Nora Mislem is from Honduras. In the early 1980s she was amongst a group of leftist students in Honduras who went to the Salvadoran border to assist refugees fleeing El Salvador. During this time the Honduran government was running CIA backed death squads to crush and terrorize the opposition. The Reagan Administration, in its proxy war against Marxist guerrillas in Central America, was training and supporting ruthless regimes in Honduras and other neighboring countries. In Honduras, the most notorious acts of murder and torture were being carried out by a CIA trained unit called Battalion 316. In 1981 and again in 1982 Nora Mislem was kidnapped by men from Battalion 316.

Under the custody of Battalion 316, Nora Mislem suffered torture like countless other victims. I sat silent today in the auditorium as she recounted in Spanish what horrors her torturers inflicted upon her. Every once in a while she paused as her translator, Sister Maureen from Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, described in English the horrors we knew she had spoken in her native tongue. In the next few sentences I will recount what I heard. But when I write them they will sound to the reader like many other tales of torture I am sure you have heard about. However, when I heard them today from her they were neither banal nor distant. They were the words of a human being who had suffered unimaginable horrors at the hands of monsters who continue to live among us.

Nora Mislem was tied up and hooded. She was handcuffed and tied with rubber tubing. She was told that her two-year-old son had been killed by the death squads in retaliation. She was told that soon her parents too would be killed. She was beaten. She was given electric shock all over her body including her genitals. A plastic bag was brought out. A machete was put to her head. She was told she was a dog. She was told her head would be cut off and put in the plastic bag for other dogs to eat. She was told that her genitals would be mutilated. She was repeatedly violated by her male torturers. Then without hope, she was released to live with the physical and emotional scars forever.

I asked her afterwards why she thinks she was tortured, what did her torturers hope to gain by torturing her? She said to me that she believes that she was tortured to instill fear and terror in the population. Others who dared to speak out against the government would face a similar fate. Her torture was an act of terrorism, not a method of interrogation. The purpose was to intimidate and humiliate. Ultimately she was tortured because the torturers had the freedom to torture without facing any consequences.

Nora Mislem’s story is not unique. Unfortunately she is one of many thousands of women, mothers, daughters, sisters and human beings around the world who carry the scars of torture with them every day of their lives. Her story is the story of torture. The Bush Administration has now made all Americans characters in the story of torture.

One of the participants at today’s teach-in made the point that the wrong discussion to have is whether torture as an interrogation technique works or not. That is irrelevant. Torture should not be allowed because it makes monsters of the torturers. When the Bush Administration decided that torture was acceptable, it dehumanized the Americans who are charged with practicing it. It dehumanized us as a people. In the 1980s the United States turned a blind eye when our allies practiced torture - today we have imported the practice and made it our own. Is this the nation we want to be?

Tomorrow, June 26th, has been designated by the United Nations as the International Day in Support of Survivors and Victims of Torture. There will be many events marking the day. After the events are over, many of us will move on with our lives. Occasionally we will rise in opposition to torture and hope our efforts will some day end this evil practice. In time Nora Mislem’s story will likely fade from our memories. However, for Mrs. Mislem and other survivors, torture is a lifelong tragedy. For her and for the thousands of others who continue to suffer torture we as a nation need to become human again. 

Events in Washington DC marking the 9th Annual U.N. International Day in Support of Survivors and Victims of Torture:

• Beginning Monday, June 26th at 7 a.m., TASSC will hold a 24-hour Vigil in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC. Click here for the schedule. I plan on being there in the evening.
• Amnesty International USA will lobby Congress tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to stop extraordinary rendition.