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Today's
Stories
October 15,
2004
Leah Caldwell
From
Supermax to Abu Ghraib: the Masterminds of Torture and Abuse
October 14,
2004
Darcy Richardson
The
Other Progressive Candidate: the Lonely Crusade of Walt Brown
Willliam A.
Cook
Turning
Myths into Truth
Laura Santina
Water, Women and War
Evelyn Pringle
Free Speech Banned by Big Pharma: What You Can't Say About Drug
Importation
Alan Farago
Lessons
from Nature
Rep. Maxine Waters
A Letter to Colin Powell on Haiti
Nicole Colson
Maimed
for Oil and Empire
October 13,
2004
Bishop Thomas
Gumbleton and Bill Quigley
Aftermath
of a Coup: The Other Disaster in Haiti
Sharon Smith
Barak
O-Bomb-a?: Democrats Target Iran
Christopher Brauchli
God and the Bush Administration
Mike Whitney
The Real Meaning of the Hamdi Case
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: a False Beacon?
Website of
the Day
Operation
Truth
October 12,
2004
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
"Indian
Country"
Greg Bates
The Year of Voting Dangerously: a Survey Request of Nader Voters
in Swing States
Steven Conn
Progressives as Pawns: Kerry's War on Nader
Jason Leopold
Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Siphon Billions from
UN Oil-for-Food Program
Security Scholars
for a Sensible Foreign Policy
Time for a Change of Course
Timothy J. Freeman
Dying for a Mistake
Pierre Tristam
Deconstructing Bush
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The 2nd Debate: the Blurring of Act and Audience
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Israel as Sideshow
Website of the Day
John Kerry's Personal Off-Shore Tax Shelters
October 11,
2004
Robert Fisk
Iraq:
Unforgivable Betrayals and Broken Promises
Kevin Pina
The
Untold Story of Aristide's Departure from Haiti
Patrick Gavin
Rethinking
Columbus Day
Chris Floyd
Tribes with Flags in the New Afghanistan
Daniel Wolff
Radioactive Money: Entergy, Political Cash and America's Most
Dangerous Nuclear Plant
Walter Brasch
The Only Ones Who Believe Saddam Had WMDs are Bush, Cheney...and
40% of All Americans
Mike Whitney
The Phony Afghan Elections: Ballot of the Disappearing Ink
Ari Shavit
"He Talks to Condi Rice Every Day": an Interview with
Sharon's Lawyer
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Debates and the Big Lie
Website of the Day
Dylan's Greatest Recording?
October 9 /
10, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
"There
Are No Innocents"
Paul de Rooij
Northern Ireland is Still the Issue: a Conversation with Gerry
Adams
M. Shahid Alam
Making Sense of Our Times
Laura Carlsen
Protest and Populism in Latin America
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: ASA Goes to Court
Col. Dan Smith
Bush's Credibility Gap
Paul Craig
Roberts
Faith-Based Economics
Greg Bates
What If Nader Critics Get What They Demand?
Joshua Frank
Cobb, the Greens and the Collapse of the Left
Felice Pace
Wilderness, Politics and the Oligarchy: How the Pew Charitable
Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement
Walter A. Davis
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
William A.
Cook
The Agony of Colin Powell
Phyllis Pollack
Twas No Crank Call Love Affair: London Calling, 25 Years Later
Poets' Basement
Klipschutz, Albert, Ford
Website of the Weekend
Abu Ghraib: the Taguba Annexes
October 8,
2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
The
Israeli Invasion of Gaza
Moshe Adler
Edwards' Gambit: He Hoped No One Would Notice the Similarities
David Swanson
Media Blackout: Press Continues to Ignore Labor's Opposition
to Iraq War
Dave Zirin
CounterPunch Contest: Let's Name the New DC Baseball Team!
Rep. Ron Paul
The Draft is a Form of Slavery
William S. Lind
Keeping Our SA Up
Samar Assad
Kerry v. Bush: No Difference When It Comes to Israel / Palestine
Jim Ingalls
and Sonali Kolhatkar
The Elections in Afghanistan
October 7,
2004
Dave Lindorff
All
Out of Volunteers: A Draft is in the Air
Masha Hamilton
Fear in Kandahar
Christopher
Brauchli
Master of Corruption: the Ripening Scandals of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Is There Still Time to Impeach Bush?
Bruce K. Gagnon
Bombing the Panhandle: Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
Meredith Kolodner
Where
is the Urgency?: The Anti-War Movement's Election Year Challenge
October 6,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
"Please,
Dude, Can I Take Them Out?": Targeting Civilians in Fallujah
Ron Jacobs
Going
Nuclear: the Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Michael Colby
The National Flip-Flop: Suddenly Bush is Unfit to Lead?
Tarif Abboushi
More of the Same: Israel Wins the Debates
Matthew Behrens
Canadian Firms Profit from Iraqi Blood
Mike Whitney
Rethinking WMDs
John Pilger
Stealing Diego Garcia
Ben Tripp
Kerry's "Triumph"
Kevin McKiernan
Cheney's Poison Lab: Wrong Time, Wrong Target
Patrick Cockburn
Elections
Will Not End the Fighting in Iraq
Website of the Day
Is There an Islamic Problem?
October 5,
2004
Anthony Loewenstein
Rupert
Murdoch and the Marginals: "Personally Creating Outcomes"
Mark Clinton
and Tony Udell
The
Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran
Greg Bates
Trading
Idiots: an Open Letter to Eric Alterman
Dave Lindorff
What's
the Frequency, Karl?
Norm Dixon
Why Washington Won't Save Darfur Villagers
Larry Kearney
God Talk and Burning Children
Bill Linville
Dirty Politics in the Land of "Clean" Government
Gary Leupp
What
Edwards Should Ask Cheney
Website of
the Day
A Guide to Halliburton for Tonight's Debate
October 4,
2004
Diane Christian
The
Gates of Hell
Joshua Frank
An Interview with David Cobb
Doug Giebel
Incurious George: What If Bush Didn't Lie?
John Chuckman
Strange Victory: Sen. Obvious and the Pathetic Lump
Ramzy Baroud
Reverse the Picture: Anatomy of a Palestinian Outrage
Julia Stein
Remembering Mario Savio and the FSM
Sean Donahue
Outsourcing
Terror: Kerry and Special Forces
Website of
the Day
Mapping
Mt. St. Helens as She Rocks
October 2 /
3. 2004
Paul Wright
John
Kerry on Criminal Justice
Kathleen and Bill Christison
An Exchange with Israeli Historian Bennie Morris
Kathie Helmkamp
My Son Trent: a Marine Who Doesn't Want to Kill
Phillip Cryan
Indigenous Mobilization in Colombia
Lenni Brenner
The First Ex-Catholic Saint: Memories of Mario Savio
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: In Case You Missed "Montel"
Ron Jacobs
It Did Happen Here: When Neo-Nazis Terrorized Olympia
Ben Tripp
Sticker Shock
William S.
Lind
The Grand Illusion: Iraqi Security Forces
Dave Zirin
The Swindle of the Century: Baseball Comes to DC
Dave Lindorff
Lies from the Great Debate
Luscon Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Elections: a High-Tech Sham is Underway
Zoe Moskovitz
& Sasha Kramer
Separating Lies from Truth About Haiti
Nelson P. Valdes
Habana Night vs. Latin American Scholars in Vegas: 61 Banned
Cuban Academics
Alan Farago
The "Ownership Society" and the End of the Everglades
Nancy Haley
What is the Historical Jesus Trying to Tell Us?
Alex Billet
Long Live The Clash: London Still Calling After 25 Years
Steve Fesenmaier
Save and Burn: The War on Libraries
Poets' Basement
Smith, Holt, Albert
October 1,
2004
Steve Breyman
Kerry's
Missed Opportunities
Rose Gentle
My
Son Died for a Lie
Lee Sustar
Iran
in the Crosshairs
Ralph Nader
What
We Didn't Hear at the Debate: Where's the Exit Strategy?
Walter Andrews
We Are Less Secure Now Than Ever
Mike Whitney
Pandora's
Government
Mickey Z.
Debate
This
Saul Landau
The
Iraq Invasion: Lessons from the Pinochet Cases
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
October 15, 2004
The Masterminds
of Torture, Humiliation and Abuse
From
Supermax to Abu Ghraib
By
LEAH CALDWELL
Just a year ago, Attorney General John
Ashcroft pointed to the Iraqi prison system as a shining example
of the freedoms that the U.S. would bring to Iraq.
He said, "Now, all Iraqis
can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make
that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable
criminal justice system, based on the rule of law and standards
of basic human rights."
The rhetoric of law and justice
was in full force after the fall of Saddam Hussein, but now,
in the wake of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the discourse concerning
Iraqi prisons has become far removed from the self-congratulatory
statements of Ashcroft. As U.S. credibility disintegrates in
Iraq, there is public outcry to assign blame to those responsible
for torture, rape and murder.
There are the obvious culprits:
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his initiation of a
special access program that encouraged harsher interrogations
at Abu Ghraib, the government officials who pestered lawyers
with questions about the legality of torture, and the U.S. prison
guards turned soldiers who let the dogs loose, literally and
figuratively.
But as the military continues
to shift the blame up and down the chain of command, some lesser
known officials have managed to slip past public scrutiny. Their
involvement implicates the American government and its domestic
policy of mass imprisonment and brutalization in the torture
of Iraqi prisoners.
History
of ICITAP
In May 2003, Ashcroft appointed
an envoy of mostly American prison officials to help "restore
law and order in Iraq" by chipping away at Hussein's much
feared torture chambers until they resembled something closer
to American prisons. For six months, the envoy would take on
the monumental task of preparing preexisting Iraqi prisons for
prisoners. Through the International Criminal Investigative Training
Program (ICITAP), these officials would decide details such as
the number of bunks per prison and the training of Iraqi prison
guards.
ICITAP is based in the Department
of Justice, but receives funding for individual projects through
the Department of State. ICITAP has embarked on many missions
since its inception in 1986, from the former Soviet Union to
Haiti to Indonesia.
The missions change locations,
but their teams have managed to accrue a consistent record of
questionable activities while operating under the guise of rebuilding
criminal justice systems.
Typically, ICITAP serves to
prop up the police and prison systems of American client states.
It is a successor to the police training program run by the Agency
for International Development. That program was halted in the
mid-70's after the Watergate scandal when it became public knowledge
that U.S. AID officials were training police and prison officials
around the world in techniques of murder and torture, mostly
for use against leftist insurgencies. The activities of ICITAP
are not new, only the name is.
In Russia throughout the mid-90's,
Department of Justice officials were accused of illegally acquiring
visas for their Russian girlfriends, sharing classified information
with uncleared parties and cronyism, in what the Department's
inspector general summed up as "egregious misconduct."
ICITAP has had a continuous
role in Haiti. ICITAP has been sent to train the Haitian police
force and restore the criminal justice system. After millions
of dollars in funding, the Haitian police force was still deemed
"largely ineffective" and accused of serving only "a
small segment of the population," according to a report
by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Terry Stewart
Terry Stewart accepted his
invitation to participate in the ICITAP mission to Iraq. Like
the others serving on the team, Stewart had numerous years of
experience in prisons, both as former director of the Arizona
Department of Corrections (1995-2002) and as a consultant for
the private prison firm Advanced Correctional Management.
Donna Hamm, founder and Executive
Director of Middle Ground Prison Reform, witnessed Stewart in
action in Arizona, where he accumulated many accusations of human
rights violations. She said, "Twenty years of credentials
is just one year repeated 20 times. There's no change."
In 1995, after prisoners set
fire to buildings at Safford Arizona State Prison in response
to unacceptable conditions, all 613 prisoners were gathered in
a central area outside, handcuffed and forced to lie face down.
During the first day, prisoners claimed that prison guards would
not allow them to eat or to use the bathroom, and, as a result,
they urinated and defecated on themselves. Prisoners also suffered
from severe sunburns and heat strokes. The prisoners were kept
outside for a total of four days. Eventually, the case went to
trial, but the jury sided with the Department of Corrections,
claiming that the department's actions were "rational."
Though the abuses weren't attributed
to Stewart directly, Hamm said that the director's attitude sets
the climate within the department. "They don't have to adopt
a policy of abuse, it's a given that people will not be fired
and will not be held accountable. The guards abuse the prisoners,
and they know that they won't be charged under the current director."
In a reference to Abu Ghraib,
Hamm said, "This isn't a leash on the neck, but the intent
is the same: degradation, humiliation and complete denial of
humanity."
Stewart's record in Arizona
did not prevent him from obtaining a position on the ICITAP team
sent to Iraq. A documented record of human rights abuse seems
to be a boon for overseas employment by ICITAP, not a hindrance.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has recently criticized the Department
of Justice for allowing individuals with checkered pasts, like
Stewart, to assist with prison oversight in Iraq.
In June 2004, Schumer said,
"When you ask yourself why is there a mess in the Iraqi
prisons, just look at the kind of oversight and checking that
was done with the people that were put in charge - hardly any,
obviously, or these people wouldn't have been put in the prison
system. With these kind of people in charge, was there any hope
that the prison system would be run in a decent way? Absolutely
not."
Upon arrival in Baghdad, Stewart
and the ICITAP team found that out of 151 prisons, none were
operational. Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L.
Paul Bremer informed them that they were to start assessing and
re-opening prisons immediately. One of those prisons was Abu
Ghraib.
In a corrections.com interview, Stewart said that at Abu Ghraib,
"The CPA, at the request of the Iraqi people, took the execution
chamber and made a memorial out of it." Stewart also put
together a three-day training program for future Iraqi prison
workers on human rights and anti-corruption. "I gave them
an eight-hour course on human rights and anti-corruption and
the daily regiment of prisons," Stewart said. "It was
interesting teaching through an interpreter. And when I said,
'You can't physically hit an inmate,' I thought the staff would
riot. They said, 'How can we control them?'"
DeLand of
DeFree
Gary DeLand arrived in Iraq
three weeks after Terry Stewart. DeLand's history in prisons,
though abundant, was mired with allegations of misdeeds and abuse.
As director of the Utah Department of Corrections in the 80's,
DeLand faced numerous charges of denying prisoners adequate medical
treatment and subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishment.
Attorney Brian Barnard tried
civil action suits against DeLand while he was head of the Utah
Department of Corrections. During DeLand's reign, Barnard claims
he would receive at least two to three letters a week of complaints
from prisoners, which could possibly stem from what Barnard calls
DeLand's philosophy: "to lock [prisoners] up until they
were too old to commit crimes."
DeLand met up with the rest of the ICITAP team in Baghdad and
then set out to do the most fundamental task of re-opening prisons:
hiring prison employees. The ICITAP team posted recruitment flyers
and passed out applications to Iraqis, and when they ran out
of applications, DeLand claims, "The [Military Police] had
to run over and fire shots in the air because the crowd got so
angry."
Finding willing Iraqis to fill
prison positions was not a problem, but, according to DeLand,
training new Iraqi employees was filled with obstacles. "We
had a very high attrition rate. Some people found out they couldn't
take bribes and just got up and left. We explained that this
was a new system and that this is how we did things in the United
States. They would get up and walk out. Or they would ask, 'What
happens when an inmate has a problem, don't you beat them up?'
We would tell them that we just don't do that in the U.S.,"
DeLand said in a corrections.com
interview.
Maybe DeLand was confused by
the question, because prisoners endured horrendous treatment
under his watch at the Utah Department of Corrections. In 1981,
a prisoner brought a lawsuit against DeLand, both individually
and as supervisor at the Salt Lake City County Jail, for cruel
and unusual punishment.
The man, who was suffering
from a mental illness, had been arrested and charged with disorderly
but nonviolent conduct. While in detainment, the prisoner was
kept naked for 56 days in a "strip cell," described
in court documents as having "no windows, no interior lights,
no bunk, no floor covering, and no toilet except for a hole in
the concrete floor which was flushed irregularly from outside
the cell."
John J.
Armstrong
Before John J. Armstrong became
the assistant director of operations of American prisons in Iraq
he was the commissioner of Connecticut's Department of Corrections
from 1995- 2003. Like Stewart and DeLand, Armstrong was appointed
to his post by a Republican governor, John G. Rowland, who has
since been impeached. Governor Rowland complained that prisons
in Connecticut resembled "Club Med-style" resorts;
he wanted a commissioner that would toughen up the prisons that,
he claimed, had gone soft under the previous commissioner.
Armstrong vowed to put security
above all else, and, during his first months in office, he oversaw
the opening of Connecticut's first "Supermax" prison,
Northern Correctional Institution. The Connecticut Department
of Corrections website describes Northern as a "highly structured,
secure and humane environment," while a representative from
National Prison Project called Northern a "high-tech dungeon"
in a 1996 Hartford Courant article.
Northern is an autocratic guard's
dream: prisoners locked up in their closet- sized cells for 23
hours a day, and almost everything can be operated by remote
control. Though the prison was intended to house only prisoners
who pose "a threat to the safety and security of the community,
staff and other inmates," many prisoners were sent there
on minor offenses, like participating in a work stoppage protest.
During Armstrong's command,
it wasn't necessary to travel to Northern to find examples of
abuse. In a 2001 Amnesty International report studying abuse
of women in prisons, Connecticut was used as an example of how
not to treat female prisoners. At the York Correctional Institution
in Niantic, there were numerous allegations of inappropriate
sexual conduct by male guards against female prisoners, including
sexual assault and voyeurism.
In 1999, Timothy Perry, a 21-year-old
mentally ill prisoner, was beaten to death by guards at Hartford
Correctional Center. Perry put up no resistance when guards entered
his cell and beat him to death. To cover up the murder, the guards
continued to act as if Perry was alive and put him in four-point
restraints. A nurse even injected Perry's corpse with Thorazine,
a psychotropic drug that he was allergic to. At no time did anyone
bother to call a doctor or to check if Perry was breathing. All
was caught on film.
None of the staff involved
in Perry's murder were disciplined. The state of Connecticut
paid $2.9 million to Perry's estate for the murder.
To ease the burden of overcrowding
on the prison population, Armstrong initiated the exodus of 484
prisoners to Virginia's "Supermax" Wallens Ridge Prison
in 1999. Some contended that it was principally minorities being
sent to Wallens Ridge, but Armstrong maintained that the numbers
being sent were representative of the prison population. As the
prisoners settled in at Wallens Ridge, allegations of mistreatment
began to fly. Yet these charges went ignored by Armstrong, and
it was the prisoners who paid the price for his negligence.
In April 2000, guards at Wallens
Ridge saw a prisoner in his cell jump from his top bunk. Four
minutes later, the guards entered the cell of David Tracy, 20,
and found that he had hung himself with his bed sheet. Tracy
had been transferred to Wallens Ridge from Northern Correctional
Institute with Connecticut officials knowing that the transfer
would endanger both his mental health and life.
Before his transfer, Tracy
had attempted suicide three times and even requested to be placed
on suicide watch. As a result of his actions and mental illnesses,
his mental health status had been classified as "Mental
Health 4," the highest level possible. Wallens Ridge would
not be able to meet Tracy's needs and Connecticut officials knew
it. At Wallens Ridge, Tracy was not given frequent access to
mental health staff and was not monitored.
Months after Tracy's suicide,
James Lawrence Frazier, another transferred prisoner, went into
a diabetic shock and was shocked repeatedly with 50,000 volts
of a stun gun. Days later, Frazier died of heart failure.
After two years, two deaths, an ACLU class action suit, and over
70 other lawsuits, the prisoners were brought back to Connecticut.
Now, public attention was focused on the multiple charges of
sexual harassment brought upon Armstrong and others by female
prison employees.
Armstrong was implicated both
directly and indirectly in sexual harassment. Female prison employees
asserted that there was a sustained atmosphere of disrespect
towards women in the department, with charges ranging from male
guards watching pornographic movies while on duty to vandalism
and theft of female employee's belongings.
In one incident, Deputy Warden
Murdoch made explicit comments in front of 80 employees. He said
that women are sensitive during "that time of the month"
and that he would keep a box of underwear in his office in case
any women had "an accident at work." At staff meetings,
others made similar comments, and Armstrong was aware of and
condoned the behavior.
When female employees would
file sexual harassment complaints, many were called "snitches"
or would face further retaliation from their harassers. Armstrong
claimed that sexual harassment would not be tolerated within
the department, but many of the perpetrators were never disciplined
and were sometimes promoted.
While Armstrong left office
in a cloud of controversy, it did not impact his ability to find
employment with ICITAP.
Lane McCotter
Lane McCotter has been shuffled
in and out of the prison business for the past three decades.
He has been director of corrections in three states, Texas (1985-1987),
New Mexico (1987- 1991) and Utah (1992-97) and is currently working
as the director of business development for Management and Training
Corporation, a private, Utah-based prison firm that operates
16 facilities.
In 2003, McCotter was appointed
to the ICITAP team headed to Iraq. McCotter may feel comfortable
in many of America's prisons, but according to a corrections.com
interview, flying in the plane headed to Iraq felt just "like
coming home." He did two tours in Vietnam and worked as
an MP.
McCotter and DeLand both oversaw
the rebuilding of Abu Ghraib prison and attended the ribbon-cutting
ceremony when the first 500 beds were opened. The team had started
rebuilding Abu Ghraib when they saw that it was "the only
place that we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American
prison," according to a corrections.com interview. McCotter
said that he spent $1.9 million dollars in government funds reconstructing
Abu Ghraib so it could house prisoners captured by the U.S. military.
On his experience in Iraq,
McCotter said in a 2003 corrections.com interview, "It was
almost like you have been preparing for something like this your
whole life to bring together everything you have ever learned
and to put an entire system together and watch it come to life
from absolute and utter chaos and destruction and operate the
way you know it should or could. It was such a fascinating and
personally rewarding experience for all of us."
When McCotter left for Iraq, he was leaving behind an extensive
record of misdeeds in American prisons.
In Texas, where McCotter served
as director of the Department of Corrections for two years, he
faced allegations in 1985 of erasing the parts of a video that
showed the beating of a prisoner by a guard. McCotter said that
it was an "accident," but the incident leading up to
and after the beating were still on the tape. McCotter was only
in the nascent stages of his prison administrator career, and,
by the time he arrived in Utah, he was a seasoned prison official.
In Utah, McCotter served five years as director of the Director
of Corrections. In July 1994, prisoner Lonnie Blackmon was stabbed
67 times by another prisoner in a Utah state prison while eight
guards looked on and did nothing. The lawsuit filed by Blackmon's
family said that Blackmon was placed in an area of the prison
that housed a majority of white supremacist gang members. Guards
cuffed Blackmon and left him in the area "defenseless."
While Blackmon was being stabbed, cameras were recording everything.
The guards had a high-pressure hose and weapons at their disposal,
yet no one acted.
In March 1997, the death of
another prisoner was also caught on tape. Michael Valent, a 29-year-old
schizophrenic, died of a blood clot that had formed in his legs
and traveled to his lungs after being strapped naked to a restraining
chair for 16 hours. Prison officials claimed that Valent had
been restrained in the chair because he was banging his head
against the wall and posing a threat to his own safety.
The videos show the 115-pound
Valent in his cell with a pillowcase wrapped around his head,
some claim to shut out the voices in his head, while the guards
forcibly remove him from his cell and cut off his clothing. He
was then strapped to the chair, the leg restraints strapped to
the tightest level. After 16 hours, Valent was removed from the
chair, and he died in the shower three hours later. Valent's
death was ruled a homicide, and his mother received a $200,000
settlement McCotter claimed that Valent could've developed those
clots anywhere.
The photographic evidence showing
American soldiers subjecting Iraqi prisoners to sexual abuse,
assault and torture; at least 20 known murders of prisoners;
and hiding prisoners from the International Committee of the
Red Cross have been seen around the world. These well-documented
abuses were carried out after the ICITAP team had refurbished
the Iraqi prison system and prepared it for its new users.
The four American leaders of
the ICITAP team have a lot in common. They were all Republican
Party-connected prisoncrats with lengthy track records of brutality
throughout their careers in American prisons. Internationally,
the U.S. runs one of the most regressive prison systems in the
world.
Something positive may come from the international exposure of
the Abu Ghraib scandal: educating the world about what the term
"human rights" means, and has meant, for American prisoners
and what other countries can expect under U.S. occupation.
Torture
continues
In January, 2004, President
Bush said of Iraq, "One thing is for certain: there won't
be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms."
On June 29, 2004, an Oregon
National Guard unit told a different story. According to an article
in The Oregonian, a solider saw several Iraqi prisoners blindfolded
and bound at the Iraqi Interior Ministry. They were being beaten
and tortured by Iraqi officials.
The soldier radioed for assistance,
and the unit was sent to the Interior Ministry to investigate.
When they arrived, the soldiers passed out water and moved the
prisoners far from the Iraqi officials. The bound Iraqis said
they hadn't eaten anything in days. Upon further investigation,
the unit found metal rods and other torture mechanisms.
They also found 78 more Iraqi
prisoners in a 20-by-20 foot room. The Iraqi officials claimed
that they hadn't beaten anyone and the unit was soon ordered
by their superiors in the U.S. military to return the prisoners
back to the officials. Several of the soldiers took pictures
showing Iraqi prisoners being beaten by officials. Since then,
there have been no new developments on the status of the Iraqi
prisoners.
Contrary to what President
Bush has said, the rape and torture rooms of Iraq haven't closed.
They're just open for business under new management.
Leah Caldwell lives in Austin, Texas. This article
originally appeared in Prison
Legal News. She can be reached at: leahmcaldwell@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for September 18 / 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Forgeries,
Fingerprints and Forensic Fakery
Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Bush's Mask of Anarchy
Patrick Cockburn
Into the Abyss: the Week Iraq's Dream of Peace Fell Apart
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Financial Torture (Asset Forfeiture)
Joe Allen
The Comrades Kerry Abandoned: the Real Story of Vietnam Vets
Against the War
George Corsetti
Poletown Revisited: Finally, Some Vindication
Scott Handleman
The Knock-Knock of a Sledgehammer: Sequestered in Nablus
Richard Ward
Two Weeks in Beit Arabiya
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Eye on the NYTs
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