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November 1, 2001
Sami Amanah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
October 30, 2001
Rep. Ron Paul
War on Terror
Bad as War on Drugs
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flying
Blind:
The Predator's Problem
Ali Abunimah
Dear Colin
Powell
St. Clair/Cockburn
Atomic
Trains Grounded
Maud Hurd
We Need a Real
Stimulus Package
Dr. Susan
Block
We're
All Afghans Now
Tariq Ali
Busted in Munich
Francis
Beer
Toward
the Terrorist
Anti-World
October 29, 2001
Alexander Cockburn
The Left
and the Just War
John Pilger
Hidden
Agenda
of the War on Terror
David Krieger
Nukes on
the Loose
Jack McCarthy
Neo-Nazis
and 9/11
Marina Kalashnikova
The Brzezinski
Interview
Richard
Manning
Terrorism:
a definitive history
October 27, 2001
Edward
Said
A
Vision to Lift the Spririt
October 26, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Genocide
Scholar Gagged
Over Comments on the
Bombing of Afghanistan
Rahul
Mahajan
Poisoning
the Well
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why I Opposed
the
Anti-Terrorism Bill
John Troyer
Put
the War to a Vote
Norman Madarasz
What It
Means to be
Against the War
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance Attacks
US Bombing Strategy
Richard Lloyd Parry
Terrible Images
of a "Just" War
October 25, 2001
Ghassan
Andoni
Raid
on Bethlehem
N.D. Jayaprakash
From
Hiroshima to NYC
Evan Schultz
Memo
to Ashcroft:
Read Marbury
The Sunshine
Project
Assault
on the BioWeapons
Convention
Sarah
Turner
Cashing
In on Patriotism
Latin American Colloquium
on Systemology
The Meridia Manifesto
Noam Chomsky
The
New War on Terror
Resources:
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a
History of Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden
and Bush Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden
Hype of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh
on Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin
Tells Bush: Nuke 'Em
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by Alexander
Cockburn
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The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
Responses to 9/11:
Chomsky, Russell Banks,
Zinn, and Alice Walker
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November 1,
2001
FBI Eyes Torture
By Alexander Cockburn
"FBI and Justice Department investigators
are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected
associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are
beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have
to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the
Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans."
Thus began a piece by Walter Pincus on page 6
of The Washington Post on Sunday, and if you suspect that this
is the overture to an argument for torture, you are right. The
FBI interrogators have been getting nowhere with the four key
suspects, held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center.
None of these men have talked, and Pincus quotes an FBI man involved
in the interrogation as saying that "it could get to that
spot where we could go to pressure...where we won't have a choice,
and we are probably getting there."
Pincus reports that "among the alternative
strategies under discussion are using drugs or pressure tactics,
such as those employed occasionally by Israeli interrogators,
to extract information. Another idea is extraditing the suspects
to allied countries where security services sometimes employ
threats to family members or resort to torture."
Some FBI interrogators are thinking longingly
of drugs like the so-called "truth serum," sodium pentothal;
others the "pressure tactics," i.e., straightforward
tortures, used by Shin Bet in Israel, banned after savage public
debate a few years ago, which included sensory deprivation (an
old favorite of British interrogators in Northern Ireland), plus
many agonizing physical torments. Another idea is to send the
suspects to other countries for torture by seasoned experts.
Israel is not mentioned; nor are the British. Extradition of
Moussaoui to France or Morocco is apparently a possibility.
CounterPunch was astounded to find David
Cole, noted liberal professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
being quoted by Pincus as saying that "the use of force
to extract information could happen" in cases where investigators
believe suspects have information on an upcoming attack. "If
there is a ticking bomb, it is not an easy issue, it's tough,"
he said. Of course it's tough. As Cole surely knows, the "ticking
bomb" rationale has been used by Israel's torture lobby
for years, long after it had become clear that it had simply
become a routine way of dealing with suspects. Right now the
disposition of the FBI, intent on interrogating every Arab American
male (some 200,000) in this country, is doubtless to assume that
they might have knowledge of a ticking bomb.
The FBI claims it is hampered by its
present codes of gentility. If so, there's no need to eye Morocco
or France as subcontracting torturers. As a practical matter
torture is far from unknown in the interrogation rooms of U.S.
law enforcement, with Abner Louima the best-known recent example.
The most infamous disclosure of consistent
torture by a police department in recent years concerned cops
in Chicago in the mid-70s through early 80s who used electroshock,
oxygen deprivation, hanging on hooks, the bastinado and beatings
of the testicles. The torturers were white and their victims
black or brown. A prisoner in California's Pelican Bay State
Prison was thrown into boiling water. Others get 50,000-volt
shocks from stun guns. Many states have so-called "secure
housing units" where prisoners are kept in solitary in tiny
concrete cells for years on end, many of them going mad in the
process. Amnesty International has denounced U.S. police forces
for "a pattern of unchecked excessive force amounting to
torture."
Last year the UN delivered a severe public
rebuke to the United States for its record on preventing torture
and degrading punishment. A 10-strong panel of experts highlighted
what it said were Washington's breaches of the agreement ratified
by the United States in 1994. The UN Committee Against Torture,
which monitors international compliance with the UN Convention
Against Torture, has called for the abolition of electric-shock
stun belts (1000 in use in the U.S.) and restraint chairs on
prisoners, as well as an end to holding children in adult jails.
It also said female detainees are "very often held in humiliating
and degrading circumstances" and expressed concern over
alleged cases of sexual assault by police and prison officers.
The panel criticized the excessively harsh regime in maximum
security prisons, the use of chain gangs in which prisoners perform
manual labor while shackled together, and the number of cases
of police brutality against racial minorities.
So far as rape is concerned, because
of the rape factories more conventionally known as the U.S. prison
system, there are estimates that twice as many men as women are
raped in the U.S. each year. A Human Rights Watch report in April
of this year cited a December 2000 Prison Journal study based
on a survey of inmates in seven men's prison facilities in four
states. The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had
experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual
contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had
been raped in their facilities. A 1996 study of the Nebraska
prison system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male
inmates reporting that they had been pressured or forced to have
sexual contact against their will while incarcerated. Of these,
more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least
once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives
a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.
Since its inception the CIA has taken
a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and
protecting their exponents such as Klaus Barbie. The FBI could
ship the four key suspects to plenty of countries taught torture
by CIA technicians, including El Salvador. Robert Fisk reported
in the London Independent in 1998 that after the 1979 revolution
Iranians found a CIA film made for the SAVAK, the Shah's political
police, on how to torture women. William Blum, whose Rogue State
(Common Courage, 2000) gives a useful overview of the United
States' relationship to torture, cites a 1970 story in Brazil's
extremely respectable Jornal do Brasil, quoting the former Urugayan
chief of police intelligence, Alejandro Otero, as saying that
U.S. advisers, particularly Dan Mitrione, had instituted torture
in Uruguay on a routine basis, with scientific refinement in
technique (such as the precise upper limits of electric voltage
before death intervened) and psychological pressure, such as
a tape in the next room of women and children screaming, telling
the prisoner that his family was being tortured.
The CIA's official line is that torture
is wrong and is ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On countless
occasions it has been appallingly effective. CP
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