July 11, 2005
President George W. Bush has embedded murder, assassination, torture, and mistreatment of prisoners into the structure of the U.S. system of global domination. Many U.S. citizens, rightly outraged, want to know why this sort of barbaric, sadistic violence has become an integral part of U.S. security policy, and what the Administration’s justification of torture means institutionally for the future governance of this country. Above all, they want to know how Bush has been able to avoid impeachment for committing high crimes.
Here is a select list of typical tortures, abuses, and “outrages against human dignity” inflicted by U.S. forces and mercenaries on enemy captives in the course of their arrest, detention and interrogation:
Beating, kicking, and treading on bodies
Sleep deprivation and forced injection of drugs
Rape and sodomy
Water torture, a traditional U.S. Army practice since at least the Indian wars and the Philippines insurrection at the end of the 19th century
Hanging prisoners whose arms are bound behind their back by shackles or handcuffs until their limbs pop from their sockets—a new U.S. form of lynching
Tight handcuffing, close-shackling, and blindfolding or “hooding” for extended periods; sometimes the hoods are marked in order to alert the U.S. torturer to the particular crime that the prisoner is suspected of having committed
Forced stripping of Muslim prisoners and keeping them naked for long periods
Religious humiliation
Sexual humiliation, insult, and debasement, including smearing with feces, urine, and what appears to be menstrual blood
Screaming racial insults before, during, and after unleashing violence against captives
Shocking with electrical instruments, another method of torture commonly used by U.S. troops in Vietnam
Exposure for prolonged periods to extremes of light and dark, heat and cold, and noise so deafening as to rupture the eardrums
Extraction of nails, burning skin with cigarettes, stabbing or cutting the bodies of prisoners
Threatening prisoners or their relatives with death or by having them watch other victims being tortured
Threatening with dogs or allowing dogs to actually assault prisoners during or before interrogation
Forcing prisoners to stand or to remain in painful positions for extended periods
Isolation in cells, cages, wooden boxes, and barbed wire-enclosed trailers for prolonged periods
Depriving prisoners of food, water, drink, and toilet facilities
Extreme or enforced rendition, i.e., torture by proxy in foreign countries
These acts were performed both before and after the Bush administration had unilaterally exempted itself from legal liabilities under international and domestic law. Some members of the U.S. military abused prisoners because senior military commanders such as Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez had explicitly authorized them to do so; some tortured the enemy because they found it to be “fun”; but most seem to have acted in the belief that their conduct was condoned because the White House and the Department of Defense had adopted a policy of fighting terror with terror.
In the U.S. mass media the routine, sometimes bone-shattering beating of prisoners in U.S. custody receives relatively little attention except as a public relations problem. Moral and legal concern seems to be reserved for the less common, more secretive practice of “rendition,” in which officials of the executive branch are protected because the abuse takes place outside the U.S., avoiding monitoring by the Red Cross and due process. More so than other modes of torture, this type of contract crime may be ordered mainly for reasons of deterrence—i.e., to teach an object lesson to all people who fall afoul of the U.S., regardless of their national origin. European governments rightly consider it to be a blatant violation of their local sovereignty and are investigating.
A Total War Strategy
The Bush administration’s increasing reliance on imprisonment, torture, and assassination as elements in its “war on terror,” needs to be explained from multiple angles, as part of a total war strategy for eliminating new challenges to the U.S. global empire. Fear, racism, and colonial wars in poverty-stricken Afghanistan and Iraq are historical frames that highlight the scope and complexity of the problem. The collapse of separation of powers, the decay of democratic processes and values, Congress’s unwillingness to destroy the perception of presidential impunity, and the increasingly secret nature of government combine to constitute a fourth frame. Let me touch briefly on each.
From the earliest days of the U.S., fear and racism have been striking features of U.S. culture. Although closely related, they are distinguishable. By fear I mean the inordinate susceptibility of the U.S. public to fits of real panic, during which fear and extremism override reason. Usually fear spreads when political elites sound the alarm and rally the country to fight some unbelievably powerful force that is out to destroy the world they inhabit. The threat can come from within or from outside, from a modern or a “failed state,” or from a social movement. But once defined, U.S. citizens imagine that only extraordinary leaders, willing to ignore the law, can protect them from the menace. Under strong presidents, citizens fight back in self-defense against the insidious enemy, using catastrophic weapons created by their technological genius. The enemy can be Indians, Blacks, or Chinese; it can be Britain in one period, Spain, Japan, the Soviet Union, or international terrorists in another. In almost every case, the enemy that their leaders exhorted them to hate later turns out to be whoever had something we wanted. The pattern is old and recurs throughout the history of U.S. empire. The most spectacular case of “punishing an aggressor” with an unprecedented new super weapon was President Truman’s nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By racism I mean attitudes of hatred and contempt directed toward those who are unlike us, mainly for reasons of color. In multicultural, allegedly color-blind U.S., with its many racial minorities, racism and de facto segregation continues. When Bush declared his “war on terror,” this old dynamic assumed forms suited to 21st century conditions. Racial profiling returned; civil rights for minorities and immigrants eroded; and both developments went hand in hand with war atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo, Cuba.
The effects of racial bias can be seen in the world’s largest, expanding prison system, where the percentage of Blacks, Latinos, and Hispanics remains high and racial violence and mistreatment of minority inmates occurs frequently. Not surprisingly, in the atmosphere of revenge galvanized by the 9/11 attacks, racial violence quickly spread from the domestic prisons and police departments to U.S. military prisons abroad. Abusive jailers and police officers from the U.S. volunteered to fight and ended up torturing prisoners at camps in Kandahar, Baghram, Guantanamo Bay, Mosul, Bucca in southern Iraq, and Abu Ghraib near Baghdad.
The Pentagon also recruited patrol officers and officials from the federal and state prisons for its war on terror and sent them to the U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. state prison system is far larger than the federal system and in 2003 held nearly 1.2 million inmates, most of them ethnic minorities. Local jails contained 700,000 inmates; juvenile facilities over 100,000. Racial violence and mistreatment of inmates by guards is more likely to occur in the state prisons and local jails where the level of discipline is lower, the use of force greater. But from the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, where hundreds of Muslim detainees were recently abused, to the U.S. military prisons spread throughout the world, wherever prisoners of color have been tortured by guards, racism usually lies close to the surface.
Furthermore, race rather than national origin fundamentally shapes the U.S. soldiers’ image of the terrorist. The Army sent to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq was “whiter” than it had been since 2000 as a result of five straight years of declining Army recruitment of black Americans. The 17,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan reportedly turned virtually the entire country into one huge secret prison in which military guards and CIA interrogators inflicted gratuitous pain on the bodies of individual Afghani captives who are held incommunicado without charge or trial, according to a March 19, 2005 report in the Guardian. Whenever this happens the likelihood is great that they are exercising “racially-informed,” irrational violence against both their victims and the entire society to which they belong. The same phenomenon can be seen in Iraq where U.S. soldiers call the inhabitants “sand niggers” and “ragheads.”
A third framework for understanding the torture scandal is the regressive, colonial-like character of the current U.S. wars. Nothing illustrates this better than the bloody struggle to control Fallujah, a Sunni city located west of Baghdad on the edge of the Iraq desert, which before the U.S. invasion had a population estimated at 300,000.
The initial skirmish in what became the first battle of Fallujah (March and early April 2004) was fought after four U.S. military contractors were brutally murdered by young Iraqis. The killings were in revenge for the murder in Gaza of the paraplegic Sheik Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, by Israelis who were flying U.S. helicopters. Marines went into Fallujah allegedly searching for the killers of the civilian mercenaries but were forced out by its residents. To redeem their honor they mounted a full-scale assault. After three weeks of rebellion the casualty figures ranged from a low of 600 combatant and non-combatants killed and over 1,200 injured to estimates ranging upward from 1,000.
The second battle to retake Fallujah from its inhabitants began five months later in November 2004, after Marines again cut off food, water, and electricity to the city in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Their illegal acts of collective retribution were designed to empty the city of its women, children, and elderly while preventing the departure of able-bodied Iraqi civilian males. When something similar happened in Srebrenica, Bosnia in 1995 it was universally condemned in Europe and the U.S. as “genocide.” The main difference was that in Srebrenica the Serbs evacuated the women and children by truck while in Fallujah the U.S. bombed them out.
As U.S. ground attacks on entrances to the besieged city of Fallujah increased, aerial bombardment—torture from the air—commenced. A U.S. specialty since 1945, the bombing of cities tends to take a primary toll on civilians while seeking to force both noncombatants and combatants to sue for peace.
Iraqi popular resistance forces responded to these U.S. assaults by stepping up attacks in Baghdad, Samarra, Ramadi, and elsewhere, killing and wounding more foreign occupiers and their Iraqi collaborators by the week. Fallujah’s struggle to end U.S. occupation spread the nationalist resistance.
The retaking of Fallujah during November and early December through ruthless air, tank, and artillery bombardment resulted in the city’s complete destruction. Under rules of engagement approved in Washington, U.S. forces reportedly used banned napalm and poison gas, killed civilians holding white flags or white clothes over their heads, murdered the wounded, killed unarmed Iraqis who had been taken prisoner, and destroyed mosques, hospitals, and health centers protected under international law. One of the most amazing, well reported scenes from this battle took place at the Fallujah General Hospital where U.S. forces kicked down doors, cut the telephone lines, molested doctors, forced patients from their beds, and manacled their hands behind their backs. The hospital, said U.S. military spokesperson, was releasing casualty figures useful for the propaganda of the resistance fighters.
Fallujan residents were dispossessed of their homes and forced to live as refugees in surrounding towns and villages. To this day no one knows how many people died in the bloodbath. But a few months earlier, in September 2004, an Iraqi mortality researcher and his interviewer, working on a public health study jointly sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University, managed to enter the city. What they discovered was such a high number of civilian deaths that they decided to exclude the Fallujah data from their final, conservative estimate of about 100,000 Iraqi civilians (mostly women and children) killed since the U.S. invaded. In a population estimated at 24 million, that is the U.S. proportional equivalent of 1.2 million deaths.
When legal restraints are removed during a war, needless death and destruction occurs; invariably the main victims are highly vulnerable civilians. In World War II, the “kill ratio” was one civilian death (mostly children, women, and the elderly) for every soldier killed. The smaller wars fought after 1945 ran the civilian-soldier count up to 8:1. But in Iraq the kill ratio is conservatively estimated to be much higher. Why do tens of millions of Americans refuse to confront this reality? Perhaps because they never heard about the Lancet study, thanks to the U.S. corporate media. Or perhaps misguided patriotism and militarism, drummed into youth through film, television, and video games, lead them to consider the enormous civilian loss and suffering as unavoidable “collateral damage” or a product of military necessity. Whatever the reasons, not only the Administration, but the mainstream press and many citizens profess to care only about the lives of fellow Americans and remain unconcerned about the barbaric treatment their soldiers mete out to Iraqis and Afghanis.
