http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/050604B.shtmlThank God for the Torturers
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Part I: Inside the Infernal Machine
Private Lynndie England has now become the poster child for "democracy in the Middle East," the ultimate goal that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair invoked to justify their current adventure. All over the vast, oil-rich region, people see young Lynndie leering at a naked Iraqi with a sack over his head as he masturbates at her command.
Her sadistic fun and games - along with even more disgusting photos and stories of male rape and deadly beatings - play directly into the hands of puritanical, anti-Western Muslim preachers and suicidal Fools of God. How righteous Osama must feel when he hears that the young woman, a reservist in the Military Police, was shipped back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant in Iraq.
But Lynndie was not just having a good time, even if she seemed to enjoy her work. A prison guard in a special high-security cellblock run by military intelligence, she was doing what the shadowy types had asked her to do, which was to humiliate and disorient Iraqi prisoners prior to interrogation.
Once CBS News televised the photos, President Bush and everyone else proclaimed themselves suitably shocked, horrified, disgusted, and appalled. They condemned the small number of people who committed these shameful aberrations. They denied any systematic abuse. And they piously pleaded that the world, especially the outraged Muslim World, not think ill of our brave men and women in uniform.
What else could they say?
But no matter. It was all too late. Sy Hersh - the reporter who won a Pulitizer for exposing the American massacre of Vietnamese non-combatants at My Lai - had already unearthed one of Washington's shabbier secrets. Writing in the New Yorker, Hersh cited a secret, 53-page U.S. Army report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who said in so many words that the physical and psychological torture was systematic, intended, and officially promoted.
(snip)
Mindful of the Geneva Conventions and other treaties, insiders tried to spin what they were doing as only "torture lite" or "stress and duress." The goal, as the CIA manuals explained, was not to inflict pain, but "to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist."
Where earlier, more obvious brutality often stiffened resistance by creating a battle of wills between torturer and victim, the new techniques set the conflict within the captive's own body and mind, eating away at his or her adult personality and creating a child-like state of dependence.
"Stress and duress" left few physical scars and baffled casual observers, who saw none of the classic instruments of torture. When those were wanted, the CIA and military intelligence generally flew prisoners to Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, or the Philippines.
"We don't kick the
out of them," an insider told the Washington Post. "We send them to other countries so they can kick the out of them."
All hail America's global torture machine, in which Pvt. Lynndie England played her small part, finding creative and culturally powerful ways to humiliate and break Iraqi captives. We can only wonder what secrets her victims subsequently revealed. But even if what they told led to Saddam's capture, the information would hardly be worth the damage that getting it by torture has now done to the occupation of Iraq, the long-term security of Middle East oil supplies, and the hope for democratic reform anywhere - except perhaps in the United States.
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