Coastal
Post Online
January,
2004
A Christmas Nightmare Torture Story
By Jim Scanlon
Still half asleep, I heard two interviews from my bed a few days before
Christmas. One interview was of a song writer about a tactic used by US Army
Psychological Warfare Experts to "persuade" Iraqi war prisoners to
reveal secret information by playing children's music from Sesame Street and
heavy metal rock music. Anyone who had ever worked in a retail store that
played Christmas Muzak over and over would surely understand the effectiveness
of the technique.
The other
person interviewed was an articulate, pleasant sounding "anti terrorism
expert" from the US Central Intelligence Agency who discussed the
"interrogation" of Saddam Hussein, the pathetic, deposed, fugitive,
disheveled, depressed, possibly drugged, former president of Iraq who had been
captured recently. Ex president Hussein
was reportedly betrayed by one of his
supporters after he had undergone four hours of "grueling"
interrogation by US military forces.
The CIA expert said he did not want to suggest that Saddam would be
tortured, but went on to explain the likely methods of interrogation used by US
and friendly countries, which stopped short of, in his opinion,
"torture".
The goal
was to "wear the subject down" day after day, using a variety of
techniques. He might be kept in an unchanging environment where he would not
know where he was, isolated, meals would be provided at the same time. He would
be disoriented. He might be put in an uncomfortable position, like leaning
against a wall, or in a push up position. He might not be permitted to sleep
("Ve haf vays to make you talk!" Sesame Street songs perhaps?) or he
might not be allowed to go to the bathroom [to urinate or defecate] He might be
kept naked. A hood might be placed over
his head so he could not see who he was talking to.
(So, I thought, this is what must have been
going on in Guantanimo, day after day for the past two years.)
The NPR interviewer asked if it might be
implied to Saddam that, if he didn't cooperate he might be taken to another
country which might not be so restrained in eliciting his cooperation. (It is amazing how often this subject comes
up!) The anti-terrorist expert responded that that sort of thing would not
happen in this case since Saddam had to appear at a "show trial" and
extra measures would be taken to prevent any charge of torture.
(Ah ha, this is probably the reason why
those guys in Guantanimo haven't had a trial or a show trail in over two
years!)
The words "show
trial" woke me up! I had read, and
heard, those words hundreds, maybe thousands of times in my life, almost always
in connection with public trials in Nazi Germany or Communist countries like
the Soviet Union or China. People accused of spying for the Free World had "show trials".
That is, rigged, pro forma legal proceedings with a predetermined (guilty)
outcome, total theater, designed to
create the fraudulent illusion of fair play and justice.
The most famous were the Moscow Show Trials
in 1936 during which a dozen or so "old Bolsheviks, (Kamenev, Zinoviev and
Bukharin and others) publicly admitted their guilt and were subsequently
executed. At the end of the Korean War (1955) a number of US Army Prisoners of
War chose not to be repatriated back home to the US, (at least initially). The
behavior of these "turncoats" as they were called, as well as the
collaboration of many GI Prisoners of
War with their captors let to much discussion and condemnation of North Korean
Communist "brain washing" after grueling interrogations day in, day
out. Many men broke under the pressure.
In 1904, the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was awarded the
Noble Prize for his work on conditioned reflexes in dogs Because of the "turncoats" and
hard sell TV advertisement, there was great interest in Pavlov's work in the
1950s since it was related to unconsciously changing behavior and mind control.
(Remember "The Manchurian Candidate" a 1962 film which stared Frank
Sinatra in which Lawrence Harvey is brainwashed into a robot like communist
tool to assassinate a US president)
Pavlov's ideas had implications for sudden religious conversions (like
Saint Paul and modern day evangelicals)
phobias, combat fatigue (shell shock), and mental breakdowns. He had
observed that when dogs were highly stressed and frightened, long established
behavior patterns reversed. He called it "transmarginal inhibition"
(There were repeated
announcements on my radio that morning that the color code for terrorist alert
had been raised again and I should be alert for another 9/11 like attack by Al Qaeda --- but I
shouldn't worry, homeland security was on the job. There wasn't even a need to
change my holiday plans!)
The" Show Trial" utterance did not appear to have been
unintentional, a Freudian Slip, so to speak, but its truthfulness illuminated
the smooth unctuous reassurances of the "terrorism expert" that
torture was not involved. After all
what torturer ever admits he (not "or she") is a torturer? Even to
himself?
After all, Saddam
Hussein is really a prisoner of war and as such, under the terms of the Geneva
Convention on the rules of war, is
entitled to give only his name, rank and serial number. If he is not drugged or
brainwashed or doesn't suffer an accident from a "deranged lone
gunman," or commit suicide, he might just want to talk, not about his
guilt, but about his involvement with Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar Weinberger and
others in the Reagan Administration during the Iraq Iran War.
In the past, high ranking officers were
usually treated with deference by their captors. When General von Thoma was
captured by the British after the first major defeat of German forces in World
War II at El Alamein in Egypt in 1942,
he had lunch with Field Marshal Viscount Bernard Montgomery. A few months later when General von Paulus
surrendered what was left of his Sixth Army at Stalingrad, he was treated well
enough that he was one of the few German POWs
to make it back home after the war. The Japanese, on the other hand,
were more uniformly cruel and brutal.
At the end of the fourteenth century, soldiers of Timur the Great, a
Mongol conqueror destroyed Baghdad and killed an estimated 20,000 people. He
defeated Bayazid I a powerful Turkish sultan and reportedly kept him in an open
cage like an animal until he died of hunger. In 1992 Anibal Guzman also called
Comrade Gonzalo, a Peruvian professor
of philosophy and the mysterious leader
of the Maoist Communist Sendero Luminoso insurrection, was captured by Peruvian
soldiers in a school for the ballet and publicly displayed in a open cage dressed in a prison uniform of
black and white stripes with even a black and white striped little hat.
The United States of America, undoubtedly
the most technically advanced country in the world is often presented as a
"nation of laws" but is now so debased that the rules of war and
business apply only to others. The transfer of prisoners captured by one
army to another is a violation of the
rules: i.e. from the Northern Alliance (Uzbeks related to Timur) in Afghanistan
to an out sourced, offshore US concentration camp in Cuba. We can show our
unlawful combatants on television, others can't show ours.
The US Army in Iraq conducts "round
ups," arrests like a police force, and has begun once again, as in Vietnam
in Operation Phoenix, to kill men identified by informants as
"terrorists" ---no questions asked. This behavior resembles what the
debased Israeli Defense Force has been doing in Palestine/Israel's West Bank
and Gaza, and is a slightly more benign version of the behavior of the German
World War II army of occupation in areas of southern and eastern Europe that
were troublesome, like Serbia, Croatia, Poland and the Ukraine.
A Google search for the word
"torture" unexpectedly produced 8,110,000 hits. Of the first twenty,
most were definitely "against" torture with a few sexual fetish sites
seeming "for" "voluntary" torture" or Sado Masochism.
Indeterminate were what seemed to be "Heavy Metal" rock and riot
musical bands from northern Europe which seemed to symbolically emphasized
violent sex, torture, cannibalism and other disgusting behavior. My guess is
that they would be upset to know that their music was being used by the
military to "torture" prisoners' It occurred to me some prisoners
might like the music!
For people
too lazy or too stupid to think, torture and coercion are attractive. So is
killing your opponents. But it is bad
policy: effective only in the short term. It demoralizes your troops, increases
and incites opposition, is easy to start, but very hard to stop! The self
righteous, fantasies of hurting those who hurt you or your friends, justifiable
murder, mayhem and destruction, almost invariably lead to bad judgments and
serious trouble.
One hopes at
the least, that the captured Saddam will be given a DNA test to make sure we
don't find out 20 years from now that we have had the wrong Saddam as so often
happens with us.
And, just as a
reminder, here, in the torturous prose of officious, official pronouncements,
is how the UN defines torture:
"... torture means any act
by which severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person ... for such purposes as obtaining from him ...
information or a confession, punishing him for an act he has committed or is
suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him ...or for any
reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is
inflicted by or at the instigation of, or with the consent or acquiescence of a
public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not
include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to,
lawful sanctions."
Finally,
not wanting to get up and face the world, I fell into a profound sleep.