Torture Notes (I)

I have a backlog of items that I'd have blogged already if I were less busy than I have been lately. Here, then, is an initial batch of these items.

¶ Today (Wednesday) came the tragic story of Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, the third American woman to die in Iraq, back in 2003. Peterson's death was much publicized at the time, but relentless investigation by reporter Kevin Elston now reveals that she shot and killed herself after objecting to the torture of detainees.

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed….”

She was was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and sent to suicide prevention training. “But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle,” the documents disclose. . . .

Elston said that the documents also refer to a suicide note found on her body, revealing that she found it ironic that suicide prevention training had taught her how to commit suicide. He has now filed another FOIA request for a copy of the actual note.

¶ Alyssa Peterson's death conveys in a painfully personal way the effects of torture, beyond the most immediate consequences for the victims of psychologically and physically coercive interrogation techniques. Psychologist and interrogation ethics expert Jean Maria Arrigo describes the social costs of coercive interrogation in broader, analytical terms.

In her article "A Utilitarian Argument Against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists" (not available online), Arrigo argues that the more sophisticated the interrogation methods, the greater their toll on the society that practices them.

The use of sophisticated torture techniques by a trained staff entails ... problematic institutional arrangements ... : physician assistance; cutting edge, secret biomedical research for torture techniques unknown to the terrorist organization and tailored to the individual captive for swift effect; well trained torturers, quickly accessible at major locations; pre-arranged permission from the courts because of the urgency; rejection of independent monitoring due to security issues; and so on. These institutional arrangements will have to be in place, with all their unintended and accumulating consequences, however rarely terrorist suspects are tortured. Then the terrorists themselves must be detected while letting pass without torture a thousand other criminal suspects or dissidents, that is, avoiding a dragnet interrogation policy.

The moral error in reasoning from the ticking bomb scenario arises from weighing the harm to the prospective innocent victims against the harm to the guilty terrorist. Instead—even presuming the doubtful, long-term success of torture interrogation—the harm to innocent victims of the terrorist should be weighed against the breakdown of key social institutions and state-sponsored torture of many innocents. Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale.

(Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 10, Issue 3, 2004 )

¶ The recent contortions by Bush supporters to justify and rationalize Dick Cheney's sanction of waterboarding are so ludicrous and offensive that they do not truly deserve comment. Yet it is always valuable to clear the stench of bull shit with some factual information.

Via the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions, Evan Wallach has released a draft version of his article "Drop by Drop: Forgetting The History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts" [pdf], which traces a long history of rulings by US courts that waterboarding is illegal under US law.

In trials, both before U.S. military commissions, and as a participant in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) American judges or commissioners heard American prosecutors roundly condemn the practice as it was applied to American servicemen, and voted to convict the perpetrators.

These and other examples discussed by Wallach are highly significant since last month's passage by Congress of the military commissions act removes arbitration of possible US war crimes from the domain of international human rights law and places it, instead, in the US courts.

In tracing numerous past examples of US prosecutions of waterboarding in US courts and tribunals, Wallach also provides a disturbing collection of descriptions of the practice of waterboarding. Here, for example, is testimony from the 1946 prosecution of Sergeant-Major Chinsaku Yuki of the Kempentai for torture and murder of Philippine civilians.

Q: And then did he take you back to your room?
A: When Yuki could not get anything out of me he wanted the interpreter [to] place me down below and I was told by Yuki to take off all my clothes so what I did was to take off my clothes as ordered. I was ordered to lay on a bench and Yuki tied my feet, hands and neck to that bench lying with my face upward. After I was tied to the bench Yuki placed some cloth on my face and then with water from the faucet they poured on me until I became unconscious. He repeated that four or five times.
COL KEELEY: You mean he brought water and poured water down your throat?
A: No sir, on my face, until I became unconscious. We were lying that way with some cloth on my face and then Yuki poured water on my face continuously.
COL KEELEY: And you couldn’t breath?
A: No, I could not and so I for a time lost consciousness. I found my consciousness came back again and found Yuki was sitting on my stomach and then I vomited the water from my stomach and the consciousness came back again for me.
Q: Where did the water come out when he sat on your stomach?
A” From my mouth and all openings of my face....and then Yuki would repeat the same treatment and the same procedure to me until I became unconscious again.
Q: How many times did that happen?
A: Around four or five times from two o’clock up to four o’clock in the afternoon.When I was not able to endure his punishment which I received I told a lie to Yuki....I could not really show anything to Yuki because I was really lying just to stop the torture...

In case you missed it, earlier this week, FOX TV's Brian Kilmeade sneered at objections to waterboarding, saying you just "put a washcloth on them." Co-host Steve Doocy said "you don't dunk 'em in the water - you just kind of splash some water on 'em." Newshounds has the video. The Newshounds link also gets you video from a Current TV episode with Kaj Larsen, a former SERE trainee, subjecting himself to waterboarding by other former SERE trainees in order to bring to the public more information about what these tactics really are.

The on air waterboarding is in a staged environment, with mostly vapid commentary running concurrent to the footage. Larsen knows the interrogators will stop when he gives them the sign. It may be reality TV waterboarding, but it is still ten minutes of footage you may not be able to sit through. Be forwarned: it is disturbing.