2006 Stop Torture Background Piece

Have abuses happened in Guantanamo, Bagram and other American detention centers?

Do these techniques constitute “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment, or torture?

Are these techniques legal?

A recently leaked document from the White House reveals that President Bush and administrative lawyers are calling on Congress to pass legislation that would rein in Common Article 3, the provision of the Third Geneva Conventions that prevents “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” and other legal rights “recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.” Administration lawyers expressed concern that American troops might be criminalized for the use of harsh interrogation techniques banned by international law – such as exposure to extreme temperatures and sleep deprivation.

While less lurid than the Abu Ghraib photos, the document demonstrates that the administration continues to advocate the road that led to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, and reserves the right to continue to abuse detainees.

Furthermore, legislation has already been introduced to authorize the continued use of the military commissions that the Supreme Court struck down as unlawful in July 2006. The administration favors these special trials in order to permit convictions in cases where the government holds the weakest evidence against the men being held.

Honor the Image of God, our Jewish campaign against torture, has never been more important. As the New York Times recently editorializes:

[President Bush] wants Congress to make the United States the first country to repudiate the language of the Geneva Conventions. The only discernible reason is to allow interrogators — intelligence agents and private contractors — to continue abusive practices plainly banned by the conventions and to make sure they cannot be held accountable…This standard has been followed for more than a half-century by almost 190 countries, including the United States… The Geneva Conventions protect Americans. If this country changes the rules, it’s changing the rules for Americans taken prisoner abroad. That is far too high a price to pay so this administration can hang on to its misbegotten policies. Read the editorial here.

Many are predicting a showdown as Congress reconvenes to debate these proposals in the coming months.

Have abuses happened in Guantanamo, Bagram and other American detention centers?

• Authorized torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Widespread interrogation methods in American detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay have included kicking, slapping, forced nudity, painful shackling into "stress positions" for agonizing lengths of time, use of dogs, hooding and isolation, sensory bombardment, food, water and sleep deprivation, and threats to detainees and their family members. Other documented techniques include electric shocks and water-boarding (a form of near suffocation that produces a similar sensation to drowning).

• Sexual humiliation.

Acts of sexual humiliation have been reported throughout America's various "theaters of operation," from the notorious forced masturbation and naked human pyramids of Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo's use of female interrogators who have dressed provocatively, rubbed their breasts against the bodies of detainees and smeared detainees' faces with feigned menstrual blood.

• Extraordinary renditions.
  Under a policy called "Extraordinary Rendition," citizens of foreign countries are being seized abroad by U.S. police and transported to countries where they are tortured with even more extreme methods. An estimated 100-150 cases of extraordinary rendition have occurred since 2001.

• Ghost detainees.

The United States may be holding hundreds of secret or "ghost detainees," not just in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay but also in other secret locations around the world. Keeping such "ghost detainees" without registering them is a violation of the Geneva Conventions and facilitates further abuses.

• Detention of innocents.

As of 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that between 70-90 percent of those held in Abu Ghraib were there "by mistake;" more recent official inquiries have dropped the estimate to two-thirds. At Guantánamo, official reports have estimated that 40 percent of detainees never belonged there. 85 percent of those captured at Bagram in Afghanistan have since been released without any charges or evidence of terror links.

Do these techniques constitute “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment, or torture?

• Israeli and Irish precedent: Torture or “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”?

In a case against Israel in 1997, the U.N. Committee against Torture – the body responsible for enforcing the Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a party – ruled that a similar list of methods (shackling in painful positions, hooding, sounding of loud music, sleep deprivation, threats, exposure to cold air), particularly when used in combination, produce pain and suffering severe enough to be described as torture. This decision helped sway the Israeli Supreme Court to outlaw categorically both torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment in 1999, although the Israeli Supreme Court did not agree that these particular techniques amount to torture rather than to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

• Research on physical and psychological impact.

Short-term and long-term studies of those subjected to similar methods ("stress positions," sleep deprivation, hooding, isolation, and sensory bombardment) by the KGB and the British in Northern Ireland suggest that such techniques produce excruciating pain and swelling, states of psychosis and mental disorientation that have a tendency to become permanent, and other potentially long-term physical and mental effects, including loss of motor coordination, blackouts, hallucinations, violent headaches, anxiety attacks, insomnia, chronic depression, and suicidal tendencies.

Are these techniques legal?

In 1994, the U.S. joined 140 nations in ratifying the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, an international agreement that prohibits torture and obliges signatories to take action to prevent physical or mental "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment" within their jurisdictions. Furthermore, the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedents have long denounced physical and psychological cruelty on the part of governmental agents – whether to extract information, inflict punishment, or intimidate or coerce defendants – as "revolting," "shocking," and "alien" to the most sacred values on which America was founded and characteristic rather of the repressive regimes of America's totalitarian enemies. Nonetheless, in the last four years, the American government has eroded its long-standing repudiation of torture.

In 2002, directives from the Departments of Defense and Justice allowed cruel and degrading treatment by redefining torture as "physical pain accompanying serious injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death." Other official memos have attempted to safeguard the use of torture by permitting criminal statute to penalize “only the most egregious conduct…only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Even though some of these directives have been rescinded under pressure from critics, the Administration has not effectively communicated to U.S. personnel that torture is prohibited.

The propagation and subsequent repeal of policies has created an atmosphere of confusion and has contributed to the widespread use of torture within U.S. military institutions. The Administration’s counsel has tried to sidestep the Geneva conventions by referring to their provisions as “quaint” and by defining detainees as “enemy combatants” in order to deny detainees the protections that the Geneva conventions are designed to guarantee.