"I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. It's a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops or diplomats up for trial.
"And I wouldn't join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could - where our people could be prosecuted." - George W. Bush 09/30/04
"Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." - Dick Cheney 01/26/05
Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks have written about an important aspect of the torture methods that have been widely reported used by the Bush administration in the various extra-legal prison facilities they've set up in Guantánamo and elsewhere. Which is that they were based on Vietnamese and North Korea Communist iterrogation techniques for which "truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession": Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us International Herald Tribune 11/14/05.
As they explain, when the Pentagon decided to torture prisoners after the 9/11 attacks, the toture techniques they developed were based on an American training program known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). The training was used to prepare American servicemen to deal with the kind of interrogation techniques that had been documented from Korean and Vietnamese practice.
The practice of torture has been justified to the public based on the need for timely, actionable intelligence. We've heard over and over the "ticking nuclear bomb" scenario, in which a captive knows where a nuclear bomb is hidden in New York and the captor tortures him to get the information to save the city from imminent doom.
But these torture techniques were designed for something very different. Their purpose was to make the victims compliant over a longer period of time so that they would agree to false confessions.
And using an example of one of the people tortured to death in Iraq, they explain how the practice of torture, once its applied as a terror technique rather than as a defensive training exercise, becomes something very different:
Within the SERE program, abuse is carefully controlled, with the goal of teaching trainees to cope. But under combat conditions, brutal tactics can't be dispassionately "dosed." Fear, fury and loyalty to fellow soldiers facing mortal danger make limits almost impossible to sustain.
By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse.
On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called "the sleeping bag technique."
"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide information."
Three soldiers are to stand trial for Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because they were designed by Communist interrogators to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence. (my emphasis)
There's that "Pandora's box" metaphor again. It seems to be popping up a lot lately.
"The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear." - Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values (2005)
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