bad apple theory, bogus

Stop the 'bad apples' theory
Linda S. Heard, Special to Gulf News
02/21/2006

With the release by the Australian broadcaster SBS of pictures depicting the sheer stomach-churning horror of Abu Ghraib, which coincided with the publication of a UN-sponsored report demanding closure of Guantanamo Bay, the US military is once again unfavourably in the spotlight.

The Bush administration is trying to gloss over the new evidence of abuse as the work of a few bad apples. Its spokesmen say the perpetrators have already been dealt with even though not a single officer has been seriously called to account. At the same time, White House spokesman Scott McClellan has rejected calls from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, and a slew of human rights organisations to close Guantanamo, insisting the US military treats all detainees humanely.

Mr Justice Collins, a British high court judge, isn't buying it. At a hearing concerning British residents still being held at the camp, he said "American ideas of what is torture are not the same as ours and do not appear to coincide with those of most civilised nations."

Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, was even more vociferous, saying the administration's rejection of the UN report indicated "a society that is heading towards George Orwell's Animal Farm. The Archbishop is also urging the UNHCR to take legal action against the US, citing torture practices highlighted by the report. These include the use of dogs, sleep deprivation and prolonged isolation, which the report says cause "extreme suffering".

The dichotomy between what the US administration perceives to be torture and the rest of the world was recently contextualised by Professor Alfred McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, speaking on the Democracy Now network. McCoy, who is the author or a new exposé titled A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror totally rejects the "bad apple" theory.

CIA torture techniques

Take the Abu Ghraib photograph of a hooded man standing on a box attached to fake wires, he says. "He is hooded for sensory deprivation and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. These are two of the most fundamental CIA torture techniques."

McCoy explains how the CIA once spent over a million dollars annually to "crack the code of human consciousness". He says the CIA tried LSD, truth serum and mescaline but none of these worked because they scrambled the brain.

"They found the most effective technique was self inflicted pain," he said. "They make someone stand for a day or two and say 'if you cooperate with us, you can sit down'."

He explains that as they stand their fluids go down to their legs, lesions form, they erupt, they suppurate and finally there is kidney failure. It was the picture of the hooded man attached to fake electrodes that inspired McCoy to pick up his pen. "I wrote this book when that photo was shown on CBS news at the time William Safire wrote in the New York Times that this was the work of creeps," and while others were saying this was abuse "from a few people on the nightshift" or "recycled hillbillies from Maryland. What I saw was two textbook CIA interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain and sensory disorientation."

McCoy says that early CIA experiments produced a distinctive system of American torture "that is with us today and has proved to be resilient, quite adaptable and enormously destructive. In the US, this is referred to as torture-light but is far more destructive and does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture."

The author believes that the CIA torture paradigm was perfected at Guantanamo when General Geoffrey Miller was appointed head of that facility in late 2002.

"General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto research lab," he says. There, "they added two key techniques, including an attack on cultural sensitivity and Arab male sensitivities to issues of gender and sexual identity."

Miller then exported these techniques to Abu Ghraib in September 2002 when the individual responsible for the prison General Ricardo Sanchez subsequently issued orders for expanded interrogation techniques.

With the passing of the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, which bars inhumane and cruel treatment, most Americans think such abuses are over, says McCoy. In fact, due to last minute amendments, this may not be the case.

In particular, when George W. Bush signed the bill into law, he reserved the right as commander-in-chief and head of the executive to do what he needs to do to defend America. Furthermore, Senator John McCain, sponsor of the bill, inserted a provision allowing a cop out for CIA interrogators, who, if they believe they are following lawful orders, cannot be prosecuted.

Lastly, Guantanamo was exempted as being outside US territory. It was this provision that allowed the administration to order Federal courts to drop all habeas cases related to its Cuba-based gulag.

"Torture is an extremely dangerous thing," says McCoy. "Torture taps into the deep unexplored recesses of human consciousness when an infinite capacity for goodness and cruelty coexist. Once it starts, it spread out of control.

"You can see from those photos (Abu Ghraib) that it becomes Dante's hell. This is why we need an absolute prohibition on torture. There is no such thing as a little bit of torture."
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