Torture is Not Just a Post-9/11 Issue
Friday March 7, 2008
See also: Is Torture (Ever) Justified?
To hear many pundits say it, the United States has never practiced torture much. It's anathema to our heritage. Then the attacks of September 11th, 2001 came, and our government began to use torture against suspected non-U.S. terrorists. "America," President Bush said in October 2006, "doesn't torture." And people on both sides of the debate seem to more or less hold to this idea--that to the extent that the Bush administration tortures, it's doing so in a way that clashes with American history and the American way of life.
In a recent AlterNet article ("Waterboarding? Racist Cops Have Been Torturing Black Suspects for Years"), civil rights veteran Thomas J. Gardner provides a much-needed reality check:
Nor is the Chicago case isolated by any means. We were all outraged at the way attack dogs were used to frighten or attack prisoners at Abu Ghraib--but according to Human Rights Watch (see their report titled Cruel and Degrading: The Use of Dogs for Cell Extractions in U.S. Prisons), prisons in five states routinely and openly use attack dogs in a similar way.
At times even children are subjected to torture. At Mississippi's infamous Columbia Training School for Girls, students have allegedly been shackled, hogtied, locked in solitary confinement for as long as one week (in the "dark room," an unfurnished room with a hole in the floor for a toilet), forcibly stripped, punished by being forced to run with mattresses on their backs or rubber tires around their waists, and forced to eat their own vomit. The Department of Justice sued the school four years ago and has been supervising it ever since, but problems still persist. Legislation currently pending before the Mississippi State Legislature would finally shut down the school.
Numerous, more isolated examples of torture--often classified as police brutality--exist. The August 1997 case of Abner Louima, who was tortured so severely by NYPD officers that he had to be hospitalized for 64 days, is particularly severe. Most cases of torture via police brutality leave substantially less evidence, particularly now that the Taser--a generally nonlethal weapon that does not cause significant damage to the body--is available. Reports exist of officers zapping suspects with 50,000 volts multiple times, even in cases where the suspect poses no apparent risk. And incidents in which suspects are beaten with nightsticks, sometimes to death, generally go unrecorded--leaving open the question of why, exactly, the nightstick was put to use.
None of this is to suggest that police officers, as a group, are any more prone to torture people than the rest of us. But those police officers who do torture people are in an excellent position to get away with it. The complaint process involved in filing police brutality reports is daunting, evidence is scant, and a law enforcement officer has an immediate and somewhat understandable witness credibility advantage over an arrestee.
Nor does the use of torture against U.S. prisoners end with police officers. A great deal has been written about extraordinary rendition, the practice by which the CIA exports suspected terrorists to other countries for torture and interrogation--allowing the United States to reap the benefits of torture without actually putting such practices to use. In the American criminal justice system, the threat of prison rape and prison beatings--often reduced to a punchline on Law & Order--serves a similar purpose. While prison rape is probably not quite as ubiquitous as popular culture might lead us to believe, it remains a serious and largely unaddressed problem. The sense among many is that prisoners deserve what they get--the same sentiment that many supporters of the Bush administration express towards suspected terrorists. When lawmakers sit back and allow prisoners to beat and rape each other, they are practicing torture by extraordinary rendition just as surely as the CIA does when it extradites a suspect to Egypt for interrogation.
The CIA's decision to use waterboarding in its interrogation of Abdul-Rahim Hussein Muhammad 'Abdu, Abu Zubaydah, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is terrible, but the three known terrorists were treated far less severely than many U.S. citizens who have faced torture within our own criminal justice system. It is commendable to address the torture problem as it pertains to suspected international terrorists--but as we do this, we should also address the torture that takes place against U.S. citizens on our own home turf.
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In a recent AlterNet article ("Waterboarding? Racist Cops Have Been Torturing Black Suspects for Years"), civil rights veteran Thomas J. Gardner provides a much-needed reality check:
Like relentless Stalinists, the policemen gave me a few hard, calculated kicks with steel-toed boots in my back and ribs for making them exhausted from their beating. I promised them the names of protesters, when they were coming, and what they were driving. I could hardly speak from my busted lips, chipped teeth and broken jaw, but I forced words from my mouth that sounded like what they wanted as long as they stopped their feverish beating to decipher what my cracking voice was revealing.That was 1968, certainly a time in history when Southern police officers felt especially free to practice torture on anyone who wasn't white, but torture still happens. It is now generally acknowledged that Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge supervised the torture of hundreds of young black men in order to force confessions between 1972 and 1991. He never faced criminal charges, but a lawsuit--with 139 plaintiffs and numerous corroborating witnesses--is still pending, and he was fired in 1991 following an internal police investigation.
But I didn't know anyone, and I certainly didn't know about a conspiracy to take over Memphis. So I have since apologized for naming as co-conspirators Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hermann Hesse, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and any other author I ever read. I kept looking from face to face of my seven captors trying to plead with them individually by offering each a name. I worried that one would recognize these names and decide to kill me and dump me in the river, like so many other black men who had been crucified in the South.
Nor is the Chicago case isolated by any means. We were all outraged at the way attack dogs were used to frighten or attack prisoners at Abu Ghraib--but according to Human Rights Watch (see their report titled Cruel and Degrading: The Use of Dogs for Cell Extractions in U.S. Prisons), prisons in five states routinely and openly use attack dogs in a similar way.
At times even children are subjected to torture. At Mississippi's infamous Columbia Training School for Girls, students have allegedly been shackled, hogtied, locked in solitary confinement for as long as one week (in the "dark room," an unfurnished room with a hole in the floor for a toilet), forcibly stripped, punished by being forced to run with mattresses on their backs or rubber tires around their waists, and forced to eat their own vomit. The Department of Justice sued the school four years ago and has been supervising it ever since, but problems still persist. Legislation currently pending before the Mississippi State Legislature would finally shut down the school.
Numerous, more isolated examples of torture--often classified as police brutality--exist. The August 1997 case of Abner Louima, who was tortured so severely by NYPD officers that he had to be hospitalized for 64 days, is particularly severe. Most cases of torture via police brutality leave substantially less evidence, particularly now that the Taser--a generally nonlethal weapon that does not cause significant damage to the body--is available. Reports exist of officers zapping suspects with 50,000 volts multiple times, even in cases where the suspect poses no apparent risk. And incidents in which suspects are beaten with nightsticks, sometimes to death, generally go unrecorded--leaving open the question of why, exactly, the nightstick was put to use.
None of this is to suggest that police officers, as a group, are any more prone to torture people than the rest of us. But those police officers who do torture people are in an excellent position to get away with it. The complaint process involved in filing police brutality reports is daunting, evidence is scant, and a law enforcement officer has an immediate and somewhat understandable witness credibility advantage over an arrestee.
Nor does the use of torture against U.S. prisoners end with police officers. A great deal has been written about extraordinary rendition, the practice by which the CIA exports suspected terrorists to other countries for torture and interrogation--allowing the United States to reap the benefits of torture without actually putting such practices to use. In the American criminal justice system, the threat of prison rape and prison beatings--often reduced to a punchline on Law & Order--serves a similar purpose. While prison rape is probably not quite as ubiquitous as popular culture might lead us to believe, it remains a serious and largely unaddressed problem. The sense among many is that prisoners deserve what they get--the same sentiment that many supporters of the Bush administration express towards suspected terrorists. When lawmakers sit back and allow prisoners to beat and rape each other, they are practicing torture by extraordinary rendition just as surely as the CIA does when it extradites a suspect to Egypt for interrogation.
The CIA's decision to use waterboarding in its interrogation of Abdul-Rahim Hussein Muhammad 'Abdu, Abu Zubaydah, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is terrible, but the three known terrorists were treated far less severely than many U.S. citizens who have faced torture within our own criminal justice system. It is commendable to address the torture problem as it pertains to suspected international terrorists--but as we do this, we should also address the torture that takes place against U.S. citizens on our own home turf.
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Comments
Spoken like a true socialist; what a load of crap. You, the ACLU and Amnesty International need to conduct a circle jerk.
Dave’s curiously phallic protestations aside, the matter of torture in the United States–going back to the kind of routine capital punishments in the founders’ day that to this day justify the likes of Justice Scalia’s lust for executions–would fill a few volumes no less thick, and sick, than torture in or by the other usual suspects of Western “civilization.” Man’s inhumanity to man is universal to be sure, but it tends to be more universal in those cultures that pretend to be above savagery. It’s those cultures you must beware of most, because they’re the ones that usually perfect the art of euphemizing and dissimulating savagery behind lofty terms like “enhnaced interrogation techniques,” “rendition” and “supermax” incarceration.
Not to belabor the issue, but I have a couple of additional points. The New Yorker two weeks ago ran an excerpt from a scholar writing about the US occupation of the Philippines, documenting cases of waterboarding there (I couldn’t find the piece online).
Second, I’d love to see a discussion started about the latest and most beloved form of torture on American streets: Tasers. Talk about trigger-happy cops. Not a week goes by without its slew of repugnant cases.
Indeed, Pierre–and thanks for the post! It’s funny you mentioned Tasers because I came very, very close to discussing them in greater detail. I didn’t because it didn’t quite fit the vibe I was going for–I think most officers who overuse Tasers think “Hey, cool, a nonlethal way to make suspects sit still! I’ll use it nine times on that meth addict writhing around on the floor over there!,” which is incredibly stupid but doesn’t offend my moral sensibilities as much as, say, the angels of mercy at Columbia Training School who made 14-year-old girls eat their own vomit.
But I agree–torture is torture regardless of why it’s used, and in the case of Tasers we’re looking at potentially hundreds of accidental deaths, most in cases where the suspect had medical conditions with which the officer was not familiar. The scene where DeNiro’s character gets Tasered in Meet the Fockers, for example, was supposed to be funny–but if DeNiro’s character happened to have a pacemaker or a weak aortal valve, that might have put a damper on things. Tasers are nonlethal, except when they aren’t. You can definitely count on seeing some additional content on this topic.