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Special
Review
Exposing the Bush Regime's Global Torture Gulag
Two
recent books reveal the depravity of the Bush administration's
far-flung archipelago of torture and detention sites.
By Thomas R. Eddlem
 Ghost
Plane, by Stephen Grey, New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2006, 372 pages, hardbound, $25.95.
Torture Taxi, by Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson, Hoboken, NJ:
Melville House Publishing, 2006, 205 pages, hardbound, $23.00.
With
a little bit of encouragement from his interrogators, whose methods
of persuasion included “waterboarding” -
that is, simulated
drowning – Islamist terror chieftain Khalid Sheik Mohammed
confessed to everything. Almost literally.
Khalid took credit for planning the 9-11 attacks, and an aborted
wave of follow-up attacks. He confessed to the murder of the
brave and accomplished Wall Street Journal investigative reporter
Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002 – an
admission questioned by
Pearl's parents, but
eagerly welcomed by
Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was convicted for that crime.
Khalid even confessed to planning
an attack on a skyscraper owned by Plaza Bank in Washington,
even though that bank wasn't founded until roughly three years
after his March 2003 arrest.
The Bush administration released Khalid's lengthy and detailed “confession” in
an effort to vindicate its system of detention, torture, and
military commissions. This didn't work out as the administration
planned: Within hours of the release, the blogosphere seized
on – and embellished – the implausibly grandiose
confession.
By the end of the news cycle, on-line satires and parodies of
the Khalid “confession” had the terrorist
thug claiming
responsibility for every crime and outrage of consequence since
the Lindbergh kidnapping, including such atrocities as the cancellation
of the cult sci-fi series Firefly.
 Whatever else the Khalid case demonstrates, this much is clear:
It illustrates beyond reasonable contradiction the fact that
torture is not a reliable means of extracting intelligence and
authentic confessions. And the fact that the Bush administration
triggered ridicule rather than praise by releasing the results
of Khalid's interrogation suggests that the public mood has shifted
dramatically regarding torture. Now it's time to bring about
a much-needed examination of the most ominous product of the
administration's counter-terrorism policy, its creation of a
worldwide network of detention and torture centers.
If
every American, or even an activism-minded plurality of our
population,
were to stop snickering over the Khalid “confession” and
read Ghost
Plane or Torture
Taxi, the world would be radically
changed.
The President and most of his senior level officials would not
only be impeached and removed from office, they would most likely
serve life sentences in federal prison, as would most members
of the congressional intelligence oversight agencies.
That’s
not an exaggeration.
Organizations
like Amnesty International have termed the administration's “extraordinary
rendition program” -- in which terrorist suspects and other “enemy
combatants” are kidnapped and sent for detention and torture
abroad -- a “global gulag.” And in their books, investigative
authors Grey, Paglen and Thompson document that Amnesty International’s
analysis is accurate, even if the Bush administration's gulag
has yet to scale is not yet that of its Soviet predecessor.
“The
modern world of prisons run by the United States and its allies
in the war on terror is far less extensive,” Grey
acknowledges. “Its inmates number thousands not millions.
And yet there are eerie parallels between what the Soviet Union
created and what we, in theWest, are now constructing.”
Grey
explains that the Bush rendition program is organized in a
three-tier fashion, with the highest value detainees going
to secret CIA-run prisons in places like Afghanistan, Poland
and Romania (the
latter two having closed down in 2005).
Although
the CIA used waterboarding (simulated
drowning of detainees) and painful stress positions to break the will of detainees,
the main torture method employed in these prisons was psychological
sensory deprivation over a period of years.
Mid-level detainees were farmed out to prisons run by foreign
intelligence services, including Egypt (which employs beatings,
a spine-stretching chair, and electrocution), Uzbekistan (whose
government would sometimes boil people alive), and Morocco (which
offers beatings and genital mutilation). The lowest value detainees
were sent to places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
which acted as a sort of dumping ground for those detainees whose
intelligence value had been drained out of them, as well as for
hundreds of subjects who were entirely innocent.
The worst form of torture, according to most detainees whose
testimony has been made public, was conducted in prisons run
by the CIA itself. Not only did the Bush Administration scour
the globe for the most brutal nations to outsource torture, they’ve "improved" on
the old Soviet/Chinese style of beat-'em-up torture to discover
a whole new level of pain for detainees. They've found a new
way to torture people which is worse than slowly breaking their
spines or running electrical currents through genitals: they
attack the mind, and destroy it.
Benyam
Muhammad, an Ethiopian who endured genital mutilation in Morocco, said
that the psychological torture was far worse for him in the CIA's dark prison
in Afghanistan than
enduring the knife to his penis in Morocco. In an account recently published
by the New York Times, the lawyer for computer science student (and legal resident
alien of the U.S.) Ali al-Marri offered a similar assessment: “Mr. Marri
shared a fantasy with one of his lawyers not long ago. ‘I’d love
to be taken back to Saudi Arabia and they would beat the’ — here,
he swore — ‘out of me for six months,’ Mr. Marri said, according
to Mr. Savage [the attorney]. ‘It would be brutal, but it would be finite.’”
Both books focus upon the first two types of prisons, and found that the CIA
was using a fleet of 26 luxury executive jets to ferry prisoners for torture
across the world. But the authors approached their investigations from different
directions.
Grey is a prominent British freelance reporter and frequent
contributor to large, mostly liberal establishment publications
such as the Sunday Times (of London), the New York
Times, CNN,
Newsweek and others. Grey used his prominence to obtain some
inside government sources, and to parlay the resources of his
host organizations to investigate the prisons more comprehensively.
Paglen
and Thompson write for far less ostentatious publications;
Thompson
is a staff writer for the S.F. Weekly, a left-leaning
independent paper. Their valuable investigation began by talking
with “planespotters,” hobbyists
who record the flights of airplanes at airports worldwide.
The two followed up the revelations of the CIA luxury jet fleets
by visiting some of the main locations where the aircraft were
based, and some of the horrific facilities – such as the
infamous CIA “Salt Pit” prison in Afghanistan – which served as the aircraft’s
destinations.
While
Paglen and Thompson’s book is a case study in sleuthing
worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Grey’s book is the better of
the two because of the simple way in which it is organized for
the unconvinced. The authors of both books undertook an amazingly
valiant and successful attempt to expose what are the worst crimes
of the young 21st century and to present their findings in sober,
restrained language that is all the more potent for its lack
of without any sort of overt partisan bias.
Grey
begins his volume with a rundown of some of the most notorious
cases in which obviously innocent people were abducted by the
CIA and tortured -- specifically the cases of Canadian computer
programmer Maher
Arar
and German auto salesman Khaled
el-Masri.
Because
Grey highlights the innocent victims of Bush’s
global gulag early in his book, he is far more likely to wake
up the disinterested. Perhaps even a few of Bush’s more
devoted followers who would be less likely to be alarmed if the
torture had been limited to actual terrorists.
That
the torture hasn’t been limited to actual terrorists
is becoming more and more apparent daily. A December 15 Associated
Press study tracking some 245 detainees released from Guantanamo
Bay and other secret CIA prisons revealed that 205 of the 245
detainees released (most from Guantanamo, after interrogation
in another secret prison) were remanded to the custody of their
respective native governments and released shortly thereafter.
This, of course, leads to a frightening either/or possibility
for the nation under the Bush administration policy.
If
those released were innocent, as it now appears, it leads to
the
question: Why would the Bush Administration torture so
many innocents for years? But if those released were the hardened
terrorists – the “worst of the worst,” to use
a Bush administration cliché – then why were they
irresponsibly released to freedom, where they could wreak havoc
upon more innocents in fresh terrorist incidents?
Just as troubling is the possibility that many of those detained
and mistreated by the CIA were innocent at the time of their
capture, but are now susceptible to the Jihadist recruiting pitch
as a result of what they've experienced at American hands.
These
books will be an awakening for those who assume that the Bush
administration
would never lock up and torture an innocent
person. The natural question of “why would the Bush administration
lock up and torture the innocent?” is answered persuasively
in the long roll of innocents who have undergone the worst forms
of torture known to man. Some of them were imprisoned in cases
of mistaken identity; others were arrested by U.S. Forces who
were duped by Islamic bounty hunters; yet others were seized
by the CIA as a result of reliance on bad information sources
(such as genuine terrorists), and an understandable “take
prisoners and ask questions later” approach by field agents.
The
fact that an unusual percentage of innocents have been tortured
in these secret CIA prisons ought not to be so shocking, considering
that the rendition program made trials virtually impossible – and
trials have historically been the most accurate means of separating
the guilty from the innocent.
Both authors highlight one example of how the CIA likely deliberately
renditioned a person they knew to be innocent: the kidnapping
in Italy of Egyptian-born Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, better known
as Abu Omar, in February 2003.
Abu
Omar attended a mosque in Milan that was known to attract at
least
one Islamic radical, and according to some accounts,
Abu Omar had already served as a CIA informant in the past. When
he was kidnapped off the streets of the Italian city of Milan,
Grey explained, “He was told bluntly that ‘if he
agreed to work as an infiltrator for the Egyptian secret service,
he would be home in 48 hours. Otherwise he would have to bear
full responsibility for his refusal. Abu Omar refused.’”
For
the supposed crime of seeking to be left alone, Abu Omar was
seized
by a CIA “snatch squad,” shoved in a van,
taken to Aviano Air Force Base and flown to Egypt. At the hands
of the Egyptian secret police, Omar was subject to beatings and
electric shocks to his genitals and other sensitive parts on
his body so severe over the next year that he was left permanently
incontinent.
Paglen
and Thompson cite another outrage: “One of these ‘erroneous
renditions’ turned out to be a college professor who had
given an Al-Qaeda member a bad grade (the professor’s name
was presumably given to the CIA by the disgruntled former student).” The
fact that a terror suspect, under torture, fingered a professor
who he didn’t like as a fellow suspect is instructive of
what more American citizens may some day face.
Native-born
American citizen Jose Padilla is already facing a trial after
being fingered by two detainees under torture,
reportedly after Padilla refused to become a CIA informant. And
Padilla himself, according to medical examiners, has been left
mentally incapable of participating in his own defense by several
years of torture. This isn't surprising, since – as one
federal official commented to National Public Radio -- “the
objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this
person.”
Whether
those released from their CIA-created hell were innocent or
guilty of plotting terrorist acts against the United States,
the policy reveals the problem with the Bush rendition/torture
policy. Paglen and Thompson note: “High level terrorist
suspects, for example, cannot be called as witnesses against
other terror suspects in cases at home. Because they have been
treated so brutally, they cannot be tried in a court in the U.S.
because any evidence against them is irreparably tainted by the
combination of torture and years of secret detention without
access to a lawyer.”
The Bush rendition and torture policy creates a chasm between
the detainees and the Anglo-American common law system that not
only delays justice, it makes justice impossible. The innocent
are tortured along with the guilty under such a system, and the
guilty may eventually win release as the Bush global gulag fills
up.
Torture?
It’s a Bush thing
Trials by jury have long been the mechanism by which the guilty
and the innocent are most accurately sorted. Thus it should hardly
be a surprise that Guantanamo housed a large number of innocent
detainees. Administration apologists and its amen corner on talk
radio seem to take particular glee in the Bush abandonment of
the right to trial by jury guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment
to the Constitution.
“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks
and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks
and wanted to prepare indictments,” presidential strategist
Karl Rove told a Republican audience on June 23, 2005. The statement
reveals more about the Bush Administration’s world view
than it appears at first glance. The Bush Administration really
does seek to destroy the criminal justice system – to eliminate
indictments in favor of a militarist, gulag state where everyone
apprehended at the whim of executive branch authorities is tortured
to ensure “security.”
The
most obvious problem with such a system is that history has
yet
to produce a single example of a government empowered
to “disappear” people that provided either liberty
or security for its subjects. Only the Anglo-American common
law principle of a right to trial by jury (which dates back to
Magna Carta) has guaranteed both liberty and security for the
United States and Great Britain for these long centuries.
The
authors of both books are careful to stress that rendition
began under
President Clinton, who issued the following anti-terrorist
policy in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing: “When
terrorists wanted for violation of U.S. law are at large overseas,
their return for prosecution shall be a matter of the highest
priority … return of suspects by force my be effected without
the cooperation of the host government.”
But
stressing the fact that Clinton started rendition is simply
a conspicuous
stab at even-handedness. Despite the fact that
a handful of those “renditioned” were sent to hideously
backward foreign governments, Clinton’s focus had remained
upon delivering prisoners to the U.S. for trial. Clinton really
did want to prepare indictments for terrorists, as Karl Rove
spat out on the campaign trail, while Bush ordered the CIA to
establish a chain of its own prison/torture chambers in which
intelligence – not justice – was the ultimate goal.
Trials were never a priority, and over time they became an impossibility.
The rendition program, as it currently exists, is entirely a
creation of the Bush administration, with the usually detail-aversive
president playing a hands-on role.
Paglen
and Thompson note that Bush became personally involved in the
minutiae
of much of the program: “George W. Bush
was unlike other presidents, including Clinton, who had historically
insulated themselves with layers of ‘plausible deniability’ between
their orders and a particular covert action.… Bush was
intimately involved in the details of the program to capture,
kill, render and interrogate terror suspects.” This kind
of direct presidential involvement could provide for some interesting
investigations as the House Judiciary Committee under its new
chairman, Democratic Representative John Conyers of Michigan.
A chink in the armor?
One ray of light shed by these quite distressing books is the
fact that even from deep within the bowels of the CIA rendition
program itself, prisoners came forth with stories about how some
CIA agents were horrified by what was being done.
Grey
reveals that on board the plane transporting Maher Arar to
his Syrian
torture chamber “was a federal agent who
called himself Mr. Khoury, and who explained that his family
too was originally from Syria.” Arar himself explained: “And
he was very sympathetic. I could tell in his eyes he didn’t
tell me directly, but I could tell in his eyes. I knew, if I
continued talking to him for another fifteen minutes, he would
just cry. You could just tell.”
Paglen
and Thompson also record the experience of Benyam Muhammad
during
his transfer from Morocco (where he had a surgical scalpel
taken to his genitalia and chest as part of his torture) that
one CIA agent was horrified at the injuries she was photographing: “There
was a white female with glasses,” Muhammad explained, “She
was about 5’6”, short, blue eyes. When she saw the
injuries I had she gasped. She said ‘Oh, my God, look at
that!’ Then all her mates looked at what she was pointing
at and I could see the shock and horror in her eyes.”
Perhaps
some CIA agents would help to expose and bring down the program
under the proper pressure from Congress. The restoration
of freedom in America may depend upon patriotic CIA professionals
coming forward, just as honorable, heroic soldiers like Samuel
Provance did in the midst of the Abu Ghraib scandal. From the evidence
compiled in these books it's clear that not all CIA operatives
are hardened totalitarian torturers. A vigorous investigation
by Conyers may shake some CIA whistleblowers loose.
CIA
incompetence: Not-so-secret “state secrets”
It
may seem unlikely at first glance that a congressional investigation
could uncover the hideous crimes of the world’s largest
intelligence agency, which were shielded by a series of dummy
corporations in order to hide the CIA’s new “Air
America.” Once again, the successful investigations undertaken
by these enterprising authors provides a measure of hope.
Grey
reveals that for all the Bush Administration’s bluster
about doing everything they can to “protect” America,
the dummy corporations used by the CIA to run the luxury jet
rendition program were run by real life dummies. Not only had
the CIA left all of the flights on the open record, but they
forged amateurish identities that were easily spotted by reporters.
“Looking at our new suspect companies,” Grey and
New York Times reporter Margot Williams “discovered a similar
pattern of corporate officers who were using names like ‘Philip
Quincannon’ and ‘Erin Marie Cobb’ that were
probably fake, and had social security numbers registered as
recently as the 1990s – implying a freshly created identity.
Fundamentally, the CIA had left behind a paper trail for us to
follow.” All of the companies were linked to each other,
with many of the same phony identities holding corporate leadership
on different companies. Grey counted 26 aircraft in all within
the program.
He
was even able to use Federal Aviation Administration information
to
track a CIA plane in flight and capture its landing on film. “[I]t
was astonishing to see how little effort the CIA had made to
protect its cover…. [I] could have been a terrorist and
scrambled a SAM 7 missile. But at any rate, we obtained the first
TV footage of a CIA plane in action.”
The
CIA may be the world’s largest intelligence agency,
but it suffers from all of the weaknesses of a large bureaucracy
that can be exploited by vigilant congressional oversight. Moreover,
most of the incriminating evidence for the unspeakable crimes
of the Bush Administration is already on the public record. The
Bush Administration and its amen corner can no longer take the
secrecy route of M*A*S*H’s Colonel Flagg. (“I could
tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”)
Paglen
and Thompson note that “the torture planes, the
renditions, and executive orders that produced them seem here
to stay…. [D]o they, in fact mark the beginnings of a long
and unsettling future?”
The authors of these two valuable volumes offer a clear look
into the depths of that dark abyss -- a growing and lawless gulag
state that the Bush administration has created for the American
people. That will be the future of America, unless these books
are widely read, and the American people take action.
Thomas R. Eddlem is a radio
talk show host in Southeastern Massachusetts
and freelance writer. He has been published in more than 20 periodicals,
including The Providence Journal, LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com and The
New American magazine.
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