That could be the title for a post about Abu Ghraib. Civilian contractors apparently played a role in the abuses there, according to the Hersh article. But I haven’t had time to learn much about what happened in that place, nor have I wanted to look at the pictures.
No, I’m still talking about our torture subcontracting to countries, not defense companies—and linking to another article about “extraordinary rendition” and the Maher Arar case (sent to me by Gary Farber, who is really on a roll these days.) Ahmad Abou El-Maati, the first of the Canadians tortured in Syria, has spoken publicly about what happened to him:
During my detention and torture by the Syrians I was forced to divulge everyone I knew. This included Mr. Maher Arar,” says Ahmad Abou El-Maati, a Toronto truck driver first arrested in November, 2001, and released from a series of Middle East prisons just a few weeks ago.
Mr. El-Maati says that shortly after his arrest he placated his torturers by falsely confessing to a bomb plot targeting Ottawa, and by falsely implicating others, including Mr. Arar, according to an affidavit he wrote after returning to Canada last month….He says RCMP or CSIS agents questioned him in the Toronto airport and also put a spy on the plane. Then, “upon my arrival in Syria on November 12, 2001, I was immediately detained.”
During subsequent months in prison, Mr. El-Maati says he was forced to lie down naked as guards dumped ice water on him, burned him with cigarettes and beat him with cables. “I was forced to sign a false confession of false events implicating me in a non-existing plot involving my brother, which I signed and fingerprinted in order to stop the vicious and constant torture,” he says.
He says he also falsely identified an Ottawa man, 33-year-old Abdullah Almalki, as a suspect. Arrested in Syria two years ago and only recently released, Mr. Almalki is also seeking standing at the inquiry.
This is more or less what I’d have guessed he would say, if you’d asked me. It really does look like the Syrian government was interrogating and torturing Canadian citizens at the request of U.S./Canadian intelligence—and in Arar’s case, the U.S. deported a Canadian citizen from JFK airport to Syria on the basis of “evidence” gained under torture. It sounds like something out of the Salem witch trials, but that seems to be what happened.
In the past, when questions have been raised about these matters—about just what was going on in Guantanamo; about the President’s asserted authority to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely without charge or access to an attorney; about what happened to the immigrants rounded up and questioned immediately after 9/11; about “extraordinary rendition”—the Bush administration’s response has always been:
1) We’re at war
2) We’re the good guys
3) You can trust us
4) Did we mention we’re at war?
I never was satisfied with these answers. But I realized that not everyone read The Nation in 8th grade, or had the phrase “power corrupts, absolutely power corrupts absolutely” drummed into them by their parents at a young age. I knew that people rally around the flag and believe the best of their leaders in war time, and that wasn’t a bad thing. I wondered, back in the fall and winter of 2001, if my suspicions were unwarranted or even unpatriotic.
But now several years have passed without a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. We’ve had time to recover, time to think about this clearly. My nightmares about more attacks on New York and Boston haven’t come true yet, but my fears about my own government have been confirmed, and confirmed again. In some cases they’ve been more than confirmed. I would have thought we made pretty damn sure that someone was a terrorist before we sent them to be “interrogated” abroad. I would have thought we’d rely on Egypt and Jordan to be more persuasive than us, but draw the line at Syria. I would have thought that individual soldiers would lose control during interrogations in Iraq, and some POWs would get beat up, but nothing as cheerful or as widespread as what happened at Abu Ghraib.
My best efforts notwithstanding, most Americans have probably never heard of Maher Arar. But after this week—now we’ve all heard stories of torture, and seen pictures. And I think we should all be able to say–Democrat or Republican, hawk or dove:
“Trust us” and “we’re at war” are not going to cut it anymore. This s**t is wrong, and it’s stupid, and it’s the opposite of what this country is. It gives more aid and comfort to our enemies than any number of antiwar rallies ever could. It’s got to stop. And don’t tell us “trust us, it won’t happen again”–we tried trusting you, and look what happened. We’ve got to know it’s going to stop.
Hmm I’m a bit more pessimistic than you. I doubt if ppl cannot remember the nasty stuff that happens in the cause of the drug war, I doubt they’ll remember anything about this war.
Good post, Katherein. Relevant to it, I emphatically recommend the full essay I here abridge.
My one quibble with you is this: ” I would have thought we’d rely on Egypt and Jordan to be more persuasive than us, but draw the line at Syria.”
Respectfully, I think you’re being naive in believing that Egypt and Jordan are better, nicer, less brutal, than Syria; this is a by-product, I suspect, of the fact that Egypt and Jordan get nicer press in the US because they are our “Friends,” — that is, their leaders take money from us and have something of a strategic alliance with our government — while they are domestically little less brutal and oppressive, or inclined to use torture, than Syria, with whom our governments are historically hostile and whose relations remain far more hand’s off. It’s true that Syria is somewhat more emphatically a police state than Jordan and Egypt, but only marginally so, and both Egypt and Jordan certainly engage in torture; I know of no study saying they do it in kinder, gentler, fashion.
Torture is torture. There’s not much moral difference. But the claims that we believed Syria’s assurances that people wouldn’t be tortured are even more laughable than similar claims about Egypt and Jordan–when it’s Syria, there’s less deniability. This is a country that Bush denounces without restraint, that the state department denounces without restraint, that at one point looked like it was next on the list for regime change. It’s not much worse, but it looks worse, becaause the hypocrisy is so blatant–sort of like, well, torturing people in one Saddam Hussein’s most notorious prisons.
But as you say, there’s not much moral difference.
(And thanks for the article! I’ve been very busy, I’d never have found it.)
I should have said–NO moral difference.
More here.