IRAQ: The Gloves Came Off

By Miren Gutierrez Reprint | | Print |

Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, May 13 2004 (IPS) - When Aldo Moro who was prime minister of Italy five times was kidnapped and later murdered by Red Brigade terrorists in 1978, a member of the Italian security forces suggested to General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa that a suspect be tortured. The general famously replied: “Italy can do without Aldo Moro, but not with the introduction of torture.”

When Aldo Moro who was prime minister of Italy five times was kidnapped and later murdered by Red Brigade terrorists in 1978, a member of the Italian security forces suggested to General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa that a suspect be tortured. The general famously replied: “Italy can do without Aldo Moro, but not with the introduction of torture.”

By contrast Cofer Black, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counter- terrorism chief, was said to have testified at a U.S. Senate hearing in 2002 that interrogators had been given more latitude in interpreting the law because of the importance of the information they were seeking. “After September 11 the gloves came off,” he was quoted as saying.

The results are there for everybody to see.

Photographs first broadcast by CBS television network showed naked Iraqi detainees forced by U.S. soldiers into degrading poses at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Other pictures, especially that of the hooded man wired as if for electrocution, went around the globe.

The New York Times reveals that the CIA has used “coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of al- Qaeda.” None of these was known to be in Iraq.

Between 10,000 and 12,000 detainees are held in Iraq by U.S. forces.

The U.S. Army admits it is investigating 10 prisoner deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another 10 cases of abuse. The number of prisoner deaths in U.S. custody in the two countries stands at 14. The deaths of two Afghans have already been ruled homicides.

Three U.S. reservists are to be court-martialled for carrying out physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners. A number of other soldiers have been formally accused or suspended.

But there is a new tolerance towards torture in name of the ‘war on terrorism’, says Theo van Boven, U.N. special rapporteur against torture. “There is a legitimate concern about security and the threat of terrorism,” he told IPS. “But torture is prohibited in all circumstances, it is inhuman treatment.”

The New York Times says one set of legal memorandums “advises government officials that if they are contemplating procedures that may put them in violation of American statutes that prohibit torture, degrading treatment or the Geneva Conventions, they will not be responsible if it can be argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country.”

But deportation of prisoners to places where they are likely to be mistreated becomes “another violation”, says van Boven.

“There is a common starting point to any strategy of both insurgencies and contra-insurgencies,” says former Salvadorian guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos. “Who has the legitimacy? Now, with the International Court of Justice, the human rights treaties and the progress of liberal democracy, not to torture is not only a need, but an obligation.”

Winning depends on “how you conduct yourself,” he says in a phone interview from Oxford. “Could an officer in an extreme case use some degree of physical violence to extract information from a prisoner? No, doing it could hurt the overall political strategy, as it has happened in Iraq. When you mistreat your detainees, you stimulate their opposition, their hate.”

An internal army report on Abu Ghraib by Gen Antonio Taguba leaked to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker says the abuses at the detention centre were “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.” It suggests that little effort was made to stop or conceal what was happening.

“Several U.S. Army soldiers have committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law,” Taguba says. “Furthermore, key senior leaders…failed to comply with established regulations, policies and command directives in preventing detainee abuses.”

Prison guards had been urged to “set conditions” for military interrogations that “equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote.

Some of the accused soldiers have told journalists or relatives that they were encouraged in their actions by senior army officers or CIA agents (and security contractors working for them). They say they received no training or standard operating procedures for dealing with the captives.

“The picture he (Taguba) draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees,” Hersh says. “Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.”

Occupying forces are obliged to provide information about everyone they are detaining. But “people who are picked up for interrogation by American forces seem often to be held incommunicado for long periods, with no information about their whereabouts revealed,” says Anthony Dworkin, in an article on the Crimes of War website.

“At the root of all the problems with military detention in Iraq is the way that interrogation and intelligence gathering have become a dominant priority for U.S. forces,” says Dworkin.

“It is standard doctrine among U.S. interrogators that people are most likely to break if they are kept in conditions of dependency and vulnerability,” he says. “Reinforced by the overriding objective of preventing future acts of terror, this approach naturally creates a climate where restrictions on the abuse and humiliation of captives are skirted or openly flouted.”

Gustavo Gorriti, a journalist who has covered terrorism and internal warfare says in an email interview that the possibility cannot be ruled out that “the abuses have been a systematic policy from above in the belief that it is the only way to obtain strategic information from a fanatic enemy. That is all that interests the torturers, who are stupid enough not to realise that they are doing more bad than good to their country. It is brutal, stupid and counterproductive.”

Torture is a war crime under the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court (ICC), which Britain has ratified. If the Court were to decide that the British government was not making a serious effort to look into the allegations in Iraq, it could launch his own inquiry.

After the U.S. rejection of the ICC in 2002 on the grounds that its soldiers would be at risk of unfair prosecution, its troops at Abu Ghraib are protected from international action.

But these blatant episodes of mistreatment have severely undermined the U.S. image while they may have done little to enhance U.S. intelligence.

“Those who act like Rambo, for whom human rights are an impediment, will not succeed,” says Villalobos. “When an army learns to behave itself, it wins the people, is better informed, and can arrange more effective and focussed operations.”

(*Miren Gutierrez is IPS Editor-in-Chief.)