Call it what you like - this is hell

[struggle4progress]

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror
by Mark Danner
Granta £16.99

Five days after 9/11, Vice-President Cheney emerged from the fortified burrow in which he'd been awaiting Armageddon and - glowering as blackly as the oil he no doubt dreams of - explained how the government intended to respond to the terrorists. President Bush was already babbling about a crusade and remembering the 'dead or alive' posters that used to be displayed in the Wild West. But Cheney did not invoke the chivalric idealism of Arthurian knights and sheriffs with tin badges. The fictions that helped him to deal with these new political facts were demon-haunted and apocalyptic. He had cast himself as Darth Vader: he therefore explained to an NBC interviewer that the administration from now on would 'work through, sort of, the dark side'.

That meant, as it turned out, the suspension of habeas corpus and of the Geneva conventions that regulate the treatment of prisoners of war. Alberto Gonzalez, Bush's legal counsel (since promoted to attorney general), supplied him with a 'new paradigm' for conducting a campaign against rogue killers from failed states who targeted civilians: since terrorists ignored the laws, why should America and its raggle-taggle band of allies bother about humane niceties?

Last year, when the photographs of detainees at Abu Ghraib being sexually shamed or threatened by dogs were published, the 'dark side' was placed on view in bright, brash colour. An investigation revealed that torture was being used to obtain confessions. One zealous American soldier, symbolically outfitted in his full uniform, had even sodomised a prisoner; unfortunately the man was too busy screaming to divulge any information of value. Other Americans did their anal interrogating with broomsticks or chemical lights, or brought in dogs to do the job for them.

Bush, testily insisting that his henchmen had been instructed to do nothing illegal, said: 'We have laws on the books.' What this meant was expensive lawyers were busy devising methods of circumventing those laws. An article in a recent New Yorker describes the vogue for outsourcing torture. Suspects abducted by the CIA are loaded in shackles onto executive jets, and delivered to countries such as Egypt, Syria and Jordan whose secret police have robust ways of asking questions. <snip>

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1418264,00.html