Torture Trouble. posted by Richard Seymour

The US is troubled by and the UK has condemned the discovery that 173 men have been found packed into an Iraqi Interiror Ministry underground bunker, starving and showing signs of having been tortured:

There have been persistent allegations of abuse by members of the Shia-dominated security forces...

But Sunday's discovery is hard evidence and officials believe it may be the tip of the iceberg.

There are suspicions the building may also have been used as a base for a militia called the Badr Brigade, and that such militias may have infiltrated Iraq's security services, our correspondent adds.

...

Deputy interior minister Hussein Kamal, who saw some of the abuse victims personally, said: "I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies."

The public outrage of the occupiers reminds me of Professor Farnsworth's reaction to Fry's cannibalism in Futurama: "This is an outrage! I was going to eat that mummy!" The removal of skin is not an unknown torture technique. It was used by the Argentinian junta, for instance:

One day they put me face-down on the torture table, tied me up (as always), and calmly began to strip the skin from the soles of my feet. I imagine, though I didn’t see it because I was blindfolded, that they were doing it with a razor blade or a scalpel. I could feel them pulling as if they were trying to separate the skin at the edge of the wound with a pair of pincers. I passed out. From then on, strangely enough, I was able to faint very easily. As for example on the occasion when, showing me more bloodstained rags, they said these were my daughters’ knickers, and asked me whether I wanted them to be tortured with me or separately.

The same methods were used, along with many others, in El Salvador during a brutal US-sponsored crackdown on dissent, according to the UN-sponsored Truth Commission. You could guess that this is fairly ubiquitous in terror states, although non-state movements have been known to mutilate live human flesh also: among the Nicaraguan Contras' favourite tricks was to slice off the breasts of nurses and teachers discovered harbouring children and the sick in civilian compounds.


Skin removal.

At any rate, check out what Jafaari's spokesperson said:

[M]ethods used under Saddam Hussein had not been completely eradicated despite efforts to introduce new practices.

Did you read that correctly? Go on and have another look, I'll wait. The new Iraqi security forces were built from the bottom up by the invading forces. The CIA trained them in their operations from day one. Quite possibly, some of the Badr Corps will not have needed any training from the CIA since they had their own prisons to run in Iran.

But the claim that the US does not use torture and, moreover, does not believe anyone else should, at least confirms that the old ones are not necessarily the best ones. The US was quite happy, for instance, to help the Contras torture, rape and murder with impunity in Nicaragua, while the security services in Salvador were amply assisted in their happy task. The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, (recently named the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) distributed manuals to its recruits advising them on how to use torture, beatings and executions, at least from from 1982 to 1991 according to the open admissions from the US government. And the SOA/Whinsec "is only one small part of a vast and complex network of US programs for training foreign military and police forces that is often shrouded in secrecy; currently, approximately 275 known US military schools and installations in the US provide such training". - see here.

It is pedantic and needless to go through all the instances where the US has in fact used torture and trained clients to do so, when the White House is demonstrably terrified that the US Senate might ban the use of torture against prisoners held overseas. Never mind that the US government has already incriminated itself by promising a Salvador Option in Iraq, this shortly after Dick Cheney had telegraphed the plans in a pre-election debate:

Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had -- guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress.

...

And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections. The power of that concept is enormous. And it will apply in Afghanistan, and it will apply as well in Iraq.

Never mind, in short, the fact that both the US and UK do use torture, and have used torture repeatedly. You will be missing a crucial lesson in media and manipulation if it hasn't occurred to you that the sole reason the information about the "tip of the iceberg" (as the BBC had it) was released by the Iraqi Prime Minister was to control its presentation. As with the corrections column in The Guardian, its function is to assure you that everything else going on is above board and perfectly legitimate. And if you really believe that it is, then you have a promising journalistic career ahead of you.