{"id":1060,"date":"2005-03-12T01:07:10","date_gmt":"2005-03-12T09:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/03\/now_about_those_torture_techni\/"},"modified":"2005-03-12T01:07:10","modified_gmt":"2005-03-12T09:07:10","slug":"now_about_those_torture_techni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/03\/now_about_those_torture_techni.html","title":{"rendered":"NOW, ABOUT THOSE TORTURE TECHNIQUES . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest Pentagon report on torture says there are new rules defining how the U.S. military
\nshould treat captives. But as a New York Times editorial, “Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed Again”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> pointed out yesterday,
\n“Don’t ask what they are, because they’re classified.” And certainly don’t ask the Navy inspector
\ngeneral who wrote the report that approved of the new rules. He admitted that, well, he had
\nnot actually read them<\/i>. Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, the official voice of the Times beats
\nwith the heart of a fed-up blogger. Yesterday’s example:
\n


\n

This whitewash is typical of the reports issued by the Bush administration on
\nthe abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners at camps run by the military and the Central
\nIntelligence Agency. Like the others, [this] report concludes that only the lowest-ranking soldiers
\nare to be held accountable, not their commanders or their civilian overseers. …
\n

<\/P>
\n

<\/A>[It] said that “none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib
\nbear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater.” [The author] and his
\ninvestigators must have missed the pictures of prisoners in hoods, forced into stress positions and
\nthreatened by dogs. All of those techniques were approved at one time or another by military
\nofficials, including Mr. Rumsfeld. Of course, no known Pentagon policy orders the sexual
\nhumiliation of prisoners. But that has happened so pervasively that it clearly was not just the
\nperverted antics of one night shift in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib.<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

The author of the report also must have missed what Douglas Jehl recounts today: “Army
\nDetails Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail,”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> a front-page news
\nstory based on American military documents obtained by Human Rights Watch:<\/P>
\n


\n

WASHINGTON — Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in
\nAfghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American
\nsoldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative
\nreports that have not yet been made public. …
\n

<\/P>
\n

John Sifton, a researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said the documents
\nsubstantiated the group’s own investigations showing that beatings and stress positions were
\nwidely used, and that “far from a few isolated cases, abuse at sites in Afghanistan was common in
\n2002, the rule more than the exception.”<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Whoops. Seems the author of the Pentagon report has seen those documents after all. It’s just
\nthat the torture (sorry, he termed it “abuse”) that killed those two prisoners “was unrelated to
\napproved interrogation techniques” (his words). <\/P>
\n

But the documents say four military interrogaters assaulted the two prisoners with “kicks to
\nthe groin and leg, shoving or slamming … into walls\/table … painful, contorted body positions
\nduring interview and forcing water into [one’s] mouth until he could not breathe.” When the two
\ndied, Jehl also reports, U.S. military officials said their deaths “were from natural causes.” The
\nAmerican commander of allied forces in Afghanistan even “denied that prisoners had been chained
\nto the ceiling” or that their lives had been endangered by their treatment. After a Times
\ninvestigation, however, “the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides.”<\/P>
\n

Everything is A-OK now, though, because of the new rules. The Pentagon says the rules are
\nfine, if secret, and we can take the Pentagon’s word for it because this is a democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest Pentagon report on torture says there are new rules defining how the U.S. military should treat captives. But as a New York Times editorial, “Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed Again” pointed out yesterday, “Don’t ask what they are, because they’re classified.” And certainly don’t ask the Navy inspector general who wrote the report that approved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1060","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-h6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}