A Look at Torture (1)

They are meant to serve as deterrents to crime if not retribution to crimes already perpetrated. Thus is a  prisoner’s will  broken with specific terror-interrogation techniques.  For those who favor them, torture and punishment are regarded as a sacrifice of a few for the sake of the many.

So now we know of a place called Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, once Saddam Hussein’s palace of torture for his fellow Iraqis, now the seat of a prison scandal for the United States in its war on terrorism.

We also know now that the scandal’s revelations were set into motion when Major General Anthony Taguba, who is of Filipino descent and the son of a Bataan Death March veteran, made a written report on the prison abuse and   opened the floodgates for an investigation.  Then someone anonymously slipped under the door of the investigating team’s office a computer diskette containing pictures of the abuses.  Eventually these pictures found their way to television stations and inevitable worldwide publicity.

The images of abuse, as we know them now, are a gallery of horrors.  There was this female American soldier holding a naked prisoner on a leash.  There were naked Arab prisoners piled as American prison guards gloated.

Still another was a naked Arab male hooded by a pair of woman’s underwear.  And there was that photogenic female prison guard, with thumbs up, beaming in a photo op over the body of a dead Iraqi packed in ice.  Add to these the reports of rape and sodomy meant to humiliate and break the will of the detainees, and the scenario is complete for the eventual introspection of a superpower nation scarred by the memory of the 9/11 tragedy.

But there too is US President George Bush who, in the beginning, has declared that “this is a war in which the old rules did not apply.”  The statement may be misconstrued, depending on one’s own purpose and conviction, as anything-goes-as-long-as-we-win, Geneva Convention be damned.

Other reports of prison abuse in Afghanistan, where America also has its war and inevitable detainees, filtered in.  Also mentioned but not publicly detailed due to the absence of graphic pictures are the presumed torture and abuse in Gitmo, or Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the most dangerous and militant of terrorists are detained sans lawyers and visitors.  The torture techniques in Abu Ghraib are said to be exports from Gitmo.

In Israel, unquestionably the United States’ foremost ally in the Middle East, is Meretz, an ultra-secret police compound near Tel Aviv.  It is reportedly used as an interrogation facility by a legendary Arab-speaking unit of Israel’s military intelligence.  Nowhere is it found in current Israel maps such that the Arab detainees’ greatest terrors there are the isolation and knowledge that no one knows where they are.  They also report that the torture tactics used in the facility are no different from those in Abu Ghraib.

In our own country, reports of physical, psychological and emotional torture for detainees during the Martial Law years also went around, either through Amnesty International and other human rights groups or through the grapevine.

(2004)