Kevin — The Kings of Pain
Comments Off on Kevin — The Kings of PainCounterpunch
May15, 2004
The Kings of Pain
United Kingdom, United States and Israel
By JOHN STANTON
A little publicized piece by Ali Abunimah in Lebanon’s Daily Star titled “Israeli
link possible in US torture techniques: In exchange for interrogation training, did
Washington award security contracts?” should be getting a lot more attention. While
it is doubtful that the Pentagon and its defense contractors would need to barter
with Israel to get their interrogation techniques (they’ve had them for decades),
the Abunimah article provides a gold-mine worth of resources establishing, yet
again, the inseparable and often damaging linkage between US and Israeli interests
in the Middle East and Central Asia. Reading through some of the resource material
cited by Abunimah, it is difficult to figure out where US foreign and defense policy
ends and Israel’s begins. But more on that later.
History records how much of a mess Great Britain made of the Middle East chopping up
tribal lands, establishing arbitrary borders, and at one point even threatening to
“gas” the Iraqi’s during the failed occupation of their country in the early 1900’s.
But little is known about the role that Great Britain played in developing the fine
art of torture. It was Great Britain, not Israel or the US, that pioneered the
torture tactics so common in military practice in 2004.
Five Techniques
For over 30 years Israel and the US have used time-tested torture practices devised
by the British. The British Army pioneered these methods way back in 1971, using
them against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Irish people. According to one
of the world’s most respected, and underrated, human rights groups B’Tselem
(btselem.org), in 1971 British security forces in Northern Ireland used coercive
interrogation methods against fourteen IRA suspects. These methods were known as the
five techniques and surfaced in a legal proceeding known as Ireland versus the
United Kingdom. The five pillars of torture include the following:
Wall-Standing: Forcing the detainees to remain for periods of some hours in a
“stress position,” described by those who underwent it as being “spread-eagled
against the wall, with their fingers put high above the head against the wall, the
legs spread apart and the feet back, causing them to stand on their toes with the
weight of the body mainly on the fingers. Hooding: Putting a black or navy
colored bag over the detainees’ heads and, at least initially, keeping it there all
the time except during interrogation. Subjection to Noise: Pending their
interrogations, holding the detainees in a room where there was a continuous loud
and hissing noise. Deprivation of Sleep: Pending their interrogations,
depriving the detainees of sleep. Deprivation of Food and Drink: Subjecting
the detainees to a reduced diet during their stay at the center and pending
interrogation.
The United States and Israel have brutally refined British practices adding cultural
torture. For prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanimo Bay and Israel’s many
detention centers housing Palestinian captives, that means assaulting the integrity
of one’s culture and religion while physically pushing the prisoners to the brink of
death. Modifications made by Israel and clearly adopted by the US for the Arab
captives include constant references to hetero-on-hetero sex, forcing nude inmates
to role-play as dogs and simulate hetero-on-hetero sex, and the common practice of
photographing the prisoner in humiliating circumstances so that in each
interrogation session the broken prisoner, or his comrades/family, can see how far
he/she has been removed from humanity.
Been There, Done That
In a March 1991 report titled Interrogation of Palestinians During the Intifada:
Ill-Treatment, “Moderate Physical Pressure?” or Torture? B’Tselem reported on a
method of torture called Shabah which now seems to be the preferred method of the US
military and intelligence communities. “Shabah entails tying the detainee’s hands in
front or behind his body with plastic or metal cuffs. He is blindfolded or his head
is covered to the neck by sacking [hood] with only a slit left open to breathe. He
stands in this position in an open yard, or sometimes with his hands tied to a pole,
for several days during which he is interrogated for several hours each day. He is
subjected to inadequate food; sleep deprivation (sometimes for up to a week) and
restriction of toilet facilities; beating (with clubs, fists or boots, sometimes on
the genitals or head, sometimes banging the head on the wall); the “cupboard” (being
placed in a closed dark space, some one meter by one meter for hours or days);
partial suffocation (by pressure on the windpipe or by placing sacks on the head and
pressing them against the nose and mouth); and Falaqa (beating the soles of the feet
with a stick or plastic hose, usually while the detainee is handcuffed and hooded).”
What does Shabah feel like? According to B’Tselem quoting a prisoner, “They had me
sit on a chair about 25cm high that is chained to the floor. One leg of the chair is
shorter than the others, so the chair is unstable. They shackled my hands behind the
back of the chair, and my legs, and put a sack over my head. The shackles are metal.
The first day they did this, I felt something drip on me, and the next day I saw
that it had been the vomit of a previous detainee. They played music so loud that I
couldn’t figure out what it was. Sometimes the chair was really smooth, and I would
slide downwards whenever I dozed off to sleep. Anyway, like I said, it wasn’t
straight. They kept me in Shabah for forty-eight hours”
Meanwhile, back in the mother country of democracy and torture, Great Britain’s
prisons have been the home of brutal practices against the IRA, although they’ve
apparently managed to whitewash much of their atrocities. In 1997, Amnesty
International reported on the despicable conditions for the Irish in British
prisons. “Category A prisoners (prisoners regarded as a high security risk) were
held in conditions which led to serious deterioration in their physical and mental
health. Róisín McAliskey, who was four months pregnant, was temporarily detained in
a filthy cell in the special security unit of an all-male prison. She and other
prisoners, including Patrick Kelly, who was suffering from cancer, received
inadequate medical treatment.” In another incident in Brixton Prison in the late
1990’s, six Irishmen hanged themselves under suspicious circumstances. Some of the
guards responsible for monitoring them were former members of the British military.
Peace is Our Profession
As Abunimah noted in his article, The Jerusalem Fund of Aish AhTorah earlier this
year sponsored the first annual Defense Aerospace Executives Mission of Peace to
Israel and Jordan (http://www.jerusalemfund.com). Members of the US Congress such as
Friend of Zion award winner Senator Evan Bayh play a critical role in ensuring that
the Judeo-Christian lines of communication remain open to negotiate lucrative
contracts and ensure that the US will stay in Iraq and support whatever nutty policy
the Sharon government comes up with. Another Friend of Zion award winner is Robert
Liscouski, an Assistant Secretary of US Homeland Security for Infrastructure
Protection. The Jerusalem Fund’s honorary chairs include a former head of Mossad and
Israel’s Minister of Internal Security. In this case, appearances are not deceiving.
The Chairman of the Mission of Peace for the Jerusalem Fund is not an Israeli but
the Joe Reeder, a former US Army undersecretary and now corporate lobbyist for
Greenberg Traurig. Albert Einstein might be surprised to learn that his name is used
by the Jerusalem Fund for four classes of the Albert Einstein Award (technology,
lifetime achievement, etc.) which, by coincidence, end up in the hands of defense
and security contractors, not to groups like B’Tselem. Just how this effort
translates into some sort of Mission of Peace is something only George Orwell would
understand.
As long as we are talking irony and oddity, it’s worth mentioning that Reeder heads
a defense industry ethics study group in the US whose stated purpose is to improve
the ethics practices of the industry. In reality, Reeder’s effort goes more toward
to defending the image of the defense contractor as ethical patriot in the face of
mismanagement of Iraqi reconstruction contracts, abuse of revolving doors,
overcharging the government and the nightmarish fact that a former Pentagon official
and Boeing employee, Darlene Druyun, is now a convicted felon. So much for ethics.
Even though the January 2004 gathering in Israel was billed as a Defense Aerospace
Executives gig, Robert Roth of Viacom and Mark Kamlet of Carnegie Mellon University
showed up to talk about telecommunications network and cybersecurity issues. A
number of investment banking firms were also present. The celebrity of the event was
Jack London, CEO of CACI and Abu Gharib fame, who headed a seminar titled How to
work with the Department of Defense: A prime consolidator perspective. Reeder, as
noted by Abunimah, gave insights on how to sell to the Pentagon. And this was a
Mission of Peace?
Rarefied Web
So what does all this have to do with torture? “The visit of the US delegation that
included the CACI head exposes a rarefied web of influence sharing in which US
government officials and congressmen, defense contractors and lobbyists parcel out
huge contracts, and siphon significant portions off to Israel,” wrote Abunimah. That
“rarefied web” includes Great Britain who violated its own sanctions on Israel and
adopted the US arms export approach to that country. Commenting on the revised
British arms transfer policy, Oxfam stated that “rather than solely basing decisions
to export arms components on human rights, conflict and poverty considerations, new
criteria were introduced to assess potential deals against their importance for the
arms industry.”
And that’s the rub. The liberating principles of human rights that took humanity
centuries to adopt are once again being tortured and minimized on behalf of greed,
of fanaticism and of fear. We are back to Britain’s five techniques. We are all
drowning in violence. Can Crucifixion for the enemy be far behind? The simplistic
rationale of British, American and Israeli leaders has led us all into a world where
television, the Net, radio, newspapers, magazines, conversations and dreams are
focused on war, death, and destruction. Bin Laden is winning big time and dragging
us all down with him.
No one is rising above it all and there’s no telling the depths to which this will
affect generations of children. And it all begins when leaders become unaccountable
and their methods go unchallenged. How can the three enlightened societies that are
the UK, US and Israel be so plain stupid when viewing their unpleasant histories
with the Arab and Central Asian worlds? How did it come to this? There were no
consequences for the political and military dereliction of duty on 911. No
consequences for the lies that led to the Iraq War and Occupation which, in turn,
led to slaughter of Iraqis and Americans in Falluja, the torture at Abu Gharib and
the beheading of American Nick Berg. As more and more Americans view Arabs as
“animals” it’s worth posing the question, Does a 500lb precision guided munition
released from a US aircraft that ultimately incinerates a Iraqi family make the US
any less sick than the group that beheads an American citizen? Are the 2500 US
civilians killed on 911 worth 20,000 Afghani and Iraqi civilians killed? Is it
ethical that Israel uses British and US military equipment for assassination
missions or the killing of the Rachel Corrie’s of the world?
How much retribution, how much torture, how many brains splattered across the earth,
how much of the “rarefied web of influence” can the world stand?
When will a Mission of Peace really become a mission of peace?
John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in political and national
security matters. He is the author of the forthcoming book A Power, But Not Super.
He is also the author along with Wayne Madsen of America’s Nightmare: The Presidency
of George Bush II. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com.