“I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it, and I will not authorize it”. In September 2006, it was with these words that George Bush Jr., then President of the United States, tried to assure the world that America’s global “war on terror” did not include torture and human rights violations. The horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were an “aberration”, we were told – the unfortunate result of a few “bad apples”. Facts that have now emerged from the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI)’s report on CIA’s ‘Rendition, Detention and Interrogation’ programme have however shown, beyond any doubt, that Bush and the US administration were lying about US’s track record on torture, just as they lied about the so-called “weapons of mass destruction” that helped to set the stage for US-sponsored global Islamophobia and the “war on terror”. The SSCI report exposes in great detail the reality behind the bland and innocuous sounding “enhanced interrogation techniques” followed by the CIA in prisons and detention centres across the world.

Chilling narratives of torture

The SSCI report is the result of its analysis of 6 million pages of CIA’s records of its operations between 2001-2006. What is now in the public domain is a 500-page summary of the complete 6,700 page report. The details it documents are chilling and ghastly, to say the least. The report reveals that the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ included the following procedures:

Prisoners were subjected to ‘enhanced’ interrogation, in other words torture, on a non-stop, unrelenting 24x7 basis.

The 24x7 ‘interrogation’ often went on for 20 whole days at a stretch.
Prisoners were kept in complete isolation, sometimes for 47 days at a stretch.

Prisoners were stuffed in coffin-like boxes. The report documents a case of a prisoner kept in such a box for 266 hours (11 days), and then stuffed in an even smaller box (21 inches wide, 2.5 feet deep, 2.5 feet tall) for an additional 29 hours.

Rectal feeding and ‘rectal rehydration’: Prisoners, including those on hunger strike in protest against torture and human rights violations, were force-fed through the rectum. An infusion of “pureed” humus, pasta, nuts and raisins was forced through the rectum of prisoners.

Prisoners were forced to remain naked, and were subjected to rape and sexual violence.

Prisoners were intimidated with mock executions, and threats of death and torture. The report for instance documents a case where a buzzing power drill was held next to the head of a prisoner during interrogation to extract information. Guards played the infamous ‘Russian roulette’ with detainees, where the prisoners were threatened with death.

Waterboarding (controlled drowning) was a common practice during the “enhanced interrogation”. There are documented instances of prisoners being subjected to waterboarding no less than 183 times. Waterboarding led to convulsions and vomiting, and continued sometimes until detainees turned blue and were on the verge of drowning.

Prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation sometimes lasting up to 180 hours (almost 8 days), often standing or in painful positions. Naked detainees were doused with ice-cold water and kept awake.

Prisoners were threatened that their families, including their children, would be harmed. The threats included threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee and to “cut” a detainee’s mother’s throat.

 Prisoners were refused access to toilets, and were exposed to unbearable levels of sound and light or kept in total darkness.

Prisoners were left hanging by their wrists for extended periods of time, and were kept in “stress positions” even on broken limbs and although medical personnel had advised against it.

The report also reveals that at least 26 of 119 known detainees in custody between 2001-2006 were wrongfully held, and many held for months longer than they should have been. One of the prisoners for instance was wrongfully detained, and had to be released by the CIA after enduring 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation and ice water baths, when “the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be”. Two more detainees spent 24 hours chained in the standing sleep deprivation position, until the CIA “confirmed that the detainees were former CIA sources”, who had previously reached out to the CIA to try to share information. Clearly, the SSCI report, even if it just touches the tip of the iceberg of systemic tortures and rights’ violations that define US policy, is a strong and unimpeachable indictment of CIA and the US administration.

The politics of justifying torture

It is not surprising that the ‘justifications’ and the cover-ups have begun. Dick Cheney, who was the US Vice President during the period investigated by the SSCI, has taken it upon himself to spearhead the opposition to the SSCI report. In an interview to Fox News, Cheney claims that “it is a terrible report, deeply flawed”. Predictably, Cheney claims that “professionals” [read the torturers in the CIA] were being “thrown under the bus” through this report. “What happened here was that we asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it never happened again, and that’s exactly what they did”, he adds. One finds in this rhetoric a deliberate campaign of obfuscation, and justification of the unjustifiable. We are being told that the horrific crimes were “okay” because they ostensibly “worked” in their glorious aim of “stopping the terrorists”. It is impossible to ignore that there is a very visible ongoing effort to frame the discourse over the CIA torture report in terms of the efficacy of torture in controlling terrorism.

The fact is that these justifications of torture, and not the SSCI report as Cheney would have us believe, is deeply flawed at multiple levels. To begin with, the Bush-Cheney-CIA argument that torture and violations of rights actually help in countering terrorism is hardly borne by facts. As the SSCI report itself painstakingly documents, torture did not help the CIA to extract information from the detainees. Is it really so difficult to understand that torture, rather than producing “useful” information, in reality produces a concocted mix of truths, half-truths, imaginations, delirious and fantastic inventions and in fact anything that the detainee thinks will even temporarily shift the nightmarish experience?

Moreover, the issue is not really the efficacy of torture, or the lack of it. What should concern any democratic society is that these multiple violations are simply illegal, apart from being a horrific assault on human dignity and the rights of a human being. The UN Convention Against Torture, which the US signed in 1994, for instance makes it abundantly clear that the ‘interrogation’ techniques followed by the CIA are not permissible under any condition, even in a “state of war… during threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency”. What has happened is therefore, simply put, a crime – however hard the Cheneys and the Bushes of the world try to justify it. To try and deflect this fundamental question of dignity and freedom of an individual under the garb of “necessity” is a simple denial of justice.

It is also pertinent to note that it is Cheney himself who has pointed out who should be held responsible. In his Fox News interview, Cheney claims, “The notion that the agency [CIA] was operating on a rogue basis was just a flat out lie…He [George Bush] was in fact an integral part of the program. He had to approve it before we moved forward with it…He knew everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the program”. So, we have here, straight from the horse’s mouth, a declaration that the crimes were sanctioned by the highest levels of the US administration.

“This is not about us”:
Obama’s abortive efforts to escape accountability

Even as representatives of the previous Bush-Cheney regime, along with the CIA, are busying themselves with justifying the ‘interrogation’ techniques documented in the SSCI report, we are also witnessing an attempt by Obama and his administration to reassure the American people that horrific torture was something of the past, an abomination that is not really “American”. “This is not how we operate,” Obama says. In the same vein, SSCI chairperson Dianne Feinstein adds, “The release of this 500-page summary cannot remove that stain, but it can and does say to our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it’s wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes”.

What however, need to be understood and underlined clearly and unambiguously is this: Torture and rights’ violations are no aberration in US policy; they are in fact exactly how the US has operated and continues to operate in its quest for global hegemony. To put it plainly, torture is not the work of some stray, incompetent people. It is rather a well-planned and central part of the US’ imperial wars, military occupations and counter-insurgency warfare, including under the current Obama regime. When the top US leadership claims that they “didn’t know”, they “were misled” or that “the CIA didn’t tell us”, it is simply laughable.

Under the Obama regime, the horrific tortures even in the much publicised Guantanamo Bay prison continue. Commenting on the continuing force-feeding of hunger strikers in Guantanamo, Rebecca Gordon points out in her article ‘American Torture -- Past, Present, And… Future? Beyond The Senate Torture Report’, “At present, a Navy nurse faces possible dishonourable discharge for refusing to participate in these force feedings, because he believes they are a form of torture”. Obama’s much touted ending of CIA torture still allows for “extraordinary rendition” – the new fancy term for allowing terror suspects to be taken abroad for detention and interrogation. Moreover, it is no great secret, nor a huge surprise that torture by US agencies is rampant not just in foreign lands but equally in American prisons, police stations and detention centres.

US’s history of imperial wars and its quest for global hegemony is rife with instances of the most ghastly crimes. For instance, when it invaded the Philippines in 1899, it used waterboarding to deal with detainees. Robert Barsocchini thus quotes the Philadelphia ledger, which documents the US operations in Philippines in late nineteenth century: “…our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses”.

In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the CIA-sponsored Contras wrecked havoc against all supporters of the elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Contras’ claim to fame lies in their attacks on civilians, their despicable acts of cutting off women’s breasts and men’s testicles, gouging out eyes, beheading infants, raping women and children, using children for target practice, and slitting throats and pulling the victim’s tongue out through the slit. Former US President Ronald Reagan remained one of their most reliable funders and allies, referring to them as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers”. In fact, the list of torturers and dictators – in Africa, Chile, Vietnam, Central America, Middle East and elsewhere – supported and sponsored by various US administrations is a long and ever-growing one.

Racial profiling, creating the ‘other’ and justifications for torture

The SSCI report essentially documents one of the tragic consequences of the Bush regime’s ‘war on terror’. It is pertinent to reiterate that one of the fundamental pivots around which Bush’s ‘war on terror’ was waged was the orchestrated campaign of Islamophobia. Indeed, Islamophobia gained traction globally as the US sought to build legitimacy at home and abroad for its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The horrific story of torture is therefore intrinsically connected with the concomitant issue of systematic profiling and othering.

In fact, the history of tortures is equally a history of racism and creation of the ‘other’. Robert Barsocchini reminds us of how, way back in 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge justified the US’ tortures in Philippines: “It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse…Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals”. If it was the ‘Orientals’ then, or the blacks and the ‘niggers’, it has now become the “Islamic terrorist fundamentalist” whom is “okay” to suspect, target, torture, main and kill. For us to be able to effectively address the narrative of torture and rights, and address we must, it is thus essential to challenge the systematic and familiar processes of racial profiling, of communal hate mongering, of deep-rooted prejudices and biases inherent in society.

The SSCI report exposes the gruesome underbelly of “Wars on Terror” waged in our collective names. In India, too, it is an open secret that terror investigations by the IB, NIA and other agencies have systematically resorted to communal profiling and custodial torture. We need to establish accountability – ranging right to the highest levels of leadership – for horrific crimes like these – be it by the US State or the Indian one. And we need to question, every inch of the way, the justifications and the racially/comunally coloured rationale offered to mute the horror of crimes we are faced with.

Moreover, on January 26th when US President Obama comes to India as a guest of the Modi government, we need to state loud and clear: Mr Obama, this is very much about you. The US administration will have to accept responsibility and accountability not just for tortures and crimes, but also for the disease of Islamophobia it engendered for its vested interests.