Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture

by Beth Pyles

October 31, 2006

During the short time it takes you to read this, lean forward, so that your back is not resting against the support of your chair. Don't lean back. That's the only thing you have to do. That . . . and read.

Several men held at Guantanamo Bay recently committed suicide. In responding, camp commander Harry Harris said, "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." And Colleen Graffy, Deputy Ass't Secy' of State remarked, ". . . certainly taking their own lives was not necessary. But it certainly is a good PR move . . ."

In another time and place, sitting in the CPT apartment in Baghdad, a Kurdish-Iraqi friend, referring to Saddam and the United States, said to me, "The student has gone. The teacher is here."

I wanted to cry out to my friend, 'that's just not so! We aren't the kind of people who torture!' I wanted to say that, but I could not. How could I, when, as we sat in Baghdad, the executive and legislative branches of my own government, along with the people of the US engaged in a debate about when torture is permissible?

From a faith perspective (and many of those involved in the debate name themselves as persons of faith), the answer to when torture is permissible is a simple one to answer: never. As a Christian, I must recognize that my fellow Christians and I disagree on many things. But if we imagine Jesus as present in the torture chamber, it is not to give aid and comfort to the torturer. The scriptures I study have the follower of Jesus pose the question, 'when did we visit you in prison?', to which Jesus replied, that which you do to the least of these, you do to me. He makes no remark on the guilt or innocence of the prisoner, referring only to their condition as imprisoned as worthy of our compassion.

Torture is never permissible. The cruel irony of the discussion, perhaps, is that only those in power, those in a position to even contemplate the use of torture, would ever even have the debate. The powerless don't debate whether torture is an option, because for them, it never is. What is striking about all the discussions about torture, the only voice heard in the media who had been a recipient of torture was Senator McCain. With all due respect to Senator McCain, I cannot help but wonder whether he would have fought harder had he still been in a cage in North Viet Nam.

And by changing the language from 'torture' to 'interrogation techniques which may use some degree of physical force, so long as it does not cause death or serious permanent bodily injury' (or whatever the current language is), the only people we have fooled are ourselves. The tortured are not fooled.

If there is anything that faith has to contribute to our public discourse on the subject of torture, I suspect it is this: understand that what you do is who you are. Christians would say that she who sins is a sinner. As a nation, we must confess that if we torture, then we are torturers.

I cannot help but wonder what the authors of our New Testament canon and the early generations who followed them, many of whom were the victims of state-sanctioned torture themselves, would make of our debate? I wonder what Jesus, the man we follow who was himself the victim of state-sponsored torture for a good cause (the good of the many), would have to say?

Faith teaches us that ethics are not theoretical; nor are they merely aspirational. Ethics are where we live. Ethics are, to paraphrase Dr. King, the effort to make our ends and means cohere.

Well, how are we doing? Do we the people have coherence on the subject of torture? Alas, I fear, we do not.

Bucca & Abu Ghraib are place names that come up often in conversation with Iraqis; they have become a part of the Iraqi language of suffering, comparable to ancient Israel's recollection of life in Egypt, to our own reaction to the simple words 9/11. Bucca and Abu Ghraib are defining in the perceptions of many Iraqis for what it means to be an American. But are they the isolated examples we wish they were?

These are facts you can know simply by reading the newspapers and reports from groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. These reports are from those who are willing and able to talk and who have access to the West. This is not the whole story.

The general movement over time in Iraq has been to transition from US to Iraqi control (as they stand up, we stand down, as Mr. Bush says). Thus the reports of torture against the US forces have decreased as the reports against Iraqi authorities have increased.

But the US has a very real and direct role in the continued torture of prisoners in Iraq, in several ways: in the hiring of mercenaries; in the policy of non-protection of Iraqi civilians; in the blind eye turned to open practices; and in the training of Iraqis.

1. The hiring of mercenaries. Security contractors, mercenaries, are paid by our tax dollars. But because they are private employees and not soldiers, they are, according to the United States government, not subject to military law. It would appear based on practice that the US does not view these mercenaries as subject even to international laws and standards. These organizations recruit from soldiers about to leave the military. And they tell their friends still in the military "we don't have to 'follow the same rules' when it comes to torture." This is what soldiers have told me.

2. Policy of non-protection of those living in Iraq.  CPT'er Tom Fox and I accompanied two Palestinians to a meeting in late October with representatives of the US Embassy in Baghdad. They were there to seek help in investigating the torture and murder of their cousin, among other concerns - he had been taken into custody by one of the many brigades resurrected (often with the same personnel) from the Saddam days. Days later, his body was found along the airport road with burn marks, bruises from beatings and most ominous, drill holes in the sides of his head (in the months since I was in Baghdad, drilling of the skull of the murdered has become common place).

The Embassy personnel understood the risk to their lives that our friends were making in asking for an investigation. When the Embassy representative asked them if they were sure they wanted her to go forward, my Palestinian friend said that he understood the danger, but that he and his family looked to the US to protect them from retaliation. The other Embassy representative responded vehemently that he could not look to the US for protection, because it is not the job of the US to protect them and that they must look to the Iraqi government (the very government which murdered their cousin) and to the UN (which has no forces on the ground in Iraq outside the Green Zone) for protection. Up to the point when she said don't look to us to protect you, I understood; after all, it's a war zone. But when she went on to say that it is not the job of the United States, the now de facto occupying force in Iraq, to protect civilians from violent retaliation because they reported the torture, I understood something very different: the policy of the US is not designed in any meaningful way to root out torture in Iraq. After all, we protect what is important.

3. Blind eye to open practice of torture. It is said that the most highly rated television show in Iraq is, loosely translated, 'Terrorists in the Fist of Justice'. Men are paraded in serial fashion before the television camera, with only a white background and a microphone. An off-camera voice questions them about their 'crimes' and they confess and apologize to the Iraqi people for their terrorist acts. They often bear obvious marks of beating. This is theater, apparently designed to reassure the Iraqi people that their government is acting to stamp out terrorism, much like the photographs of the dead Zarqawi displayed on television.

Four Palestinian men, whose families CPT has worked with in order to find out where the men were held and if they were to be charged, signed confessions and appeared on the show. The confessions they signed included allegations of five bombings of police stations in Baghdad. The problem is that none of those police stations were bombed. When these four men were transferred from one prison to another, the officials at the second prison refused to accept them until they had documented their serious injuries so that they would not be accused of having inflicted them. The US presumably knows of this case because they were on Iraqi television, because Amnesty International has reported on their case (it's on their web site), and because they were told about it during a meeting with CPT in October, 2005. I have had an unofficial report that these men were released from detention some time in May, a year or so after they were detained and after they had been once released by an Iraqi judge only to be rearrested the same day by Iraqi authorities.

4. Training. The US maintains that it is providing training to Iraqi security forces, including in its human rights obligations. In January, 2006, two other CPT'ers and I accompanied an Iraqi Human Rights worker and an Iraqi lawyer to an Iraqi army prison, searching for two women who had been detained in an apparent effort to secure their male family members. This holding of the women of a family as hostages to get the men to turn themselves in was a practice of the MNF and is now of the Iraqis ( See United Nations Report). We were allowed to see the women and to our unpleasant surprise, the general in charge also brought two of the sons into the room, one, then the other.

The large room was crowded with Iraqi officials, our delegation, the women, the Haji (the patriarch of the family whose wife and daughter-in-law were the women held), the guards for the men and each man in turn. There was much emotion and turmoil. During a time when the officials were distracted, the son in the room at the time, who wore a hooded sweatshirt, somewhat concealing a wounded if not broken nose and scratches, whispered in answer to the lawyer's question about what was wrong with his feet (he was only able to walk in a shuffling, limping way), that he had been beaten on the bottoms of his feet. When the general noticed my attention to the son's face, he became angry and refused to allow us to speak with the son or the women alone. The son quickly announced in a loud voice that he had not been mistreated in any way.

Until the son was brought in, an American Captain (that is the only identification we have of him) was in the room. When the son entered, he quickly left and we never saw him again. He was introduced to us as a 'trainer'. The question I am left with is what he was training the Iraqis to do?

Click here to continue.