Pentagon to Release 2,000 Photos, Some Showing Previously Unseen Prisoner Abuse

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24 April 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

The Pentagon is releasing today as many as 2,000 photos never before seen, some showing prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay. The photos were tied up in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, calling for evidence of Defense Department actions at the prison camp to be made public. According to The Washington Post, the release will contain “21 images depicting detainee abuse in facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan other than the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, as well as 23 other detainee abuse photos”.

The photos may dramatically escalate tensions brewing in Washington over what to do regarding allegations that top officials were involved in plotting and ordering the systematic physical and psychological abuse of terror suspects. Justice Dept. memos released one week ago have been consistently described as “chilling” revealed new information about the extent of abuse actually carried out against certain individuals.

A recent report released by the Red Cross (ICRC), published online in full by the New York Review of Books, detailed allegations even more shocking than the Justice Dept. memos. The report found that a cyclical application of techniques was developed, in part by “experimentation”, which included suffocation by water, prolonged stress positions, physical beatings, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food, as well as other threats of extreme force.

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The full list, as enumerated in the ICRC report, is as follows:

• Suffocation by water poured over a cloth placed over the nose and mouth…
• Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head…
• Beatings by use of a collar held around the detainees’ neck and used to forcefully bang the head and body against the wall…
• Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face…
• Confinement in a box to severely restrict movement…
• Prolonged nudity…this enforced nudity lasted for periods ranging from several weeks to several months…
• Sleep deprivation…through use of forced stress positions (standing or sitting), cold water and use of repetitive loud noises or music…
• Exposure to cold temperature…especially via cold cells and interrogation rooms, and…use of cold water poured over the body or…held around the body by means of a plastic sheet to create an immersion bath with just the head out of water.
• Prolonged shackling of hands and/or feet…
• Threats of ill-treatment, to the detainee and/or his family…
• Forced shaving of the head and beard…
• Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food from 3 days to 1 month after arrest…

The Red Cross report was highly critical of the role a skewed worldview played in distorting American laws substantially enough to permit the use of torture:

Cheney’s story is made not of facts but of the myths that replace them when facts remain secret: myths that are fueled by allusions to a dark world of secrets that cannot be revealed. At its heart is the recasting of President George W. Bush, under whose administration more Americans died in terrorist attacks than under all others combined, as the leader who “kept us safe,” and who was able to do so only by recognizing that the US had to engage in “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business.” To keep the country safe “the gloves had to come off.” What precisely were those “gloves” that had to be removed? Laws that forbid torture, that outlaw wiretapping and surveillance without permission of the courts, that limit the president’s power to order secret operations and to wage war exactly as he sees fit.

The ICRC had warned the Bush administration as early as 2003 about abuse going on at Iraqi prisons such as Abu Ghraib, and in 2004 the sudden release of evidence about what had occurred at Abu Ghraib, and the administration’s claims to have no knowledge of the abuse, raised questions about if or why the warnings had been ignored.

While the state of health of top prisoners is not publicly known, one former CIA operative who said he had studied the use of these techniques across the world over many decades said that subjecting an individual to waterboarding 180 times would likely leave the individual “nearly braindead”. Such claims, from former intelligence officials, physicians and military personnel, have been growing more frequent as public outrage seems to spread over the abusive techniques.

He also said his research for the US government demonstrated comprehensively that coercive interrogations do not produce good information. China, North Korea and North Vietnam were three examples where the purpose of using torture was to produce false confessions for propaganda purposes.

The BBC reported Friday that:

The images relate to around 60 criminal investigations of US military personnel suspected of abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2006.

The ACLU says the photos show that the much-publicised abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq amounted to a specific policy.

“These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by US personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” said ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh.

The ACLU lawsuit was filed 5 years ago, but was contested by the Bush administration, which had sought to keep the photos secret, on the grounds their release, and their potential involvement in related investigations, could compromise national security. That argument has been made moot by the current administration’s ban on the harsh interrogation techniques, opening the way for release of the images, some of which could enter into evidence in ongoing investigations.