When Are We Going to Answer for Torture?

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

04 October 16

And when is John Brennan going to get fired?

o my knowledge, only one of the two major-party candidates in this year's presidential election has addressed at length the fact that the United States became one of too many nations around the world who torture people. That would be Donald Trump, who said he was going to bring back waterboarding and much, much more. (For her part, Hillary Rodham Clinton has evolved. In 2007, when she last ran, she jumped through the "ticking bomb" loophole. Now, though, she seems categorically opposed to any torture at all.)

The Guardian, on the other hand, has been working the story of the horrors done in our name as hard as anyone, and it now brings us news of a new report from Human Rights Watch that gives us another look at the policies in which we were all made complicit.

The men, who were released to Tunisian custody in 2015, described being threatened with placement in an electric chair at a black site prison in Afghanistan in 2002; being beaten with metal batons while their arms were suspended by a bar above their heads; and having their heads pushed into barrels of water. One of the men, Ridha al-Najjar, was a pivotal detainee for the CIA, which believed him to be a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. Najjar was the first man taken by the CIA to the black site, which was code-named Cobalt and was where at least one detainee is known to have died. His interrogation became a template for others at the site, according to the CIA inspector general. Najjar said the interrogators forcibly inserted something into his anus. According to a footnote in the 2014 Senate intelligence committee's investigation into torture, John Brennan, now CIA director, was among the senior CIA officials briefed in the summer of 2002 on the interrogation plan for Najjar. According to the Senate report, the plan included isolation, "'sound disorientation techniques', 'sense of time deprivation', limited light, cold temperatures, and sleep deprivation".

Suggested question for the upcoming town hall debate: John Brennan clearly knew that this country was torturing people in contravention of 200 years of American military history, several treaties this country had freely ratified, and every possible consideration of human decency. Why does he still have a job and will you fire him?

"The US should provide these men with adequate compensation and redress," said Human Rights Watch's Laura Pitter. "It is under an obligation to do so under treaties it has ratified and there is still time to act. If it doesn't respect its obligations when it comes to its own very serious human rights violations, it undermines US credibility when urging other governments to respect theirs."

Somebody needs a refresher course in American Exceptionalism—we do not torture so, when we do torture, it can't be torture because we don't torture.

The report describes extensively the insertion of water or pureed foods into the anuses of detainees, which the CIA denies was sexual assault.

Opinions vary. We need further research to establish who's right here. Any volunteers from Langley?

Najjar told Human Rights Watch that in addition to having his head dunked in a barrel of water between interrogators' questions, he was also strapped to a board and lowered by his head, upside down, into the barrel. In a description consistent with other accounts of water dousing, he reported being placed within a tarpaulin full of cold water that zipped closed at the top with minimal space for air. The CIA has maintained that it only waterboarded three detainees: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Earlier accounts of water dousing come from Mohammed and 12 other detainees, none of whom are Najjar or El Gherissi. In 2015, a lawyer for a detainee subjected to water dousing told the Guardian: "You would laugh the next time you heard the government try to minimize its wrongdoing by drawing a distinction between waterboarding and other forms of water torture."

I don't think I would, but I take his point.

Within the first month of his captivity at the black sites, according to the Senate torture report, CIA cables described Najjar as "clearly a broken man … on the verge of a complete breakdown". His torture "became the model" for others at the black site, according to the CIA inspector general.

The model.

Fcking monsters, the lot of them.