The conclusion of one autopsy report of an Iraqi male who died under interrogation at Abu Ghraib prison, reads:

Mr. [redacted] was captured by Navy Seal team #7 and resisted apprehension. External injuries are consistent with injuries sustained during apprehension. Ligature injuries are present on the wrists and ankles. Fractures of the ribs and a contusion of the left lung imply significant blunt force injuries of the thorax and likely resulted in impaired respiration. According to investigating agents, interviews taken from individuals present at the prison during the interrogation indicate that a hood made of synthetic material was placed over the head and neck of the detainee. This likely resulted in further compromise of effective respiration…. The cause of death is blunt force injuries of the torso complicated by compromised respiration. The manner of death is homicide.5

With the recent revelation that the U.S. has detained more than 83,000 people as part of the war on terror over the past four years—enough to fill the NFL’s largest football stadium—there can be no doubt that the atrocities like those reported by Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights represent only the tip of the iceberg.6

The CIA’s secret prisons

One aspect of the administration’s penchant for torture however, came to light in November, as the Washington Post reported the CIA has “disappeared” dozens of detainees into secret prisons located in at least eight different countries including Thailand, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and several unspecified Eastern European nations.7

According to the Post, as many as thirty detainees continue to be held in these so-called secret “black site” prisons. The CIA policy of “rendering” detainees to secret prisons seems to have evolved during the initial days following September 11, 2001, and orders appear to have come straight from the top of the Bush administration. In response to a CIA request for guidance, for example, an August 2002 Justice Department memo said that torturing al-Qaeda detainees “may be justified,” and that international laws against torture “may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations” conducted in the war on terrorism.

A week later, Bush signed an order giving the CIA sweeping powers to kill, capture, or detain members of al-Qaeda anywhere in the world—and the black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials.

Initially, CIA officials looked “for a setting like Alcatraz Island,” according to the Post, and considered a remote island in Zambia as a possibility, but rejected the plan. As more prisoners were captured during the war in Afghanistan, the CIA set up one of the first black-site prisons in an abandoned brick factory outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. In the “Salt Pit,” as it was known, in November 2002, a CIA officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight without blankets. He later froze to death, officials told the Post.

German citizen Khaled El-Masri, on the other hand, was lucky enough to get out of the Salt Pit alive. In December, El-Masri, who is of Lebanese descent, explained to reporters how, in 2004, he spent more than five months in CIA custody. El-Masri says he was detained on December 31, 2003, on a vacation to Macedonia, apparently because his name was similar to that of a suspected terrorist. After more than twenty days of questioning by Macedonian security forces, El-Masri says that he was handcuffed, beaten, and blindfolded—and flown to what he later learned was a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan. He told reporters:

I was dragged out of the car, pushed roughly into a building, thrown to the floor, and kicked and beaten on the head, the soles of my feet, and the small of my back. I was left in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell. There was no bed and one dirty, military-style blanket and some old, torn clothes bundled into a thin pillow. I was extremely thirsty, but there was only a bottle of putrid water in [the] cell. I was refused fresh water.8

Other black-site prisons include a site in Thailand that was closed after its existence was confirmed in the media, and Thai officials insisted it be shut down. The CIA has also apparently abandoned its small detention center at Guantánamo Bay, worried about the implications of rulings by U.S. courts that grant detainees some legal rights.

Outsourcing torture

When the CIA isn’t up to torturing detainees on its own, it seems perfectly willing to outsource its dirty work to intelligence services in countries like Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan, and others, a procedure it obscurely calls “rendition.” The CIA gives financial assistance and sometimes direction—to these prisons, where detainees almost certainly face torture at the hands of security forces like Egypt’s Mukhabarat.

Canadian citizen Maher Arar, for example, alleges that he was arrested at New York’s JFK airport in September 2002 while changing planes on his way home after a vacation in Tunisia. According to Arar, after thirteen days of interrogations in a federal cell, he was hooded, shackled, and flown to Amman, Jordan, before being driven across the border into Syria—where he was delivered into the custody of a secret police unit.

Despite being innocent of any crime, Arar was held for more than a year, and, he says, brutally beaten during that time, often with a shredded electrical cable. “They mostly aimed for my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists—they were sore and red for three weeks,” he said in November 2003. “They also struck me on my hips, and lower back. Interrogators constantly threatened me with the metal chair, tire and electric shocks.”10

While admitting and defending the policy of renditions, CIA director Porter Goss—as well as other Bush administration officials—have denied the allegations of torture. “This agency does not do torture,” Goss told USA Today. “We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture.”11

“Unique and innovative,” however, sounds like a quaint euphemism considering the methods that Goss was referring to—so-called CIA “enhanced interrogation techniques” that are designed to break prisoners during interrogation.

As CIA sources described to Britain’s Independent, those techniques include such things as: the “attention grab,” in which an interrogator violently shakes a prisoner; the “attention slap” which is “aimed at causing pain and triggering fear”; “cold treatment” during which a prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept at approximately 50 degrees and constantly doused with cold water; and “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is bound to a board, plastic is wrapped over his face and either water is poured over him or his head is lowered into a tub—triggering an automatic gag reflex.12 The CIA claims that these techniques don’t amount to torture—which is defined by the United Nations as “an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.” However, according to the Independent, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the waterboarding technique lasted an average of only fourteen seconds before having to have the procedure stopped.

A tool the administration refuses to lose

The Bush administration’s response to the latest round of torture allegations has been entirely predictable. Administration officials claim that the U.S. does not condone or use torture, and that any torture that does occur is the result of individual bad acts—however, it says it reserves the right to take whatever necessary steps to carry out the war on terror.

On her latest trip to Europe, even as the revelations about the CIA’s black-site prisons were making news, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told foreign leaders that “the U.S. does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances.” In the same breath, however, she chided those same leaders for criticizing U.S. “intelligence gathering,” claiming that the information gained “has helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives.” Overall, said Rice, “The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice,” and therefore, “more extraordinary measures must be taken.”

The Bush administration’s embrace of torture is certainly nothing new. From the beginnings of the war on terror, when the administration refused to abide by the Geneva Conventions or other international laws prohibiting torture and ensuring detainees’ rights, the administration has signaled that it is willing to use whatever means necessary to prosecute its wars and occupations.

A section of the administration, led by Dick Cheney, has pushed even farther than the regular “we-don’t-torture-but-we-reserve-the-right-to-if-we-need-to” line. Vice President Dick Cheney has led the fight to derail legislation introduced by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and approved by the Senate in October that would prohibit the military’s use of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U.S. government custody.

While Bush has threatened to veto the bill, in late October Cheney, along with CIA Director Porter Goss, met with McCain, to strong-arm him into accepting a proposal that would exempt the CIA “if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.” Whether or not the administration can hold to its openly pro-torture stance, however, is a political equation. For the Bush administration, the impact of each new torture revelation is directly connected to the overall growing hatred—both at home and abroad—of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Internationally, the torture scandal has begun to put pressure on governments—both those that support the U.S. occupation and those who may have “passively” allowed the U.S. to abduct detainees. In Italy, for example, a judge recently issued extradition orders for twenty-two CIA agents accused in the February 13, 2003, kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a cleric also known as Abu Omar from Milan. Nasr, according to prosecutors, was sent to Egypt where he was tortured. The case is threatening to become a black eye for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—one of the Bush administration’s strongest supporters in the war on terror. Already, one of the wanted CIA agents has publicly stated that Italian officials were aware of the operation.13

Newly appointed German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces similar pressure to stand up to the United States. A report by the Berliner Zeitung newspaper said eighty-five CIA flights had taken off or landed at the U.S. Rhein-Main air base in Frankfurt between 2002 and 2004. Baghdad, Kabul, and the Jordanian capital Amman were among the most frequent points of origin and destination.14

In his first written report about the investigation into the rendering of prisoners to and from EU countries, Dick Marty, a Swiss diplomat leading an investigation for the forty-six nation Council of Europe, reported that not only did preliminary evidence suggest that U.S. agents had kidnapped and illegally transferred detainees between countries, but that there likely was some degree of collaboration from European officials as well—a revelation likely to spark outrage among ordinary Europeans.15

Here at home, each new revelation of torture further exposes the administration’s biggest lies: that the U.S. is a force for “liberation” and that the war on terror is making us safer. Today, opinion polls show that 54 percent or more of Americans want U.S. forces withdrawn promptly from Iraq and 60 percent now believe it was a mistake to have sent troops in the first place. Meanwhile, a sinking economy and a string of high-profile political scandals have left Bush’s approval ratings hovering around 40 percent.

While the Democratic Party “opposition” proved itself unwilling and unable to seize on the Abu Ghraib scandal during last year’s election (in its pro-occupation and “tough on terror” stance), some Democrats—notably liberals like Ted Kennedy—are beginning to make noise about the latest round of torture allegations.

More significantly, however, certain members of the Republican Party—and even in the Bush administration itself—have signaled growing unease at the direction of the administration’s policy on torture.

In July, Senate Republicans—including Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist—broke ranks with the administration to support McCain’s anti-torture bill. While the administration was still attempting to work out a compromise with McCain as this article went to press, some reports suggested that Condoleezza Rice was urging the administration to quietly drop its opposition to McCain’s bill.

From Rice’s perspective, going the more traditional route—having the administration officially sign onto a torture ban while quietly allowing the CIA to go about its business as usual—may be more politically expedient and ensure better PR for a presidency that’s already taken a severe political hit in the polls. Rice may have been hoping to stave off the kind of bad press that resulted in late November, when Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, suggested in a BBC interview that Cheney’s crafting of the administration’s torture policy may in fact make him guilty of a war crime.16 And however sincere McCain (and coauthor of the bill Senator Joe Lieberman) are about preventing torture, both were staunch supporters of the invasion of Iraq, and Lieberman continues to defend Bush’s war policies. They are both perfectly comfortable with “shock and awe” bombing, the use of phosphorous (a chemical weapon) in Fallujah, and other such devices of mass violence—just so long as people held in U.S. custody aren’t tortured. In any case, McCain, who spent time as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, is helping to propagate a particularly insidious myth—that the current torture revelations somehow go against standard American practices and morals. “Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture,” writes Naomi Klein,

McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge “that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them.” It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as [historian Alfred] McCoy writes, “its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more,” a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.17

NIcole Colson is a writer for Socialist Worker.