Torture now official policy
By Heather Cottin
We saw the photographs. The images are burned into our
memories. Men tied to the floor of a cargo plane, blindfolded
and duct-taped. Shackled men kneeling, their heads covered in
black hoods. Then, barely able to walk, being led from outdoor
cages to interrogation in Guan tan amo Naval Base.
And now comes word that the United States has murdered
prisoners of war. Amnesty International and other human rights
organizations have reported the death of two prisoners being
interrogated at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. A U.S.
military doctor confirmed that the official cause of death was
homicide.
"Dilawar, 22, from Afghanistan's Khost region, died from
'blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating
coronary artery disease' while another captive, Mullah
Habibullah, 30, suffered from a blood clot in the lung that was
exacerbated by a 'blunt force injury,'" reported Andrew Gumbel
in the Independent of London on March 7.
George W. Bush, in his State of the Union address in
January, bragged that alleged al-Qaeda members captured by the
U.S. were meeting "a different fate." "Let's put it this way,
they are no longer a problem to the United States and our
friends and allies."Bush joins a host of officials who are
flouting international treaties that forbid torture. His
flippant remarks encourage these brutal techniques in the
Pentagon's colonial outposts.
This comes after human rights groups have criticized the
U.S. policy of handing suspects over to countries where torture
techniques are an established part of the security apparatus.
Human Rights Watch has said, "There is no distinction between
using torture directly and subcontracting it out." For years,
the U.S. military, through infamous institutions like the
School of the Americas, taught these techniques to officers
from countries under right-wing dictatorships in Latin
America-- regimes that used the most brutal methods to repress
workers and peasants challenging the oligarchies and U.S.
businesses behind them. But now Washington is using torture
directly.
The policy is backfiring. Awareness of Washington's reliance
on ruthless cruelty is growing. International solidarity is
growing against imperialism in all its savage forms.
Reprinted from the March 20, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to
support pro-labor, anti-war news.
Email
this article
Printable
page