Torture: the ‘rot’ began at the top

The Bush administration has been caught in another lie.

Remember how the president looked earnestly into the television cameras on Oct. 6, 2007, and said, “This government does not torture people.”

While the issue of illegal and inhumane practices towards prisoners erupted into public consciousness following the release of gruesome photos from Abu Ghraib in April 2004, secret memos dating from much earlier reveal that detailed and elaborate discussions on the use of torture were held in the White House by top government officials

Rather than just “a few bad apples,” as those lower military members who were prosecuted for their crimes at Abu Ghraib were labeled, these documents prove the “rot” began at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Discussions about how to get around U.S. and international law were held almost immediately after 9/11 by Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft, among others.

While there are variances in the words defining torture in the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter and other U.N. conventions and declarations, as well as U.S. military and domestic codes, the indisputable meaning prohibits the use of severe pain, suffering or degradation, whether mental or physical, to be intentionally inflicted on any person for the purpose of gaining information or a confession.

Such policies are considered “war crimes” in international law, with prosecution not limited to the actual practitioners of torture but applicable to those who promulgated and issued the orders.

Since 9/11, there has been a sustained effort by elements of the Bush administration, particularly Cheney, to assert that the president has unlimited power to order brutal interrogations of detainees in order to extract information deemed necessary to protect the U.S.

When confronted by allegations of torture by U.S. military or CIA and FBI agents abroad, the White House initially asserted that these acts were “aberrations.” Later they said the request for expanded interrogation techniques came from “the field.”

Documents attained by the ACLU in its ongoing legal battle over the hundreds of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay prove that the use of waterboarding, prolonged stress positions, 20-hour interrogation sessions, extreme isolation, hooding, nudity, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes and other brutal measures was approved at the highest level of government, including George W. Bush. Instructions giving legal cover for torture were sent to the CIA and Defense Department beginning in 2002.

Ashcroft, at one of these “torture” discussions, voiced this concern: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

However, recent revelations of official approval by the Bush administration of torture are only part of the picture. The jails and prisons of the U.S., police departments, immigration agents, mental hospitals, juvenile “boot camps” and other repressive institutions employ similar inhumane, often racist, sexist and homophobic tactics to force confessions, maintain control or alter behavior.

Countless lawsuits over prison conditions detail how Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo-style torture is practiced throughout the U.S., from the decades-long solitary confinement of the members of the Angola 3 to the torture-induced “confessions” behind the indictment of the San Francisco 8.

Over 2 million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails, mostly men and women of color, almost all poor, often convicted of crimes of survival without having adequate legal representation.

The connections between “the war abroad” and “the war at home” reveal themselves clearly through prison bars and isolation cells.