2nd Aug 2022

USA and Torture: A History of Hypocrisy

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”– George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

It seems that after the battle, the Continentals were preparing to run some of the British Empire’s German mercenaries through what they called the “gauntlet.” General Washington discovered this and intervened. Washington then issued an order to his troops regarding prisoners of war:

“‘Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands,’ he wrote. In all respects the prisoners were to be treated no worse than American soldiers; and in some respects, better. Through this approach, Washington sought to shame his British adversaries, and to demonstrate the moral superiority of the American cause.”

In the worst of times when foreign troops literally occupied American soil, torturing and murdering American patriots and few believed that the cause of the revolution could ultimately win against the might of the British Empire, the first Commander in Chief of the U.S.A. set the precedent that this society is to lead even our enemies by “benignant sympathy of [our] example.” To win the war against the occupying army of Redcoats, the American revolutionaries needed right on their side.

And it worked. Many of the German Hessians in fact joined the revolutionaries in their fight against the English and stayed here in America to be free when the war was won.

ListVerse: The first 100 years or so of the United States’ existence was filled with travesties like the Civil War and the enormous slave trade which flourished in the South. In addition, manifest destiny and the inherent racism involved with the “white man’s burden” led to a number of horrible massacres of the Native American population. 

An island in Clear Lake, California, was renamed Bloody Island after the massacre of the indigenous Pomo tribe there in 1850. Thanks to severe mistreatment, including rape and murder, at the hands of white men who had taken various members of the tribe as slaves, the Pomo people attacked, killing two men and escaping to a nearby lake.

Captain Nathaniel Lyon, a soldier in the US Cavalry, and other men set off into the woods to find the offending tribe. The men discovered the hidden camp a short time later.

After failing to successfully reach the tribe, which had taken refuge on an island in the lake, the soldiers built a handful of boats, loaded them with cannons, and attacked. From 100 to 400 Native Americans were killed.

A local newspaper originally declared the massacre to be tantamount to state-sponsored genocide but reversed course four days later, calling it a “greatly exaggerated” story.

Perhaps the deadliest massacre of Native Americans in US history, the Bear River Massacre has remained in obscurity largely because it occurred during the Civil War. The Northern Shoshone called present-day southeastern Idaho home, and it was there that they were attacked.

Mormon settlers had been progressively taking more land from the Native Americans, appropriating nearly all of the arable territory. Striking back at those stealing their land, the Shoshone soon saw themselves in the crosshairs of Colonel Patrick Connor and 200 California Volunteers, who vowed to take no prisoners.

At daybreak on January 29, 1863, the soldiers attacked, brutally killing nearly 250 Native Americans. They raped any women who hadn’t been killed, used axes to crush the skulls of the wounded, and set fire to all the lodges.

Chemical Warfare

ShadowProof: According to a CIA document declassified in March 2006, the U.S. government lied publicly about pushing for a United Nations “on-the-spot” investigation into Soviet, Chinese and North Korean charges of U.S. use of biological weapons (BW) during the Korean War.

According to the document, a “Memorandum of Conversation” from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) dated July 6, 1953, the U.S. was not serious about conducting any investigation into such charges, despite what the government said publicly. The reason the U.S. didn’t want any investigation was because an “actual investigation” would reveal military operations, “which, if revealed, could do us psychological as well as military damage.”

The memorandum specifically stated as an example of what could be revealed “8th Army preparations or operations (e.g. chemical warfare).” SEE PHOTO ABOVE

Trouble Countering Charges of Biological Warfare

The “memorandum of conversation” — really the minutes of the meeting — concerns a discussion of the difficulties U.S. psywar experts were having getting academics to back the government’s own propagandistic critique of the World Peace Council-backed International Scientific Commission’s (ISC) conclusion supporting Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used offensive biological weapons in Korea. The situation was crucial because the evidence was backed up by the statements of a number of captured U.S. airmen, including some officers, providing confessions of use of BW, and giving detailed descriptions of who ordered it and how it was done.

The U.S. responded to the airmen’s confessions with claims they were coerced, false confessions. Some claimed (with CIA connivance, if not inspiration) the POWs were “brainwashed.” The origins of the Bush-era “enhanced interrogation” torture program can be traced in part to CIA and military research meant to counter, supposedly, the possibility of such “brainwashing.” But since they knew it wasn’t actually “brainwashing,” the whole explanation was really a cover story for the creation of a psychologically based torture program.

(For more on the history of the ISC, which was chaired by the famous British historian of Chinese science, Dr. Joseph Needham, click here.)

Souvenirs of torture in Vietnam

IndyWeek: Sean Flynn was, of course, the incredibly handsome son of movie actor Errol Flynn. "Looks like me but better," the father had the grace to say. He'd been in a few rather bad movies himself. And he certainly had the appearance of the worldly sophisticate when he arrived at the tender age of 24 in Vietnam as a freelance photojournalist. But the truth was, Flynn had never worked as a photographer, never been a journalist before and just didn't understand the rules.

Because of his looks and the "swashbuckling" name he carried on from his father, he was a favorite of all the troops. He looked terrific in his tailored fatigues and the GIs all wanted to have their picture taken with him. Not long after he arrived in the country, he went out for an extended period with the Green Berets. They tortured prisoners; he took pictures of prisoners being tortured. But, when the pictures were sent out worldwide by UPI, a minor storm broke loose in the Green Beret camps where he had stayed, a mere ripple, of course, compared to reaction to the Abu Ghraib torture pictures.

And the Green Berets came looking for Flynn in Saigon. We laughed as he dodged his old buddies; and, of course, when they did catch up with him, they just bought him a drink and invited him on another adventure with them. The two pictures that I had saved show one Viet Cong prisoner strapped to an Asian version of the western cross; another one shows a VC suspect being strung upside down for his interrogation. These were routine procedures. In the manuscript for my Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, I had mentioned another popular method of attaching a crank telephone with wires to a man's testicles.

A group of very young Marines was being tried for having mutilated and tortured several civilians in yet another now forgotten village somewhere north of Danang. The testimony was pretty gruesome as the details unfolded.

The last of the witnesses was a shy young Marine from Brooklyn.

He told how one Vietnamese woman was strung from a little bridge and the Americans kept throwing grenades at her. He told how they strung an old man up with a hangman's noose and then knocked a chair out from under him and then proceeded to stab him again and again. Still, he never looked up, until the prosecutor asked, "Was there anything unusual about your fellow Marines' behavior as they did all this?"

The boy suddenly sat up, ramrod straight, looked the members of the court in the eyes and said: "Yes, sir. They were all laughing."

Yes, as in all wars, the Americans absolutely did torture prisoners in Vietnam. But, I don't think there was ever anything like the kind of sick sado-masochistic sexual humiliation and torture we saw in Iraq.

“Tiger Cages” in Vietnam

UCPress: Fifty years ago today, Life magazine printed photographs taken inside a prison on an island off the coast of Vietnam called Côn Sơn.

The photos depicted a wing of a former French colonial prison that held prisoners in pit-like recessed concrete boxes measuring five by nine feet — too short for most people to stand in. Around 300 men and 200 women, including at least one fifteen-year-old girl, were locked in these cramped, brutal “tiger cages.”

The Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, operated this prison under close advisement of the United States. In fact, this prison was part of the mass incarceration system that Vietnam built in the 1960s, with the help of U.S. law-enforcement experts and funding from the CIA. The prison on Côn Sơn island held accused Vietnamese Communists, along with many persecuted ethnic and religious minorities and people arrested for peaceful political dissidence. Although most were not kept in the tiger cages, general conditions were deplorable. Illness and disease were endemic, lizards and insects rampant. Malnourishment was common. From the catwalks between those cages, guards tossed quick lime, a chemical that caused painful skin burns, on prisoners who complained. Many former prisoners reported that they were beaten, held in manacles, and denied medical care.

U.S. advisors did not stop these abuses.

No member of Congress or the U.S. public was supposed to lay eyes on the tiger cages. But in 1970, a U.S. delegation visited South Vietnam. At the time, the fate of the U.S. war effort was uncertain. President Richard Nixon had campaigned on a promise to bring the war to a close. A year into his first term, he hoped to ascertain whether “pacification”—a combined security and development initiative—was trending toward success. His opponents and supporters in Congress also wondered how the war was going. The select committee delegation of ten members was organized to assess the situation on the ground.

When the delegation arrived to the island, Frank Walton, a U.S. advisor who was previously a high-ranking Los Angeles Police Department officer, boasted that the inspection would reveal a facility with better conditions than prisons at home. (That may actually have been true.) But Tom Harkin, a congressional aide, and Don Luce, a humanitarian volunteer who translated for the delegation, had learned from an ex-prisoner how to locate the hidden area of the prison containing the tiger cages. They were appalled by the conditions they witnessed.

But the delegation’s official report on the trip minimized the abusive prison conditions. Harkin then decided to leak the photos. Incensed at the “whitewash,” he felt compelled to bear witness to the violations he saw. The infamous photos ran in Life.

Genocide and Slavery

CounterPunch: Torture is almost always a crime attributed to other, less civilized peoples. When most Americans do think of their own country’s torture, if they think of it at all, they usually imagine it to be a regrettable departure the civilized norm misguidedly perpetrated amid the terror and fury ignited by the deadliest attack on US soil in generations. Yet torture has been an unspoken weapon in America’s arsenal since the earliest colonial days. In a nation built on a foundation of genocide and slavery, horrific violence, including widespread torture, was a critical tool for securing and maintaining white dominance in the same way that great global violence has been crucial to perpetuating America’s superpower status in modern times. 

The same founding fathers who constitutionally proscribed “cruel and unusual punishment” endorsed and committed the most heinous crimes against both Native Americans and black slaves — witness Thomas Jefferson calling for the “extermination or removal” of Virginia’s Indians. Ever fearful of revolt and revenge, white Southerners subjected black slaves to the some of the cruelest punishments imaginable to break both their physical and psychological ability to resist.

A World of Hurt

By the dawn of the twentieth century, American torture went global following the imperial conquest of former Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, where US occupation troops faced courts-martial for, among other crimes, waterboarding captured resistance fighters. Meanwhile back home, black Americans were scorched, skinned, disemboweled and castrated while still alive by otherwise upstanding citizens, including women and children, during many of the thousands of lynchings that plagued the Jim Crow South and far beyond.

During World War II, the vast bulk of the most barbarous tortures were committed by America’s German and Japanese enemies. Yet rather than punish some of the worst offenders, the United States paid both Nazi and Japanese war criminals for their grisly knowledge as it sought an edge over the Soviet Union in biowarfare, weapons, mind control, espionage and other technologies and techniques. It wasn’t long before the US was carrying out its own torture programs, like the notorious Project MK-ULTRA, while aiding or committing torture in support of brutal dictators in various Cold War hot spots around the world from Vietnam to Iran to Greece, South America and the more recent genocides of Guatemala and East Timor. There are too many other examples to list in this “brief history.”

Torture by the Book

Starting in the early 1960s, the CIA, then the US military, produced torture manuals that were used to instruct both US and foreign personnel in kidnapping, interrogation, assassination and democracy suppression. These manuals introduced or perfected many of the methods that would later become all too familiar to the world as the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the George W. Bush administration in the post-9/11 era. Cold War operatives like Dan Mitrione, a USAID official who kidnapped and then tortured homeless Uruguayans to death in a soundproof Montevideo dungeon to teach local security forces, informed and inspired Bush-era officials who would prove all too willing to authorize appalling physical and psychological tortures in the name of national security.

By September 11, 2001, the United States had literally written the book — a whole series of them — on torture. The shocking slaughter of nearly 3,000 Americans on that bright, blue Tuesday morning, coupled with the hard-line ideology of many leading Bush officials, led to torture becoming official administration doctrine. Bush falsely argued that domestic and international laws against torture no longer applied in the new worldwide war. Justice Department lawyer John Yoo even asserted that the president had unlimited wartimes powers to order the massacre of an entire village of civilians if he so desired.

“If the Detainee Dies, You’re Doing it Wrong”

Although administration and CIA attorneys now endorsed “cruel, inhuman or degrading” detainee treatment as long as it happened abroad, considerable vagueness remained about how much torture was too much. Yoo successfully argued that abuse is only torture if the pain inflicted was equal to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Jonathan Fredman, a CIA attorney, asserted that “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” Plenty of detainees would indeed die, but we’re not quite there yet.

First came Guantánamo Bay, where men and boys captured during the early days of Bush’s anti-Islamist crusade, many of them sold for hefty bounties, were sent for interrogation. Bush called these people the “worst of the worst.” However, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all knew that the majority of GITMO detainees were innocent but refused to release them, largely for political reasons.

Nonetheless, Guantánamo prisoners were subjected to tortures including severe beatings, interrupted drowning (better known as waterboarding), brutal sodomization, shackling in excruciating “stress positions,” prolonged sleep, sensory and dietary deprivation, solitary confinement, and exposure to extreme temperatures and maddeningly repetitive loud music. Medical professionals, including leading psychiatrists and psychologists, actively participated in, and even devised, these torture sessions and techniques.

“You Can’t Spell Abuse Without Abu”

As the war on terror expanded to include countries that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, people resisting US invasion and occupation, as well as innocent men, women and children, were imprisoned and abused. The most notorious of these torture prisons was Abu Ghraib near Baghdad, Iraq, where prolonged vicious beatings, sexual humiliation and death threats were common, and where men, at least one boy and, allegedly, numerous women were raped by their jailers. As one former guard there quipped, “you can’t spell abuse without Abu.”

Abu Ghraib detainees were forced to sleep in flooded cells without mattresses, stripped naked and forced to crawl and bark like dogs, attacked with dogs, forced to curse Islam and eat pork and food from dirty toilets. Old women were dragged around by their hair, ridden like donkeys and urinated on by soldiers like Sgt. Charles Graner, who was fond of sodomizing innocent detainees with found objects.

“The Christian in me says it’s wrong,” Graner said of torturing prisoners. “But the corrections officer in me says, ‘I love making a grown man piss himself.’”

Gen. Antonio Taguba, who compiled a scathing report on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, concluded that the majority of prisoners there — the Red Cross said 70 to 90 percent— were innocent. Female relatives of wanted Iraqi insurgents were also jailed at Abu Ghraib as bargaining chips. One woman was thrown in a cell with the corpse of her murdered son. Perhaps the most shocking yet little-known fact about Abu Ghraib is that at least 34 detainees died there while in US custody, with nearly half of these deaths officially listed as homicides. By 2006, at least 100 prisoners had died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently.

Tortured to Death

The most well-publicized detainee death happened at the notorious “Salt Pit,” a CIA black site, or secret prison, in Afghanistan, where Gul Rahman died of hypothermia after being stripped naked and chained to a wall in near-freezing temperatures. Abuse of prisoners, who were often kidnapped from third countries in a practice known as extraordinary rendition, was rampant at black sites around the world, including Detention Center Green in Thailand, which Gina Haspel ran in late 2002.

Black site prisoners were hung by chains from ceilings for days on end, stuffed into boxes, deprived of sleep, shackled naked in cold temperatures and subjected to mock executions. Prior to Haspel’s arrival, CIA torturers at Detention Center Green waterboarded the wrong man, a cooperative man, 83 times in a month. In addition to supervising Detention Center Green, Haspel also played a key role in the destruction of videotaped CIA torture sessions.

Scores of friendly nations as well as some of the world’s most notorious dictators, including Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and the mullahs of Iran, cooperated with the CIA’s rendition program. The US also outsourced torture and interrogation by sending abductees to these and other countries knowing they would be abused, as well as by allowing agents from some of the world’s worst human rights violators, including China, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and Libya, to interrogate and even abuse detainees inside Guantánamo.

Bush Impunity, Trump Opportunity

There was widespread hope that the election of Barack Obama, who promised to end and investigate torture, would usher in an age of justice and transparency. However, not only did Obama, who explained that he wanted to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” fail to prosecute or even investigate the policies and actions of the Bush officials who authorized and justified torture, he actively protected them from facing justice for their crimes. Obama also declined to declassify a landmark 2014 Senate report detailing brutal, even deadly, detainee abuse by CIA operatives, and torture continued at Guantánamo and elsewhere under his watch despite an early executive order banning it.

In a very real sense, Obama’s dubious decision to “look forward” set the stage for President Trump to look backwards into the darkest depths of our nation’s past and openly embrace torture, which he did on the 2016 campaign trail when he vowed to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and during his presidency when he nominated two torture supporters to head the CIA. However, unlike the dramatic surge in civilian casualties following Trump’s promise to “bomb the shit out of” Islamic State militants and kill their innocent families, there hasn’t been any reported spike in torture under the current administration. There have, however, been continued allegations of detainee abuse at Guatánamo Bay.

There have also been well-documented cases of abuse, including widespread sex crimes, at prisons, many of them for-profit, holding immigrants and asylum seekers who often languish behind bars for years as their cases slowly proceed through the system. Meanwhile, solitary confinement — which former Vietnam POW John McCain and others have called a form of torture every bit as awful as physical torment — is used to punish and break inmates, including children, at prisons, jails and detention facilities across America.

Return to Darkness? 

To this day, not a single US government, military or intelligence official who devised, authorized, supervised or implemented America’s decades-old torture regime has been brought to justice or even criminally investigated for what are very clearly grave violations of domestic and international law. The American people don’t seem to care. A 2016 International Red Cross survey found that nearly half of Americans believe it is acceptable to torture enemy combatants to obtain important information. This, despite the fact that military and intelligence veterans, as well as the Senate torture report, concur that torture doesn’t work and produces unreliable information at best. Denial — from the highest levels of government to mainstream media still reluctant or refusing to even say or print the word torture to a public which still embraces torture despite its barbarity and inefficacy — is the order of the day when it comes to facing America’s tortured history. Our nation’s failure to honestly examine its darkest deeds raises the all-too-real prospect of their repetition, a chilling possibility that seems likelier than ever given Trump’s choice of Haspel, someone accused of torturing for torture’s sake — and enjoying it.

The Chicago Police Department’s History of Torture

TheNation: The Chicago Police Department has been synonymous with all of the very worst excesses of law enforcement culture in the United States for decades, its actions exacerbated by a culture of winking, backslapping, and encouragement from elected officials and parts of the community. This is, after all, a culture of policing that considers the murder of Fred Hampton and the clubbing of protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention as its high-water marks.

I am a white Chicagoan, one who grew up around cops telling hilarious stories to preteens at block parties about how to beat a suspect without leaving any bruises. Needless to say, there is nothing funny about those stories for those on the receiving end. Laurence Ralph, a Princeton anthropology professor, looks back at some of the Chicago Police Department’s most egregious abuses, including the Jon Burge scandal, which revealed the CPD’s history of using torture techniques against more than 100 suspects—a monumental miscarriage of justice that was an open secret among police, prosecutors, and elected officials in Chicago for decades. The abuse of suspects in CPD custody was widespread and vile, a direct influence on the more widely publicized abuses that happened during the so-called War on Terror.

Richard Zuley was a Chicago police detective accused of participating in torture, and by the time of his retirement in 2007 he had already been working for five years with defense personnel at Guantánamo Bay who sought his “expertise.” As a form of sadistic retribution, “enhanced interrogation techniques” were found to be effective by the men and women who interviewed terrorism suspects after 9/11; as a way of gaining useful information, however, they accomplished little.

There's an extensive history of police torture aimed at extracting confessions or incrimination of others from suspects, including brutal beatings, sexual penetration (some participating officers appeared to have had an obsession with injuring male suspects’ genitals), third-degree burns, and electric shocks. Participation was not limited to Chicago Police Department personnel but was observed (and thus condoned) by members of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office.

One African American female officer, in a memorable passage, says that she was aware of the behavior of other cops. Like all officers who knew but did not participate, she was placed on a list of “risks” to the perpetrators. In the end, she took little action. It is easy enough for the reader to judge her for failing to act as a whistle-blower. But when the total lack of accountability on the part of the police, and the absence of interest in reining in the worst offenders, are taken into account (not to mention the personal risk involved), whistle-blowing is easier to see as symbolic martyrdom. In the end, we cannot rely on individual heroes to fix what are deep, systemic problems that rot American law enforcement to the core at every level.

READ MORE: The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site' (The Guardian)

Britannica: Rampart scandal, official inquiry (1998–2000) into corruption among officers of the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). More than 70 officers were implicated in misconduct, including unprovoked beatings and shootings, planting and covering up evidence, stealing and dealing drugs, and perjury.

The Rampart Division of the LAPD, located west of downtown Los Angeles, was the most populous area of Los Angeles and had a primarily Latino population. It was also one of the busiest divisions in terms of calls for service and criminal activity. In the late 1970s and 1980s the area experienced an increase in violent crime, particularly crime involving gangs, drugs, and weapons. To combat the rising violent gang crime, the department, then headed by Chief Daryl Gates, created a group of elite antigang units called CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). The type of officers who were selected for those units were those not afraid to talk to gang members; Gates intended the officers to mix with gang members in order to gather intelligence to be used for the prevention of violent crime.

In May 1998, after concerns surfaced about the actions of some officers, LAPD Chief of Police Bernard Parks named an investigative task force. Its attention came to focus on one CRASH officer in particular, Rafael Perez. Perez was arrested in August on suspicion of having stolen 8 pounds of cocaine valued at more than $1 million from a police evidence locker in 1998. As a part of a plea agreement for a reduced sentence, he agreed to cooperate with investigators and provided information on more than 70 officers, including police supervisors who committed corrupt acts or allowed them to occur.

Perez testified in court that CRASH officers essentially became a gang. They wore skull tattoos with cowboy hats and poker cards portraying the dead man’s hand of aces and eights. In addition to reporting the theft of money and drugs, Perez described some of the horrific actions that he claimed police officers in the CRASH unit committed. Some of the more chilling allegations were that officers had murdered or attempted to murder innocent people and planted weapons on them to cover up the crimes. One example was the police shooting of a man, Juan Saldana, while he was running in an apartment hallway. Saldana fell to the floor and the officers planted a gun on him to justify the shooting. Officers then fabricated a cover-up story while Saldana bled to death. Other innocent victims were paralyzed or served time in prison on trumped-up charges. These crimes, according to Perez, were celebrated and rewarded by CRASH supervisors.

The racial and ethnic implications of these events were evident to many observers. The victims of the police killings and woundings, and those who were routinely arrested on fabricated evidence and charges, were young, poor, working-class, African Americans or Latinos, some of whom were recent immigrants. Members of those minorities consistently felt victimized by the police.

As a result of the scandal, the City of Los Angeles faced more than 140 civil lawsuits with an estimated settlement cost of $125 million. The investigation resulted in the overturning of more than 100 cases and the uncovering of corruption in many more.

Solitary Confinement: Torture in U.S. Prisons

Prolonged solitary confinement causes prisoners significant mental harm and places them at grave risk of even more devastating future harm. These harms may be permanent and persist even after one is released from solitary.

Researchers have proven that prolonged solitary confinement causes a persistent and heightened state of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, insomnia, lethargy or chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, fear of impending nervous breakdowns and higher rates of hypertension and early morbidity. Other effects include obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes, an oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression, feelings of overall deterioration, and suicidal ideation.

Exposure to such life-shattering conditions clearly constitutes cruel and unusual punishment – in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and international laws.

In 2011, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture concluded that even 15 days in solitary constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and that any longer in solitary can cause irreversible harmful psychological effects. Other independent human rights bodies and U.N. experts have also expressed concern about the overall use of solitary.

Prior to a prisoner-led movement, more than 500 of Pelican Bay’s SHU prisoners had been held in solitary confinement for 10 or more years, and over 78 prisoners had languished in solitary for more than 20 years.. California had more people in solitary, for longer time periods, and with less justification, than any other state.

ListVerse: In 2012, prison authorities boiled Darren Rainey to death when they forced him to take a two-hour shower in scalding water that was 82 degrees Celsius (180 °F). The water, hot enough to cook a cup of overpriced ramen from the prison commissary, burned over 90 percent of Rainey’s body. As staff members pulled Rainey’s limp body from the shower, his skin sloughed off. They had, in essence, cooked him alive.

His offense?

Rainey, who was schizophrenic, had defecated in his cell. When Harriet Krzykowski, a former counselor at the Dade Correctional Institution, asked a guard how they were going to deal with Rainey, the guard calmly assured her, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll put him in the shower.” Krzykowski assumed this was a good thing.

The next day, Krzykowski learned that the guards had locked Rainey in a claustrophobic stall and showered him, by force, with a hose. Only the guards, not Rainey, were able to control the water temperature. Because the shower was so small, there was nothing Rainey could do to escape the scalding water.

Nearby inmates reported that Rainey had screamed for help during the two-hour torture session. Rainey, who was serving a sentence for cocaine possession, a nonviolent offense, was cooked like a lobster.

According to Rainey’s fellow inmates, Rainey was not the first person who had been locked in the shower under these conditions. However, he was the first to die.

“Mandingo” fighting, a practice in which slaves were forced to fight to the death, has been widely discredited. Yet in modern correctional facilities across the United States, guards force majority–minority inmates to fight one another for entertainment. In San Francisco’s main jail, reserved for pretrial detainees and those serving short sentences, these forced fights have been dubbed “gladiator matches.”

According to San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, guards place bets on who they think will win. If inmates refuse to fight, officers threaten them with rape and other acts of violence. Adachi stated of the practice, “I can only describe this as an outrageously sadistic scenario that sounds like it’s out of Game of Thrones.”

Former inmate Rico Palikiko Garcia described how these fights, which he participated in under the threat of being beaten and tased, left him with broken ribs. According to Garcia, guards warned the inmates that they would be beaten if they were honest about the source of their injuries.

One guard allegedly instructed an inmate to tell jail medical staff that he had fallen from his bunk. Officers forced another victim, Stanley Harris, to do push-ups in preparation for the fights. Harris claims that prison staff threatened him with anal rape if he did not comply.

In 2016, Terrill Thomas died of dehydration while confined in Milwaukee County jail. The medical examiner who conducted Thomas’s autopsy called his dehydration “profound.” At the time of his death, Thomas, who was mentally ill, was in his 10th day of solitary confinement. Corrections officers claim that they turned off Thomas’s water after he flooded his cell.

According to Thomas’s family, this was torture. Witnesses report hearing Thomas begging for water for several days. In an email statement, Sheriff David Clarke refused to comment on the lawsuit.

However, Clarke took care to note Thomas’s alleged criminal background, as if that justified his totally preventable death:

I have nearly 1,000 inmates. I don’t know all their names, but is this the guy who was in custody for shooting up the Potawatomi Casino, causing one man to be hit by gunfire while in possession of a firearm by a career convicted felon? The media never reports that in stories about him. If that is him, then at least I know who you are talking about.

In September 2013, Richard Mair, locked up in Dade Correctional Institute’s Mental Health Unit, hanged himself. In his suicide note, Mair accused prison guards of punishing inmates with starvation. He also repeated the assertions of other inmates—that officers forced them to fight and placed bets on the winners.

Mair also alleged sexual assault by prison employees, claiming that one asked Mair to strip out of his clothes and touch himself in exchange for cigarettes. Mair had been raped in the past. In his suicide note, he claimed that the officer knew it.

In fact, Mair suggested that he was in the mental health unit to get help for his depression and suicidal tendencies, all of which were worsened by the recent sexual assault. Mair wrote that when he refused the lieutenant’s advances, the lieutenant “slammed [him] against the wall, kicked [him] in the groin . . . and told [him] to keep [his] mouth shut or else.”

Prisoners raped by dogs, the ‘modern’ torture techniques of the US

Hambastagi: The recent publication of documents by Senator Dianne Feinstein detailing the torture techniques and abuse of prisoners by the CIA, has once again exposed the nasty and criminal nature of the bloodthirsty US government. 

Any person who knows the bloody history of US invasions and interventions knows well that the US-installed military dictators and stooges in every corner of the world use inhumane torture methods as a weapon to intimidate their people and suppress uprisings. What interested me in this regard was a book called ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ by German journalist and politician Juergen Todenhoefer which is a memoir of his trip to Afghanistan and to Bagram prison in particular. 

Juergen speaks to Jack in Kabul, a former Canadian soldier and private security contractor. Jack says that the torture methods mentioned in the report released by the US senate is something common they do to all prisoners like chaining a person by their hands on a ceiling, tying up hands and feet, and sleep and food deprivation. But, he says, what happens in Bagram prison is unusual:

“Afghan prisoners were tied face down on small chairs. Then fighting dogs entered the torture chamber. If the prisoners did not say anything useful, each dog got to take a turn on them. After procedure like these, they confessed everything. They would have even said that they killed Kennedy without even knowing who he was.”

With such methods US forces abuse and humiliate Afghans to break their morale. Most Afghan arrested only for physically looking like Taliban. There are no accurate statistics available of the number of prisoners in Bagram prison, but by an estimate there are more than 600 prisoners there and most of them are poor and innocent Afghans.

Jack tells the writer that he could not tolerate to see all this brutality by the Americans against innocent Afghans and left his duty.

American torturers are not the first ones to have used dogs to obtain confessions. This crime has a long history. After the US-backed coup by Pinochet in Chile in 1973, many supporters of Salvador Allende’s democratic government were arrested. Female political prisoners gave accounts of how Americans released dogs on them to rape them and break their morale.

In an interview with Alternet.org (December 15, 2014), Mohammad, an Afghan interpreter in Bagram Airbase stated, “Todenhoefer’s account of dogs being used to rape prisoners in the jail is absolutely realistic.” He continued, “When I translated for them, I often knew that the detainee was anything but a terrorist.”

Mohammad said at the end, “Guantanamo is a paradise if you compare it with Bagram.”

One of the shocking crimes in Bagram prison that also caused an uproar was the death of Dilawar Yaqoubi. Dilawar was a farmer and taxi driver from the eastern Khost province. He was accused of being involved in a rocket attack on the US base and transferred to Bagram prison after being arrested. He was tortured and humiliated for five days after which he died. In the documentary ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, Thomas Curtis who was a Reserve M.P. sergeant in Bagram confessed that Dilawar had been chained by his wrists for hours and brutally beaten till he died on December 10, 2002.

An American medical examiner, Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, who performed an autopsy on Dilawar said:

“Dilawar’s leg was pummeled so badly that the tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified… Torture marks could be seen all over his body… I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”

Six days before Dilawar’s murder, a man named Habibullah was also killed as a result of the US forces’ savage torture. Many people who had worked in Bagram said that Dilawar and Habibullah were both common people; that they were both innocent and that the US army could not produce any evidence to prove that they were terrorists. Despite evidence proving that these two men were killed under torture by US forces, the official report maintains that the two have died of natural causes.

Military prosecutor Stuart Couch who had seen both Guantanamo and Bagram said:

“In my view, having visited Guantanamo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantánamo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear to be allowed to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo.”

The stooge Afghan government has given US forces immunity from prosecution by signing the Security Agreement. Now nobody can hold these soldiers accountable for their viciousness and barbarity.

Georgetown: The United States government explicitly sanctioned this torture in the infamous 2002 “torture memos,” drafted by John Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general for the Bush administration at the time. These memos attempted to give legal justification to the torture program and argued that, while the techniques used “may amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, they do not produce pain or suffering of the necessary intensity to meet the definition of torture.”

Gen Petraeus and the torture units: the other story of the Iraq Surge

TheWeek: TODAY'S Guardian will not make pleasant reading in Washington. For the first time, a major mainstream media outlet has alleged that leading American politicians and military figures, including General David Petraeus, the former commander of US forces in Iraq, were directly involved in a systematic campaign of torture and atrocity carried out against Sunni insurgents by Shia paramilitary units connected to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.

Its findings go far beyond the notorious "enhanced interrogations" of Abu Ghraib. An accompanying documentary produced jointly by The Guardian and the BBC Arabic service describes how Shia paramilitary units such as the feared Special Police Commandos hung prisoners upside down and beat them with cables, tortured them with electricity, and killed terrorist suspects with electric drills.

US military advisor Colonel James Steele was one of various Reagan-era officials from the Central America 'dirty wars' who showed up in Baghdad, such as former Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte, who served as US Ambassador to Iraq in 2004-5.

The former head of the US military mission to El Salvador in the 1980s, Steele once trained the Salvadoran armed forces, whose paramilitary units used very similar tactics against left-wing guerrillas and their civilian supporters.

In his speech welcoming US troops back to Fort Bragg in 2011, Barack Obama hailed this "extraordinary achievement". But the Guardian investigation casts light on the 'stick' - rather than the 'carrot' - that made this achievement possible: a world of secret prisons, torture centres and mass killings carried out by units that were trained and equipped by the US military.

In the past, US politicians and military officers, including Petraeus, have disclaimed knowledge of such events according to the old CIA adage of "plausible deniability". Today that deniability no longer seems so plausible.

Such actions belong to a well-established tradition of strategic terror that can be traced back to Northern Ireland, El Salvador, Vietnam and French Algeria.

They Don't Even Deny It Any More

Many supporters of the torture program argue that it was ethically permissible because it produced military intelligence that may have saved lives. However, there is a wide spread consensus among intelligence officials, military officers, and neuroscientists that torture does not provide credible or valuable intelligence. In the case of the Guantánamo Bay military prison and the blacksites, the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Study found that the torture program was not effective in this regard, and that the CIA’s claims about its effectiveness rested on lies and exaggerations. 

“What do you think about waterboarding?” It’s the rhetorical question that Trump asked of an adoring Ohio audience in June. He answered his own inquiry: “I like it a lot. I don't think it's tough enough.” He seemed to yearn for the medieval torture and execution options available to ISIS militants, saying incredulously: “So we can't do waterboarding, but they can do chopping off heads, drowning people in sealed cages? You have to fight fire with fire.”

Perhaps more troubling, in December, Trump brazenly expressed his desire to seek to kill and torture not only terrorists, but their family members (“We're fighting a very politically correct war,” he said, “and the other thing is with the terrorists: You have to take out their families.”). READ MORE: "I WAS TORTURED IN THE PASADENA JAILHOUSE!"

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PDF icon CCR Factsheet: Solitary Confinement: Torture in U.S. Prisons

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold to these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

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