Torture "Lite"?

Last night we went to hear Amy Goodman of Democracy Now host a panel on Guantánamo. Her guests were Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights; James Yee, a muslim former army chaplain who was arrested for espionage after serving at Guantanamo and later released; and Alfred McCoy, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

From McCoy we learned that far from being an aberration, the Abu Ghraib photos show that the methods of torture that have been perfected by the United States since 1951 are still being routinely used in the interrogation of prisoners. They consist of three kinds: sensory deprivation (hence the hooding scenes); self-inflicted pain (such as a prisoner being forced to hold his or her arms out for days at a time, crucifixion-style); and exploiting cultural or personal phobias (in the case of muslim prisoners, using dogs, using women for sexual humiliation, and desecrating the Koran would all fall into this category).

Psychological torture has been shown to be by far the hardest to treat. John McCain has said repeatedly he would much rather have been beaten than have to face the mock executions that characterized his time as a POW in Vietnam. It’s also the hardest to prove because it leaves no physical traces.

There have been no new prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2004. Where, then, are they being taken? To secret CIA “black sites” around the world, outside the jurisdiction of any U.S. court, away from cameras and journalists and protesters and politicians.

This isn’t just a Bush-Cheney thing. A treaty signed by Clinton essentially excludes mental torture from the activities the U.S. commits itself to avoiding when questioning prisoners. Howard Dean, president of the Democratic National Congress, admitted there was no “position” by the Democratic Party on Guantánamo or on torture.

I felt so sick about this I couldn’t write about it last night. I still feel sick about it. I knew we had been lied to, of course. But I had no idea that this had been such a routine part of U.S. policy for over 50 years.

I feel sick.