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Fbi tortures { November 1 2001 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
>http://www.counterpunch.org/torture1.html
>http://www.counterpunch.org/torture1.html
>
>November 1, 2001
>FBI Eyes Torture
>
>By Alexander Cockburn
>
>"FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by
>the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda
>network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil
>liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information
>about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans."
>
>Thus began a piece by Walter Pincus on page 6 of The Washington Post on
>Sunday, and if you suspect that this is the overture to an argument for
>torture, you are right. The FBI interrogators have been getting nowhere
>with the four key suspects, held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional
>Center. None of these men have talked, and Pincus quotes an FBI man
>involved in the interrogation as saying that "it could get to that spot
>where we could go to pressure...where we won't have a choice, and we are
>probably getting there."
>
>Pincus reports that "among the alternative strategies under discussion are
>using drugs or pressure tactics, such as those employed occasionally by
>Israeli interrogators, to extract information. Another idea is extraditing
>the suspects to allied countries where security services sometimes employ
>threats to family members or resort to torture."
>
>Some FBI interrogators are thinking longingly of drugs like the so-called
>"truth serum," sodium pentothal; others the "pressure tactics," i.e.,
>straightforward tortures, used by Shin Bet in Israel, banned after savage
>public debate a few years ago, which included sensory deprivation (an old
>favorite of British interrogators in Northern Ireland), plus many
>agonizing physical torments. Another idea is to send the suspects to other
>countries for torture by seasoned experts. Israel is not mentioned; nor
>are the British. Extradition of Moussaoui to France or Morocco is
>apparently a possibility.
>
>CounterPunch was astounded to find David Cole, noted liberal professor at
>Georgetown University Law Center, being quoted by Pincus as saying that
>"the use of force to extract information could happen" in cases where
>investigators believe suspects have information on an upcoming attack. "If
>there is a ticking bomb, it is not an easy issue, it's tough," he said. Of
>course it's tough. As Cole surely knows, the "ticking bomb" rationale has
>been used by Israel's torture lobby for years, long after it had become
>clear that it had simply become a routine way of dealing with suspects.
>Right now the disposition of the FBI, intent on interrogating every Arab
>American male (some 200,000) in this country, is doubtless to assume that
>they might have knowledge of a ticking bomb.
>
>The FBI claims it is hampered by its present codes of gentility. If so,
>there's no need to eye Morocco or France as subcontracting torturers. As a
>practical matter torture is far from unknown in the interrogation rooms of
>U.S. law enforcement, with Abner Louima the best-known recent example.
>
>The most infamous disclosure of consistent torture by a police department
>in recent years concerned cops in Chicago in the mid-70s through early 80s
>who used electroshock, oxygen deprivation, hanging on hooks, the bastinado
>and beatings of the testicles. The torturers were white and their victims
>black or brown. A prisoner in California's Pelican Bay State Prison was
>thrown into boiling water. Others get 50,000-volt shocks from stun guns.
>Many states have so-called "secure housing units" where prisoners are kept
>in solitary in tiny concrete cells for years on end, many of them going
>mad in the process. Amnesty International has denounced U.S. police forces
>for "a pattern of unchecked excessive force amounting to torture."
>
>Last year the UN delivered a severe public rebuke to the United States for
>its record on preventing torture and degrading punishment. A 10-strong
>panel of experts highlighted what it said were Washington's breaches of
>the agreement ratified by the United States in 1994. The UN Committee
>Against Torture, which monitors international compliance with the UN
>Convention Against Torture, has called for the abolition of electric-shock
>stun belts (1000 in use in the U.S.) and restraint chairs on prisoners, as
>well as an end to holding children in adult jails. It also said female
>detainees are "very often held in humiliating and degrading circumstances"
>and expressed concern over alleged cases of sexual assault by police and
>prison officers. The panel criticized the excessively harsh regime in
>maximum security prisons, the use of chain gangs in which prisoners
>perform manual labor while shackled together, and the number of cases of
>police brutality against racial minorities.
>
>So far as rape is concerned, because of the rape factories more
>conventionally known as the U.S. prison system, there are estimates that
>twice as many men as women are raped in the U.S. each year. A Human Rights
>Watch report in April of this year cited a December 2000 Prison Journal
>study based on a survey of inmates in seven men's prison facilities in
>four states. The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had
>experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact
>since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their
>facilities. A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison system produced similar
>findings, with 22 percent of male inmates reporting that they had been
>pressured or forced to have sexual contact against their will while
>incarcerated. Of these, more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal
>sex at least once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level
>gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.
>
>Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly
>studying Nazi techniques and protecting their exponents such as Klaus
>Barbie. The FBI could ship the four key suspects to plenty of countries
>taught torture by CIA technicians, including El Salvador. Robert Fisk
>reported in the London Independent in 1998 that after the 1979 revolution
>Iranians found a CIA film made for the SAVAK, the Shah's political police,
>on how to torture women. William Blum, whose Rogue State (Common Courage,
>2000) gives a useful overview of the United States' relationship to
>torture, cites a 1970 story in Brazil's extremely respectable Jornal do
>Brasil, quoting the former Urugayan chief of police intelligence,
>Alejandro Otero, as saying that U.S. advisers, particularly Dan Mitrione,
>had instituted torture in Uruguay on a routine basis, with scientific
>refinement in technique (such as the precise upper limits of electric
>voltage before death intervened) and psychological pressure, such as a
>tape in the next room of women and children screaming, telling the
>prisoner that his family was being tortured.
>
>The CIA's official line is that torture is wrong and is ineffective. It is
>indeed wrong. On countless occasions it has been appallingly effective. CP
>
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