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Don't for a second think that any of it was torture! Those acts committed on prisoners captured in the Global War on Terror and held at CIA "black sites" around the world included waterboarding, confinement in a small box, and "rectal feeding and rehydration" -- and that's just to begin a nightmarish list of them. But they weren't torture at all, just "enhanced interrogation techniques." At least, that was the term preferred by officials in the administration of President George W. Bush, who launched that war on terror and the remarkably widespread mistreatment of prisoners that went with it.
Perhaps the first prisoner of that "war" on whom the CIA tested its torture techniques, Abu Zubaydah (who turned out never to have been a member of al-Qaeda), was "enhanced" in truly grim ways he later recorded in drawings while confined at the Guanta'namo Bay detention center. He would, for instance, be "waterboarded" 83 times (no, that's not a misprint!) while held at a CIA black site in Thailand as part of the global interrogation program authorized by President Bush and his administration. As Zubaydah described it: "They kept pouring water and concentrating on my nose and my mouth until I really felt I was drowning and my chest was just about to explode from the lack of oxygen." And that was only one part of his ongoing nightmare, which, as Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times would report, involved sleep deprivation, being held in a small containment box, and "walling" (having his head repeatedly smashed against a wall while his neck was in a chokehold from a towel). And keep in mind that, as Karen Greenberg has pointed out at TomDispatch, the Justice Department would greenlight such "techniques" as "lawful" rather than classifying them as acts of torture.
Now, as it happens, we're approaching the 20th anniversary of the revelation of yet another set of all-American interrogation techniques, photos of horrifying kinds of torture committed by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion of that country. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Maha Hilal take you deep into the world of what she calls "carceral imperialism" that went hand in hand (so to speak) with the nightmarish post-9/11 Global War on Terror. Even so many years later, it's both a hell of a story and a story from hell. Tom
Carceral Imperialism
Torture, Abu Ghraib, and the Legacy of the U.S. War on Iraq
By Maha Hilal
"To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me" The time I spent in Abu Ghraib -- it ended my life. I'm only half a human now." That's what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.
He was never even charged with a crime -- not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross's estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country's War on Terror.
The Abu Ghraib "Scandal"
On April 28th, 2004, CBS News's 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.
Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word "scandal" still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.
Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 -- Al Shimari v. CACI -- brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI's role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial -- the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees -- finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.
The Road to Abu Ghraib
"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture" And therefore, I'm not going to address the 'torture' word." So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush's administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their "Global War on Terror," but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.
As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing "evidence" of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.
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