Ayoon Wa Azan (The Book ….A Proof of the Prince's Intuition)
Jihad el-Khazen Al-Hayat - 10/07/08//
Yesterday, at the end of my discussion about torture in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and other secret prisons, I referred to the radical Israeli apologist, Alan Dershowitz, who endorses water torture and has even coined the expression - water boarding - first mentioned in the New York Times.
Asked about water torture, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "It is no-brainer to me." Cheney still sticks to these words, for he is the leader of the war party that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He is calling now for a war against Iran to kill more Muslims.
But the war party, the Israel lobby, and the neocons have faced humane Americans who reject torture.
The Supreme Court, as its name indicates, is the highest legal authority in the United States. It upheld the right of prisoners to appear in court instead of being detained for indefinite periods.
The Army's lawyers entrusted with defending the accused resisted torture. Colonel John Ley wrote in 2002 that torture techniques were legally questionable and morally wrong and risked a public-relations nightmare.
The FBI staff refused to take part in torture.
Military Judge Peter Brownback was dismissed when he complained about torture.
The International Red Cross condemned torture in prisons supervised by the Americans.
Human Rights Watch called on the United Nations Security Council to address American detention practices.
Britain, America's ally, objected to interrogation techniques employed in Guantánamo but restricted its objection to two detainees of British nationality.
In the meantime, the Bush administration has used every possible English word, except torture, to describe interrogation techniques. We came across expressions, such as "harsh questioning technique" or "enhanced questioning" in the sense of torture, whereby the detainee is given the impression that he is drowning, is subjected to a very loud music for a long period of time, is shackled into stressful positions and deprived of sleep. Some investigators even profaned copies of the Koran to humiliate Muslim prisoners and put them under psychological strain, as many released detainees recounted.
I refer in this respect to a few sections in Prince Khaled bin Sultan's book Fighter from the Desert, in which he evoked his refusal to hand over Iraqi captives to the American forces after Kuwait's liberation in 1991, as he noticed that Americans mistreated prisoners. The book was released ten years before Iraq's occupation, and the words of the Commander of Joint Forces and Theater of Operations have nothing to do with the resounding uproar. They rather prove the Prince's intuition about mistreating captives.
Torture has bred an accused of the Abu Zubaida type who admitted that a terror act was perpetrated with another one under way. The interrogators later discovered that he was hallucinating and was simply recounting the sabotage scenes he watched in Godzilla film. Strangely though, five detainees in Guantánamo will be tried on the basis of Abu Zubaida's testimony.
Nevertheless, the Bush administration is still entangled in civil and military courts on the backdrop of torture. The American authorities released an Australian who returned home after a deal was struck with the interrogators. In turn, the other accused, Mohammad Al-Kahtani, was not sued in court, while all charges against him were dismissed, as the American authorities did not want to raise in court the torture practices he underwent.
775 men were detained in Guantánamo after the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban regime. Their number gradually decreased with the release of 420 men against whom no charges were filed. Now, there are 270 detainees, 60 and even 80 of whom will face terror accusations, military interrogators say.
When asked about torture, President Bush replied: "We don't do torture." He can not but deny it. However, there is established official information about those who provided a legal cover to perpetrate and incite to terror. The day will inevitably come when the war party supporting torture and killing will be tried.
At the end of this discussion, I will go back to where I started yesterday's article. Arab countries practice torture with no excuse nor the slightest apology to advance. Yet, if Third World countries violate human rights, this does not give the United States the right to follow suit. The US has always been a leading country in freedom, democracy, and human rights. But then came the Bush administration to destroy in one decade the reputation the previous administrations have built over more than two centuries.
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