Torture without trace

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article25217.ece

The Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) have turned the spotlight on the complicity of medical professionals in the Central Investigation Agency’s recourse to abusive and unlawful interrogation methods during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror.’ The latest evidence, documented earlier as part of the horrors visited upon detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram airbase, underlines the imperative need to further codify such methods as illegal under international human rights law. The PHR findings focus on the psychological abuses recorded in the CIA Inspector-General’s 2004 report, but made public only recently following a law suit by the American Civil Liberties Union. There was resort to mock executions and the threat of imminent death and assault on family members, including sexual assaults — betraying the intent to terrorise and intimidate detainees. The forcible shaving of heads and beards was clearly designed to inflict personal and religious humiliation and trauma. If the intended effect of the infamous ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ such as water-boarding, stripping, sensory deprivation, and solitary confinement was the infliction of long-term bodily pain and injury, methods such as hooding gave interrogators anonymity and consequently impunity for their lawless actions.

While these means of mental torture were employed by the CIA, medical professionals, and psychologists actively colluded in the cruel and inhuman interrogations in cynical contempt for ethical and professional norms. Of particular concern are the extensive data they gathered on the basis of the reactions of detainees so as to determine the effectiveness of the interrogation techniques. The PHR rightly views this as amounting to unlawful human experimentation. The approach of the Obama administration to this dark chapter in contemporary American history has been to look ahead, rather than back, causing some consternation among civil rights groups and within the Democratic Party. President Obama’s more recent expression of a readiness to prosecute the architects of the torture laws, rather than those who merely enforced their criminal provisions, is perhaps an indication that the issue could become a political hot potato at home. What is absolutely clear is that how the people of the United States come to terms — or fail to come to terms — with the horrors inflicted on humanity in the name of the global war on terror will have a strong bearing on counter-terror strategies elsewhere.

No Afghan solutions for NATO

October 8, 2009

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article30998.ece

The request by the United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for an additional 40,000 troops sharply highlights NATO’s rapidly worsening problems. If President Barack Obama concedes Gen. McChrystal’s demand, the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan will rise to 140,000, including 110,000 Americans. There is, however, a void at the centre of NATO policy on Afghanistan. The original plans were to find Osama bin Laden, destroy Al Qaeda, and overthrow the Taliban regime, which harboured bin Laden. All those plans have failed disastrously, recoiling on the occupation forces. The Taliban were driven out of Kabul in five weeks. But they have never relinquished Helmand province in the southwest, and are now resurgent in the north and east. They control Kunduz and have just taken Nuristan, inflicting serious casualties on U.S. forces. Politically, NATO has had to collaborate with non-Taliban warlords, whose attitudes and ways are often not very different from those of the Taliban. In addition, the civilian government of Hamid Karzai is corrupt, bereft of legitimacy, and in any case barely exists outside Kabul. Independent observers regard at least a third of the votes for him in the yet-to-be-settled presidential election as fraudulent. Meanwhile, more than 31,000 Afghan civilians have died as a result of the NATO invasion, which occurred in October 2001. If the very recent suicide bombing near the Indian Embassy in Kabul is a guide, the Taliban may be re-establishing a presence in the capital. As to Osama bin Laden, he has never been found.

The issue of Afghanistan is now causing serious problems in several NATO countries, particularly the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Germany. The Obama administration has reproved Gen. McChrystal for making public his troop request. But it is not long since Mr. Obama himself castigated his predecessor George W. Bush for not listening to the military over Afghanistan and Iraq. Public support for the war is falling, and requests for substantial increases in troops and matriel are being likened to the huge and ineffectual U.S. troop increases in Vietnam in the 1960s. Al Qaeda continues to be a global threat but the Taliban are clearly not. At most they are a regional threat and it is surely significant that it is Pakistan’s armed forces that have dealt most effectively with that country’s Taliban elements when they have been set that task. NATO, confused about what this global war on terror is all about, cannot solve anything in Afghanistan. It is time for the world to move towards an enforceable U.N. agreement that ends the U.S.-led occupation and restores Afghanistan’s tradition of strict neutrality, so that the region can find some semblance of stability and peace.