Developments Overseas:
The use of torture is official US policy

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In the past few weeks, the US forces' systematic and widespread use of torture on Iraqi fighters and even civilians detained at the Abu Ghraib prison came into the open. US government and military leaders attempted to mount a coverup, saying the atrocities were the handiwork of a few unscrupulous individuals and were never officially encouraged.

As a matter of fact, the US' use of torture, abuse and brutality against civilians and prisoners of war is a deliberate and pervasive policy. The events that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison are no different from those in other prisons run by the US in other parts of the world.

The US military bureaucracy itself has churned out books and manuals on the "science" and techniques of torture employed by its armed forces. It operates schools, like the School of the Americas, that train regular military and police forces and vigilante and paramilitary groups in different parts of the world on the most sophisticated methods of torture, extortion and assassination. Those trained in these schools perpetrate the worst cases of torture, massacre and state terrorism in the world.

It was revealed last year that the US Defense Department has approved the use of 20 techniques in the interrogation of prisoners of war. One of these techniques is the use of psychological and physical violence.

The use of the most brutal methods has been made official policy. They include indefinite solitary confinement, extreme intimidation and noise to deprive prisoners of sleep and manipulation of their food. Stripping and humiliating prisoners has likewise been allowed.

In Afghanistan, thousands of Taliban fighters captured by US forces in November 2001 were packed into a container van and left there to die of starvation and unbearable heat. Also documented were the torture and killing of more than 3,000 Afghan men at the Mazar-i-sharif prison in the US military base in Afghanistan. As in Abu Ghraib, the brutality of the American forces was revealed in television broadcasts and newspaper photographs of naked, bound and gagged Afghan prisoners. Even John Walker Lindh, an American captured with Taliban forces and who came to be known as the American Taliban, was not spared. Lindh revealed that he was among those imprisoned in a container van without air, water and food. The American soldiers stripped and tied him like an animal to humiliate and intimidate him.

In its military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, the US runs Camp XRay where more than 600 alleged terrorists have been illegally detained for two years now. The US refuses to place the prisoners under the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions which stipulates the just and civilized treatment of prisoners of war. To the US, no prisoner detained at the facility is entitled to any human rights. Those released from the prison due to expos�s and campaigns against US brutality in Guantanamo have attested to the fact that prisoners there suffer the most cruel forms of torture and abuse in the hands of their interrogators and guards.

Although US government and military officials insist that the policies and methods employed in the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo are different from those in other US prisons, they are generally the same policies and methods at work against their captives in Afghanistan, Iraq and other areas.

07 June 2004
English Edition

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