posted November 15, 2005 02:50 PM              

AUSTIN, Texas -- I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning.
Maybe I should try to get a grip -- after all, it's just this one administration that I had more cause than most to realize was full of inadequate people going in. And even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Cheney. And after all, we were badly frightened by 9-11, which was a horrible event. "Only" nine senators voted against the prohibition of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control the United States." Nine out of 100. Should we be proud? Should we cry?

"We do not torture," said our pitifully inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

I am baffled by these "arguments": But we're talking about really awful people, cries the harassed press secretary. People like X and Y and Z (after a time, one forgets all the names of the No. 2's after bin Laden we have captured). The SS and the Gestapo and the KVD weren't all that nice, either.

Then I hear the familiar tinniness of the fake machismo I know so well from George W. Bush and all the other frat boys who never went to Vietnam and never got over the guilt.

"Sometimes you gotta play rough," said Dick Cheney. No **** , Dick? Now why don't you tell that to John McCain?

I have known George W. Bush since we were both in high school -- we have dozens of mutual friends. I have written two books about him and so have interviewed many dozens more who know him well in one way or another. Spare me the tough talk. He didn't play football -- he was a cheerleader. "He is really competitive," said one friend. "You wouldn't believe how tough he is on a tennis court!" Just cut the macho crap -- I don't want to hear it.

If you are dead to all sense of morality (please let me not go off on the stinking sanctimony of this crowd), let us still reason together on the famous American common ground of practicality. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

Torture does not work. Ask the United States military. Ask the Israelis.

There seems to be some fantastic scenario floating around -- if Osama bin Laden had an atomic bomb hidden in a locker at Grand Central Station, and it was due to go off in 12 hours, and we had him in prison ... I seem to have missed some important television program on this theme. I am told it was fiction, but it must have been really scary -- it certainly seems to have unbalanced the minds of some of our fellow citizens.

Torture does not work. It is not productive. It does not yield important, timely information. That is in the movies. This is reality.

I grew up with all this pathetic Texas tough: Everybody here knows you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs; and this ain't beanbag; and I'll knock your jaw so far back, you'll scratch your throat with your front teeth; and I'm gonna cloud up and rain all over you; and I'm gonna open me a can of whup-ass ...

And that'll show 'em, won't it? Take some miserable human being alone and helpless in a cell, completely under your control, and torture him. Boy, that is some kind of manly, ain't it?

"The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have 'disappeared,' like the victims of some dictatorships." -- The Washington Post.

posted November 15, 2005 03:16 PM              

By Josh White, Washington
November 16, 2005

TWO Iraqi men who were arrested in Iraq in 2003 but never charged say US troops put them in a cage with lions, pretended to execute them and humiliated them during interrogations at multiple detention facilities.

Sherzad Khalid, 35, and Thahe Sabber, 37, say they were brutally beaten over several months at US facilities such as Camp Bucca, Abu Ghraib prison and another detention facility at the Baghdad airport.

They said the abuse occurred when they were unable to tell US troops where Saddam Hussein was hiding and did not know about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Both are businessmen who were arrested in a July 17, 2003, raid in Baghdad while Mr Khalid, of Kurdistan, was visiting friends. Both said they were supporters of the US invasion.

The two men are plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights First against Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top military commanders in Iraq. The suit contends US policies during the war allowed abuse and torture. Both men say they were tortured and degraded for months before they were released.

"That was a terrifying period for me," Mr Khalid said through an interpreter on Monday, slowly recounting how he was shoved into a lion's cage at one of the presidential palaces in Baghdad three times before soldiers lined him up for a mock execution. "I was wondering if it could be real that the American army would act this way," he said.

Mr Khalid and Mr Sabber spoke publicly for the first time during interviews on Monday at a Washington hotel during a visit to the United States to meet doctors, lawyers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that US troops treated detainees humanely and that they had investigated numerous claims of abuse. Colonel Joseph Curtin, an army spokesman at the Pentagon, said he had never before heard any claims of soldiers using lions to scare detainees and that the army would try to assess its validity.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said that "this is a legal matter, it will be handled as such, but it should not surprise anyone that detainees would make false allegations against their captors".

Mr Sabber spent six months in US facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, where he was held in a tent city and endured what he called routine beatings. Mr Sabber declined to discuss what court papers have described as sexual humiliation by female interrogators. He said US troops intentionally stepped on copies of the Koran or had military dogs step on the Koran as a way of agitating the prison population.

"They just wanted to humiliate us in any shape or form they could," Mr Sabber said. "I wish I knew why. I was sure, however, that their actions were not the same as the values and morals of the American people."

The men, with six others who say they were abused in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue that top officials should be held accountable for their actions and ask the US courts to grant them damages for their suffering. The case is in US District Court in Washington, according to Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer with the ACLU.

WASHINGTON POST, REUTERS
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/americans-put-us-in-lions-cage-say-former-detainees/2005/11/15/1132016796055.html?oneclick=true