Abstract

Green Lights for Torture

The author claims that the administration of President George W. Bush sanctioned the use of torture in interrogating Iraqi detainees. So there were WMDs in Iraq after all. They're called digital cameras. Partly because of them, the United States faces one of the most humiliating defeats in imperial history. But there's also a clear paper trail. Not just the long and copiously documented record of US torture, with many of its refinements acquired by the CIA from the Nazis after World War II, but the more recent lineage of encouragement. Within a few days of the Trade Towers going down in September 2001, a vacationing FBI agent told an acquaintance of mine in Puerto Vallarta that detainees in the United States were being tortured. By October of 2001, public opinion here was being softened up for the use of torture. It was not far into the Afghan war that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made plain his views on prisoners, after horrifying accounts began to surface of the treatment of Taliban POWs. He first said the United States was "not inclined to negotiate surrenders." From spring 2003, the Red Cross was complaining to US Army commanders in Iraq, and later to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in Washington, about frightful treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.