(1)
Let Chicago's Anti-Torture Resolution Inspire Your 
Own City
By Margaret Flowers
Truthout | Report
28 July 2012 
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10398-let-chicagos-anti-torture-resolution-inspire-your-own-city

In June 2012, the Illinois Coalition Against Torture
(ICAT) produced a "How To Guide: Getting an Anti-Torture
Resolution Passed in Your City" as a contribution to
Torture Awareness Month. The guide is a useful tool for
activists in cities across the United States who want to
have their city declared a torture-free zone. It offers
analysis and suggestions drawn from ICAT's successful
campaign to get an anti-torture resolution passed in
Chicago.

The Chicago City Council unanimously approved the
resolution and declared Chicago a "torture-free city" in
January 2012. In an op-ed in The Chicago Tribune, Sister
Benita Coffey, a member of ICAT, explained why the
resolution was needed and why more work needed to be
done to end the US government's use of torture. The
resolution states:

    The City of Chicago declares that it will not
    tolerate, support or allow torture to be practiced
    by its employees or residents.

    The City of Chicago affirms that all prisoners under
    city, state or federal governmental control are
    entitled to have their human rights respected,
    including their right to be free from torture.

    The City of Chicago supports the observance of
    December 10th, International Human Rights Day, as a
    day to reaffirm that the human rights of all people
    must be respected and to publicly denounce the
    practice of torture, wherever it occurs.

This is the first time that any US city council has
voted against the practice of torture on all three
levels. Much of the impetus to pass the resolution
resulted from the accumulated outrage that many in
Chicago felt regarding the Chicago police's torture of
black men. From the 1970s to the end of the 1980s,
officers under the command of Jon Burge tortured 110
black men in a police station on the south side of
Chicago in Area 2. The police employed various methods
to torture these men, including placing plastic bags on
their heads to threaten suffocation; pushing them
against a hot radiator; burning them with cigarettes;
and simulating executions. They used the "black box," as
they called it, to send electric shocks on men's
genitals.

News of these officers' torture first broke about twenty
years ago, and in 1989, Andrew Wilson, one of the first
men tortured by the Area 2 police, filed a civil suit
alleging that he had been tortured. Since that time,
Attorney Flint Taylor and attorneys John Stainthorp and
Joey Mogul at the civil rights law firm, the People's
Law Office in Chicago, have pursued civil cases against
the officers who carried out the torture. Burge was
found guilty of perjury for denying under oath that he
tortured black prisoners in a criminal case brought
against him by the US attorney's office in 2010 and
sentenced to four and a half years in prison.  To date,
none of the other officers who tortured prisoners have
been brought to trial, let alone convicted.

As the "Guide" details, ICAT conducted a vigorous,
multilevel campaign to generate support for the anti-
torture resolution. ICAT contacted Alderman Joe Moore,
who enthusiastically agreed to sponsor the resolution
and steer it through the City Council. He also helped to
write the resolution, drawing on his knowledge of City
Council politics and what would and would not be likely
to pass. For example, when ICAT originally wrote the
resolution, the organization included two points that
Alderman Moore suggested be deleted. The first one said
that the City of Chicago, therefore the taxpayers,
should no longer pay Burge's legal expenses or pension.
To date, the city has spent $15.5 million on Burge and
other officer's legal defense. Furthermore, in 2011, the
police pension board voted to continue paying Burge his
monthly pension of $3,000. However, Alderman Moore
counseled eliminating that point as well as one that
demanded that the city pay reparations to the survivors
of police torture. ICAT agreed to Moore's suggestions in
order to secure passage of the resolution. ICAT also
launched a successful petition campaign in favor of the
resolution. The goals of the petition were twofold: to
obtain a significant number of signatures to present to
the City Council and to educate and mobilize people
against torture. Initially, ICAT set 500 signatures as
its goal. Members of ICAT circulated the petition online
through SignOn.com and with hard copies. They spoke to
hundreds of people at outdoor events, rallies and on the
street in Chicago, asking them to sign the petition.

Chicago calls itself a world-class city, so ICAT decided
that it was important to have people all over the world
sign the petition to make Chicago a torture-free city.
The group drew on human rights networks, personal
acquaintances and social media to distribute the
petition far and wide. As a result, hundreds of people
from around the world signed the petition.

Mario Venegas is a member of ICAT and a survivor of
torture in Pinochet's Chile. He solicited signatures of
people who attended Occupy or anti-war demonstrations in
Chicago, as well as passersby. Venegas also distributed
the petition to Chilean human rights groups and
survivors of torture. Eager to join in a campaign to
condemn torture and to return the solidarity many of
them had received during the Pinochet regime, a large
number of Chileans signed the petition and encouraged
their friends to do so as well. When the petition drive
ended, ICAT and other supporters of the resolution had
succeeded in gathering 3,500 signatures, seven times the
original goal.

The resolution specifically condemned "being held in
prolonged solitary confinement in Illinois prisons in
conditions which often lead to physical and
psychological breakdown" and classified this practice as
a form of torture. Tamms Supermax Prison in southern
Illinois is one of the main prisons to which the
resolution referred. The prison opened in 1998 and
currently holds 198 male prisoners. The men are held in
permanent solitary confinement. As Tamms Year Ten, an
activist organization that seeks to end the use of long-
term solitary confinement at Tamms, writes, the men
"never leave their cells except to shower or to exercise
alone in a concrete pen. There are no communal
activities, jobs or contact visits."

In June 19, 2012, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn announced
plans to close Tamms. Families of prisoners, anti-Tamms
activists and the human rights community greeted his
decision with rejoicing. Inhabitants of Tamms, the
village where the prison is located and members of
American Federation of State, County & Municipal
Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, the union that represents
the prison personnel, have vociferously expressed their
displeasure and anger. On July 10, 2012, AFSCME held a
press conference to declare their plans to work to
reverse Governor Quinn's decision.

According to Michael Gosch, a member of ICAT, the
group's work is not over. "Getting the anti-torture
resolution passed is a major first step, but our efforts
to end torture are not over. Now we need to make sure
that Chicago really is a torture-free zone, that torture
really does cease and that the victims and survivors of
torture receive reparations for the cruel and not
unusual enough punishment they received."

(2)
For Real: Torture America Style
Peter C. Baker
The Nation
July 24, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/article/169064/real-torture-america-style

On October 7, 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union
filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all
documents related to post-9/11 detention and
interrogation practices. The request was filed
simultaneously with the Defense Department, the State
Department, the Justice Department and the Central
Intelligence Agency. By the following May, no response
had been issued, so the ACLU filed a second request, and
in June took the government to court in hopes of forcing
it to comply. Three months later the ACLU prevailed, and
by the end of 2004 the documents were beginning to flow.
Since then, well over 130,000 pages have been released
and posted to a searchable database on the ACLU website.

The database contains, of course, the now infamous
"torture memos": the arguments, crafted by George W.
Bush's closest legal advisers, that waterboarding and
the like were neither torturous nor illegal-and that
such considerations didn't apply to US presidents (or
indeed anyone else in government, so long as the
infliction of pain was not provably his or her "specific
intent"). But these were only a small handful of
documents among thousands: interrogation and torture
logs, prison administration memos, courtroom transcripts
and minutes from policy meetings. Several such documents
known to exist have still not been released: in regard
to one, the government has argued that not only is its
existence classified but so too is the font in which it
may or may not be written. Other records have been
destroyed, including at least ninety-two videos of CIA
interrogations. Of the material that has been released,
much has been significantly redacted.

Despite these gaps (and in part because of them), this
vast forest of paper comprises a sprawling, fragmented
alternative literature on post-9/11 torture-one that
lacks the coherence and pacing of many useful books on
the subject, but which is not without other values. To
spend an afternoon clicking through the ACLU database is
to make some acquaintance, in a way that only primary
documents allow, with the fact that behind every US act
of torture is a massive, globe-spanning and poorly
organized bureaucracy. Like all bureaucracies, it has a
language peculiarly its own, shot through with jargon,
euphemism and tics: empire whispering to itself in memo
form.

In 2009 the ACLU hired Larry Siems, a poet and PEN
American Center program director, to head a website
called The Torture Report. His charge was to write about
post-9/11 prisoner abuse, relying as exclusively as
possible on the primary documents. Siems posted sections
of the report as he finished them, and they received
running commentary from a set group of people with
relevant expertise, including lawyers, civil rights
bloggers and a former military interrogator. There were
links to all documents referenced. The site went live in
September 2009, and Siems posted his final installment
in March 2011. Now the full report has been released as
a book, with the commenters' suggestions and insights
incorporated into the text.

For much of The Torture Report, Siems focuses on a few
particularly well-documented and egregious cases. By his
own admission, he barely touches on large swatches of
the post-9/11 torture project; there could easily be
another fifty volumes of The Torture Report. Thankfully,
he is also willing to roam freely through the document
wilderness, straying far from his central cases in
search of context or common themes, and quoting
liberally along the way. The result is a compromise
between the tidiness of most narrative reportage and the
chaos of the primary texts: a story shaped by Siems, but
very much co-narrated by his subjects.

* * *

Lingering with the documents as Siems does-offering a
play-by-play of the abuse-is a grim antidote of sorts
for the simplifications that have run rampant through
the torture discourse of the past decade. The first such
simplification was that any instance of torture by US
forces was entirely the independent, extracurricular
initiative of "bad apples" ("a perverse, kinky group,"
per The Weekly Standard) on "the night shift"-a phrase
that was repeated ad nauseam as if it meant anything, as
if it was somehow obvious that what happens after
sundown doesn't really count. The "bad apples" line has
been thoroughly debunked and seems to have fallen out of
circulation, only to be replaced by a more accurate but
equally thin cliché: that the torture went "straight to
the top" of the government. Much less disclosed or
understood is the exact nature of the channels running
between "the top" and the interrogation chamber.

Often they were quite direct. Describing the early
torture of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi citizen, in a CIA
prison in Thailand, Siems notes that every move his
interrogators made was cleared in advance by a cable
from Langley. As one of them later described it, "Before
you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable
saying, `He's uncooperative. Request permission to do
X.' And that permission would come." Whenever
authorization was sought for more obviously torturous
techniques, CIA director George Tenet would bring the
request to a meeting in the White House Situation Room
with his fellow National Security Council "principals,"
a group that included Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld,
Colin Powell and John Ashcroft.

But as deceitful (and unsavory) as it was for the Bush
administration to pin detainee abuse on a few "deviant"
individuals, it is equally inaccurate to assert that
every incident of torture was directly ordered or stage-
managed from above, or that every technique involved had
been cleared in advance by a memo from on high. Needless
to say, some were. Yet again and again, the documents
describe the process of new guidelines being drafted,
debated, edited and circulated, spelling out exactly
which torture techniques were now "legal"-only for
interrogators to subsequently unleash a procedure not
listed, or even one explicitly banned.

Then, too, the language in which the limits were set
often betrayed their meaninglessness. "Approval of the
use of all Category II techniques and one Category III
technique.is hereby rescinded," Rumsfeld wrote in a 2003
memo, responding to pressure from Alberto Mora, the
Navy's anti-torture general counsel. But: "Should you
determine that particular techniques in either of these
categories are warranted in an individual case, you
should forward that request to me." Later that year,
Rumsfeld wrote another memo authorizing a new list of
twenty-four techniques. It ended: "If, in your view, you
require additional interrogation techniques for a
particular detainee, you should provide me.a written
request." Predictably, more ?requests would come.
Perhaps equally predictably, individual interrogators
would continue improvising on the spot, as they had been
from the start. In Siems's report, torture is obviously
not just a matter of a few bad apples, but equally
obviously not just evil at the top. It is something
else-something for which no ready phrase exists.

This is oddly apt: failures of understanding are part
and parcel of institutionalized torture, which seems to
require a systemic aversion to detail, especially the
details of other people's experiences. The most publicly
visible manifestation of this aversion was the
replacement of "torture"-in both the legal memos and the
pages of the nation's leading newspapers-with terms like
"enhanced interrogation." This same preference for
detached vagueness pervades The Torture Report. "Cramped
confinement involves the placement of the individual in
a confined space," the administration lawyer John Yoo
wrote in a 2002 memo. "The confined space is usually
dark." Depending on the size of the space, "the
individual can stand up or sit down."

Abu Zubaydah's descriptions of his "cramped
confinement," which Siems quotes, dwell on several
aspects that Yoo passes over: how a cloth was draped
over his confinement box to restrict his air supply; how
the box was so small he could neither sit nor stand but
instead had to crouch, which caused a wound in his leg
to rupture; how he was given a bucket to use as a
toilet, and how it tipped over and spilled while he
remained inside for hours; how he lost all sense of
time. It is unclear whether Yoo left such details out
intentionally, or whether they simply never occurred to
him. Similarly, it's hard to know what to make of a note
written by Donald Rumsfeld in ink at the bottom of a
2002 memo on detainee treatment that, among other
things, set limits on forced standing. "I stand for 8-10
hours a day," he wrote. "Why is standing limited to 4
hours?"

When the NSC principals met to consider authorizing
"new" techniques, they did not seek out testimony from
people-US citizens or otherwise-on whom they'd been
inflicted in the past. Nor did they solicit advice from
those who study the effects of such techniques on the
body and mind. Instead, CIA agents would visit the
principals in the Situation Room and describe what they
wanted done. Sometimes they even put on demonstrations.
Whatever these demonstrations showed, they surely did
not include blood, urine, feces, dogs, nudity or the
presence of anything resembling the total domination of
one person by another, and the obliteration of his free
will by fear.

In all likelihood, the CIA officers at those meetings
were drawing on training sessions they'd received at the
Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
school. SERE courses attempt, among other things, to
prepare US soldiers, agents and private contractors for
possible torture if captured abroad. But the differences
between SERE simulations-even those in which students
are, for example, waterboarded-and life in a US torture
dungeon are many and crucial. SERE students have safe
words. SERE students know, somewhere in their minds,
that it's just training, which will end at some point.
If a SERE student is waterboarded, he is first made to
do jumping jacks, which increase his heart rate, making
it easier for him to hold his breath. (An insightful CIA
report noted the difference between the waterboarding on
SERE's curriculum and the CIA's waterboarding in the
field as follows: "the Agency's technique is different
because it is `for real.'") The mental health of SERE
students and instructors is closely monitored by
psychologists. In the most critical respects, SERE
courses are more similar to weekend camping than to a
secret US prison. When the CIA demonstrators went before
the principals, then, they were likely presenting a
highly condensed and bowdlerized re-enactment not of
torture but of a torture simulation, creating a
spectacle charged with torture's frisson of power-the
principals were, after all, deciding the intimate fate
of real people-but stripped clean of every other
defining detail.

* * *

In The Torture Report, the players seem interested in
precision only when it comes to distancing themselves
from acts they knew to be vile. Time and again, the
record shows Americans fixated on what might be called
"bureaucratic truth"-on claims and distinctions that are
meaningful primarily within a bureaucracy, but much less
so outside it. For example, since early 2009 the FBI has
repeatedly objected to the CIA's preference for
ineffective torture-based interrogation, especially as
compared with its own, rapport-oriented techniques-and
rightly so. But watch that concern in action, as
described by Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who sparred with
the CIA about the best way to handle Abu Zubaydah:

    I protested to my superiors in the FBI and refused
    to be a part of what was happening. The Director of
    the FBI, a man I deeply respect, agreed, passing the
    message that "we don't do that," and I was pulled
    out..

The "we" invoked here is not the United States, but
rather a single division of its enormous government.
It's a near constant refrain: torture is proceeding, and
some group of interrogators-from the FBI, from the
Defense Department-is ordered by their superiors to
"stand well clear." Meanwhile, another division
proceeds, or farms out the dirty work to foreigners, and
the torture still happens. What does it matter-to, say,
a detainee in the middle of a waterboarding-whether it's
one agency or another doing the torturing?

This sort of hair-splitting goes straight to the top:
during a principals' meeting in 2002, Attorney General
John Ashcroft is reported to have wondered, with some
consternation, "Why are we talking about this in the
White House?" He didn't wonder, "Why is this being
talked about?" (and certainly not "Why is this being
done?"). Instead: not in this room. David Addington,
Cheney's legal counsel, echoed this sentiment during a
discussion about destroying interrogation videos. As one
participant put it, his response boiled down to "Don't
bring this into the White House."

Once or twice, The Torture Report itself unwittingly
parrots this mode of thinking, in annotations made by
Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym of a former Air Force
interrogator who is a prominent critic of torture.
Pondering the use of techniques widely known to be
useless for gathering intelligence, he asks: "If our men
and women in uniform were able to accomplish their
missions without the use of enhanced interrogation
techniques through the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and
up to 9/11, what changed?" Leaving aside the question of
exactly what mission was accomplished in Vietnam,
Alexander seems unaware of (or uninterested in) Project
Phoenix, a torture and execution program designed and
operated by the CIA during that war. Tens of thousands
were tortured, and at least 25,000 people were tortured
and then murdered ("pump and dump," it was called)-some
by CIA agents (Americans, just not "in uniform"), most
by CIA-trained Vietnamese acting on CIA instructions.
The latter was preferable, at least from a bureaucratic
standpoint. As William Colby, Phoenix's founder, put it:
ideally, "not only were Americans not to participate.but
they were to make their objections known."

America commits torture, funds torture research and
encourages torture around the world. It is easy to point
the finger at one particularly dark corner or another,
be it the CIA or the derelict grunts on the night shift.
These documents suggest that a bigger problem might be
the sheer number of dark corners: American force abroad
is wielded and managed by so many overlapping but
distinct organizations that it creates plenty of useful
ambiguity as to how, exactly, the overlap is meant to
work. There's a clear sense, especially in memos related
to the early days of Guantánamo, of all these various
people-Army, Navy, Air Force, CIA, FBI-wandering the
cell-block halls, unsure of who is doing what, when and
to whom. In the absence of a plan, everyone takes turns
dealing with the detainees as he or she sees fit. The
guards watch, picking up ideas from the pros for later.
One could call the disarray a design flaw, but that
would involve assuming that torture wasn't part of the
plan. Given that we know it was, all the confusion seems
to have helped; CIA agents reveled in exploiting it,
often identifying themselves as FBI agents to avoid
having their presence exposed or accurately documented.
Defense Department agents pulled a similar move, more
than once impersonating State Department officials
during torture sessions.

* * *

In 2004, after CBS broadcast the first photographs of
detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, many writers-most
prominently Luc Sante, Susan Sontag and the historian
Hazel Carby-noted their striking similarity to the
photographs of lynchings of African-Americans taken from
the end of the Civil War through the middle of the
twentieth century. As Carby in particular observed, both
sets of images, along with the acts they referenced,
were attempts by Americans with power to calm their
anxieties about the uncer-?tain future through
ritualized spectacles of domination, typically
erotically charged, and always enacted on nonwhite
bodies.

Had the documents used in the composition of The Torture
Report been available at the time, they might have
played a useful supporting role in this argument. I say
this not only because of all the forced nudity, sexual
humiliation and threats of rape in the documents but
also because of how often the interrogators admit,
implicitly or otherwise, that they're not primarily
interested in gathering information. (Indeed, one
fascinating CIA memo explains the distinction between an
"interrogator" and a "debriefer" as follows: "A
debriefer engages a detainee solely through question and
answer. An interrogator is a person who completes a two-
week interrogations training program, which is designed
to train, qualify, and certify a person to administer
[enhanced interrogation techniques]." Put more simply,
in the CIA's lexicon, "to interrogate" means "to
torture.")

At the beginning of Abu Zubaydah's detention, his
treatment was overseen by an FBI team that used rapport-
building techniques only. George Tenet was impressed
with the briefings they produced-until he found out
they'd come from FBI agents. A CIA team was immediately
dispatched to take over. Never mind that Tenet had
already judged the intelligence good; torture came
first. Some prisoners came to understand this. During
one of his interrogations at Guantánamo's Camp X-Ray,
Mohammed al-Qahtani asked his questioner, "Sergeant A,"
whether she truly wanted answers to her questions. The
log reads bluntly: "SGT A states she doesn't need an
answer." An earlier memo, proposing new tools for use on
Qahtani, suggested that "if necessary the detainee may
have his mouth taped shut in order to keep him from
talking."

Lynchings were highly public spectacles, attended by
families bearing picnic lunches; the photographs people
took were widely and proudly circulated, at least in the
South, where they were commonly made into postcards. On
this front, contemporary US torture and its associated
documents seem at first different. Much of the visual
evidence has been destroyed. The documents were
classified and released only over strong government
objections, and even then with key pieces withheld. The
men and women who took the Abu Ghraib photos took them
only for their co-workers and family members. In 2009
the Obama administration successfully blocked the court-
ordered release of a cache of previously unseen photos
documenting prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
since then FOIA requests have been made more difficult
and less powerful.

Is torture simply less popular now than lynching was
then? It seems more likely that one set of rituals-those
involving violent subjugation-has become closely
interwoven with another set: those designed to
communicate a reassurance that every action of the US
government is necessary, legal and, most of all,
carefully thought out by ?well-intentioned officials.
The spectacle of lynching, and the photos documenting
that spectacle, served as a boast and a warning: look
what we can do-and will. With post-9/11 detainee abuse,
the exact same message is being communicated, only so
too is its negation: look what we disown, what only the
bad apples among us desire, and for which we will duly
jail them. Endless memos dissecting torture techniques
and parsing existing laws out of existence are a key
part of this ritual: they insist that nothing terrible
is happening. In a 2002 meeting, a military lawyer was
surprisingly honest: "We will need documentation to
protect us." A CIA lawyer chimes in his agreement:
"Everything must be approved and documented."

___________________________________________

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