El Salvador: Torturers May Meet Their Victims

July 16, 2016 by Leave a Comment

In an unusual, and brave move,

SAN SALVADOR — El Salvador’s Supreme Court has struck down a 1993 amnesty law enacted after the country’s devastating civil war, clearing the way for possible prosecutions of war crimes at the risk of reopening old wounds.

The amnesty has contributed to more than two decades of impunity for crimes committed during the 1980-1992 civil war, which claimed 75,000 lives. It helped end the conflict between the government and leftist guerillas, but it has blocked access to justice and reparations for victims.

The court’s constitutional chamber ruled 4 to 1 Wednesday that the amnesty violates international law and El Salvador’s constitution. The ruling said the government has an obligation to “investigate, identify and sanction the material and intellectual authors of human rights crimes and grave war crimes” and to provide reparations to victims.  Washington Post

If what happened during those years is hazy, or has been swamped by more recent atrocities, a short excerpt from a collection by courageous reporter, Martha Gellhorn, then in her 80s, is just below.

What Hands, Susan Meiselas, 1980

White Hands, Susan Meiselas, 1980

For a portfolio of Magnum photos see here.

A Daily Mail, 2013 article about the abducted children.

 

Filed under Human Rights, Torture, War Tagged with , , ,

Torture is the Worst Abomination of Man

July 9, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998  ) was a war reporter who continued reporting into her 80th year.  The last war-trip she made was to Central America when, under the Reagan administration, the government in El Salvador and the “contras” in Nicaragua were funded to murder their own citizens.  Gellhorn reported it.  Some of those, compiled, are in a collection of her reporting called The Face of War. (reviewed here) This is an extended excerpt from that essay.

Torture is the worst abomination of man and utterly condemns any government that sanctions it. El Salvador is a member of the United Nations and party to the Charter of Human Rights. Has the United Nations gone out of business? European officials rightly denounce psychiatric torture in the Soviet Union. Why keep obsequiously silent about El Salvador?

“Assassinated.” In 1982, regarded as a good year, better than the preceding three, 5,840 mutilated corpses of men and women, boys and girls, were found, dumped everywhere throughout El Salvador. Of these, peasants were the majority. Few peasants were “captured,” only eight “disappeared” in 1982. The method for peasants is immediate butchery in villages and fields. Peasant refugees tell how the army, or ORDEN, or the National Guard, came into their village, killing, before they stole the animals, looted and burned the houses. This is how refugees are made: an estimated 300,000 outside the country, 200,000 inside it, but the process is never-ending. Peasants are uprooted, killed, because they are Romero Catholics, Catolicos. They believe what their murdered Archbishop taught: misery is not decreed by God, but made by man. This is revolutionary Communism to the Salvadoran government. But then, Jesuit priests are considered Communists and live in danger.

Women, innumerable children, old men crowd into makeshift refugee encampments. They have all seen peasants assassinated. A  sample: a pouter pigeon of a woman who has lived for two years with 1,200 other peasant refugees on the dusty playing fields of the Catholic Seminary. “It was ORDEN. We heard them coming. We ran to hide in the trees. But my daughter was eight months pregnant, she could not run fast enough. They caught her on the path. They cut open her stomach with a machete and pulled out the child and cut it in half. She was 17 years of age. I saw with my own eyes. With my own eyes. Then they stole everything we had worked for and burned our houses.”

We learned that President Reagan was distressed by the photographs of the Phalange’s victims in the Beirut Palestinian camps. He is morally obliged to see the Human Rights albums of assassinated Salvadorans. These people did not die quickly. Many faces are covered in blood below the eyes (” We think they do this with rifle butts.”) Some have been strangled. Some are decapitated, the head beside the corpse. A naked boy, lying on his face, has long deep open stab slashes on his legs. A naked woman, also on her face, is riddled with bullet wounds through the lower half of her body; her nakedness presumes rape but that is commonplace for women. There is a gruesome statuary of eight entwined faceless bodies, burned down to nothing but smooth white fat. I studied specially the photos of those killed this January, the month when President Reagan certified that human rights reform in El Salvador warranted more military aid, although 672 Salvadorans were murdered in that month alone.

We free worlders elect our governments freely, so we are responsible for what they do in our name. If governments were better, wiser, more in touch with real life, citizens would not have to spend so much time educating and restraining them. Nadezdha Mandelstam, survivor of another tyranny, gave the best advice to citizens: “If you can do nothing else you must scream.”

Gellhorn, Martha. The Face of War (Kindle Locations 5256-5259). Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

 

 

 

Filed under Books, Torture, War Tagged with , , ,

New E-Mails Show Psychologists’ Approval of Torture

May 1, 2015 by Leave a Comment

“The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, according to a new report by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights activists….”

And, another one coming

Last November, the association’s board ordered an independent review of the organization’s role in the interrogation program. That review, led by David Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer, is now underway.

“We have been given a mandate by the A.P.A. to be completely independent in our investigation, and that is how we have been conducting our inquiry,” Mr. Hoffman said. “We continue to gather evidence and talk with witnesses and expect to complete the investigation later this spring.”

NY Times

What was that Willie Nelson song?  Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be psychologists….?

Filed under Bush Administration, Torture Tagged with , ,

Chilean-American to Stand Trial for Death of Victor Jara

April 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

September of 1973 was one of the worst months I can remember living through, and September 11 the worst day until another 38 years later.   A bright and hopeful new, democratically elected government in Chile, was smashed by Chilean armed forces, aided and abetted by the United States.  Thousands were rounded up.  Many were tortured and killed, among them Victor Jara, an internationally known singer song-writer.  His guitar hand was crushed and he was killed.  By the end of the regime in 1990 some 40,000 Chilean citizens had been detained, many of them tortured.  Over 200,000 left the country for exile.

Now, perhaps, one of those responsible, will get some time to reflect on what he did.

“A US judge has ordered a former Chilean army officer to stand trial in Florida in connection with the killing of folk singer Victor Jara in 1973.

Pedro Barrientos, who has US citizenship and lives in Florida, will answer charges of torture and extrajudicial killing.

Jara was one of thousands of people rounded up at a stadium in the capital Santiago after the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.

He was tortured and shot dead.”

 BBC

Filed under Latin America, Torture Tagged with , , ,

America: Suspicion, Paranoia and Violence

January 31, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Must read Mark Danner’s review of Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

On or about Sept. 11, 2001, American character changed. What Americans had proudly flaunted as “our highest values” were now judged to be luxuries that in a new time of peril the country could ill afford. Justice, and its cardinal principle of innocent until proven guilty, became a risk, its indulgence a weakness. Asked recently about an innocent man who had been tortured to death in an American “black site” in Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney did not hesitate. “I’m more concerned,” he said, “with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.” In this new era in which all would be sacrificed to protect the country, torture and even murder of the innocent must be counted simply “collateral damage.”

Filed under Torture, War

Why So Few Brave Men?

December 10, 2014 by Leave a Comment

The summary of the report on U.S. Torture, released yesterday by the United States Senate Intelligence Committee can only be read in small doses.  Almost every paragraph stuns one into vertigo.

 

This morning one man who took part in some of what was reported spoke about his lasting shame.

I can’t be forgiven for what I did at Abu Ghraib

I was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I tortured.

… , the Senate released its torture report. Many people were surprised by what it contained: accounts of waterboardings far more frequent than what had previously been reported, weeklong sleep deprivation, a horrific and humiliating procedure called “rectal rehydration.” I’m not surprised. I assure you there is more; much remains redacted.

Eric Fair is a brave man for saying this, publicly and in a widely read forum.  He is not as brave as he wishes he might have been.  In another piece he gives more details.

Eric Fair – An Iraq Interrogator’s Nightmare

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

… While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues, I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I’m ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I’m becoming more ashamed of my silence.

So, the question is, how do we relearn the values of courage, of resistance to illegal orders, of non-participation in evil?  I dont’ know if Eric Fair has any good ideas.  I bet he wishes he had stood up after his first experience and said “no more,” and damn the consequences.  I know I wish hundreds more had said: I will not participate.

The stars and stripes are now the stars and bars, the red of tortured men running down.

Filed under Torture, War Tagged with

Torture: After it Stops, It’s Not Over

August 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment

The obituary today for Helen Bamber, a long time healer to those who had been tortured, reminds us of the very best humans have to offer one another, and the worst.

Helen Bamber, whose volunteering to comfort broken survivors of a Nazi concentration camp when she was 19 inspired her to devote her next seven decades to helping more than 50,000 victims of torture in 90 countries, died on Aug. 21 in London. She was 89.

… Ms. Bamber said the worst toll of torture was psychic — “the act of killing a man without dying,” a survivor once told her. Torture, she wrote in an autobiography for her foundation, constitutes “a total perversion of all that is good in human relationships.”

“It is designed to destroy not only the physical and psychological integrity of one individual, but with every blow, with every electrode, his or her family and the next generation,” she continued. “The body betrays and is often discarded, a body to be hated for its scars and injuries, a body which is a constant reminder even if there are no scars or remaining injuries.”

Her approach was to treat the whole person, often in group therapy, which she saw as giving alienated victims a sense of community. She recruited dozens of professionals to treat more than 2,000 victims a year, and worked with many patients herself as a psychotherapist — which she became through experience, she said, rather than an academic degree.

Her method involved revisiting victims’ worst horrors and letting them “vomit” them out.

“You have to move into the torture chamber with them,” she told the British newspaper The Observer in 1999. “You almost have to be tortured with them.”

The next step, she told The Irish Times in 1995, is to work with the “noble and good” qualities that can enable a victim to survive. It was enough, she said, to take a victim’s story, hold it and say, “Yes, I believe you.”

Her theory, and practice, of immersion with the sufferer, back into the horror and repetitively talking it out, is much the same as that which has helped those gripped by traumatic stress (PTSD).  As Daniel Shay in his ground breaking book Achilles in Vietnam, says, “healing from trauma depends upon communication of the trauma–being able safely to tell the story to someone who is listening and who can be trusted to retell it truthfully to others in the community.”

The two faces of war trauma, both responsive to re-connecting with the human community that was lost.

Another teacher gone, but a legacy left of those who can carry on the work.

Filed under Passings, Torture, War Tagged with , ,

Poland Allowed it (The US Did it)

July 25, 2014 by Leave a Comment

The European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday that Poland had violated the rights of two terrorism suspects by allowing their transfer to a secret detention center run by the C.I.A. in Poland, where the two men were tortured .. and in doing so became  ” the first court anywhere to publicly confirm the existence of the secret prisons operated by the C.I.A. in Europe.”

Amrit Singh of the Open Society Justice Initiative, a rights advocacy group that brought the case on behalf of Mr. Nashiri, said the ruling ended the impunity for those engaged in abuses connected with the rendition program. The group emphasized that the court had ordered Poland to secure assurances from the United States that Mr. Nashiri would not be subject to the death penalty.

“In stark contrast to U.S. courts that have closed their doors to victims of C.I.A. torture,” Ms. Singh said, “this ruling sends an unmistakable signal that these kind of abuses will not be tolerated in Europe, and those who participated in these abuses will be held accountable.”

See here for a a detailed report on the rendition program.

Here’s the press release from the European Court of Human Rights.

NYTimes

As of yet, no warrants issued for the perpetrators who continue to reside comfortable on their US ranches….

Filed under Law, Torture Tagged with

Di Fi — Hair on Fire

March 12, 2014 by Leave a Comment

California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, long a familiar face of conservative Democrats, and long a power house in the Senate, had her hair on fire yesterday on the Senate Floor.  After months, ( years?,) of defending the spy agencies of the United States, as the senior member of the Senate panel entrusted with their oversight, she suddenly discovered that the fears and accusations leveled against them — of spying on American citizens and over broadly on citizens of the world– were true.  The CIA, despite promising to give her staffers a secure site to pour over Agency documents, had violated the promise and terms of the written contract, to spy upon them.  They were entrusted with finding out what the CIA had done after the 9/11 attacks with regard to intelligence gathering and in particular how much and when had torture been used, and had it been, as claimed, effective in prying loose actionable intelligence.  The CIA wanted to know what were they finding out?

The Senator held forth for 38 minutes or so, with very particular details, and a promise that she was not taking the CIA intrusions, removal of data and broken contract lightly.   Kevin Drum, long time observer at Mother Jones thinks this will turn out to be an empty threat on the part of the Senator.  We hope not.  Ever since the Frank Church led investigation of CIA over-reach and actual crimes led to a few reforms in1975, and the creation of the Intelligence Committee of which Feinstein is the chair, the Agency has been clawing back every shred and shard of power that it could.

All of Senator Feinstein’s intervention on the floor is available here, both as a transcript and a video.  It is worth watching at least some of the action to get the anger she conveys.

A word of praise on her web site might keep her spine bent to the task.

As Amy Davidson writes in the New Yorker,

This all goes back to the first years after September 11th. The C.I.A. tortured detainees in secret prisons. It also videotaped many of those sessions. Those records should have been handed over, or at least preserved, under the terms of certain court orders. Instead, in November, 2005, a C.I.A. official named Jose Rodriguez had ninety-two videotapes physically destroyed. “Nobody wanted to make a decision that needed to be made,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2012. (He also said, “I really resent you using the word ‘torture’ time and time again.”)

Feinstein, in her speech, said that the C.I.A.’s “troubling” destruction of the tapes put the current story in motion. Michael Hayden, then director of the C.I.A., had offered the committee cables that he said were just as descriptive as the tapes. “The resulting staff report was chilling,”

And Maureen Dowd turns her snark on Langley… “which couldn’t even spy on the Senate properly without getting caught.

Langley needs a come-to-Jesus moment — pronto.

That was clear Tuesday morning when Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, suddenly materialized on the Senate floor to “reluctantly” out the C.I.A.

It was an astonishing “J’accuse” moment because Feinstein has been the bulwark protecting the intelligence community against critics worried that we’ve become a surveillance state, “the privacy people,” as she has called them.

But she saw things differently when she was the victim of government spying. She suggested that the C.I.A. had violated federal law and wondered “whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.”

 

 

Filed under Surveillance, Torture Tagged with , ,

Syria: Medieval Torture

January 25, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Syria tortured and executed 11,000 according to photos brought out by a Syrian defector, and examined by three international prosecutors.

Photos also at The Daily Mail

Of course, one of those tortured in Syrian jails was Maher Arar, a Canadian, sent by the United States to Syria in 2002 where he was tortured and held for over a year.  As he points out, these revelations are important but what they reveal has been known for some time, and raised scant protest.

Milos Forman’s 2006 film, Goya’s Ghosts, shows the use of torture implements in the later stages of the Spanish Inquisition — in 1793 already well beyond medieval times– all still in use it seems in 2013 Syria.

 

Filed under Torture, War Tagged with , ,

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