more "Torture Works"

* remarkable interview on democracynow with with human rights attorneys Clive Stafford Smith and Michael Ratner about torture (mostly at bagram) (and a related interview here)

"CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, I'll tell you some of the ones, for example, that Binyam Mohammed told me. He was the man who had the razor blade taken to him (his penis). He was then taken, and again, we can prove it. We’ve got the flight logs. He was taken on January 25, 2004, to Kabul, where he was put in this dark prison for five months, and he was shackled. You just get this vision of the Middle Ages, where he’s shackled on the wall with his hands up, so he can't quite sit down. It’s totally dark in that place."

I thought the "Middle-Ages" reference/imagery was quite powerful for some reason.

and further to my post yesterday * remarkable interview on democracynow with with human rights attorneys Clive Stafford Smith and Michael Ratner about torture (mostly at bagram) (and a related interview here)

"CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, I'll tell you some of the ones, for example, that Binyam Mohammed told me. He was the man who had the razor blade taken to him (his penis). He was then taken, and again, we can prove it. We’ve got the flight logs. He was taken on January 25, 2004, to Kabul, where he was put in this dark prison for five months, and he was shackled. You just get this vision of the Middle Ages, where he’s shackled on the wall with his hands up, so he can't quite sit down. It’s totally dark in that place."

and relevant to my post yesterday

"CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: When you're talking “break people,” and I think that’s a very important word. You know, people bang on about whether it’s torture or whether it’s coercion. Well our highest officials have said that the purpose of all of this is to, quote, “break” somebody, and we get people to confess to stuff that’s absolute drivel. You take, for example, Binyam Mohammed, again. You have a razor blade taken to you (taken to his penis, for goodness sake), you have the psychological stuff, you’re going to say anything.

They got Binyam Mohammed to confess that he had dinner with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramsey bin al-Shaid, Abu Zubaydah, Sheikh al-Libbi, and Jose Padilla all together on April 3, 2002, in Pakistan. Well, you know, quite apart from anything else, two of them, Abu Zubaydah and Sheikh al-Libbi were in U.S. custody at the time when he confessed to that and at the time that he was meant to be having dinner, and you know, this is a guy that didn’t speak Arabic who was meant to be hobnobbing with half of al-Qaeda. You get this total drivel out of this breaking of people, and yet, for some reason, the people who are designing Guantanamo think we should carry on breaking them, as did the Spanish Inquisition. It’s very odd."

MICHAEL RATNER: That’s correct. I mean, it’s – they break them; they get drivel; they get false stories, and so what’s going on? What’s going on, I think, in part, is an attempt to terrorize people, terrorize the Muslim world and say, “You come into U.S. hands, and we will terrorize you.” And that’s what they’re doing.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Don’t you think though, Michael – I tell you, I think there’s a slightly bigger danger here, which is the people who are doing this abuse believe the stuff they get. This is what’s frightening to me, that we end up making decisions based on this nonsense.

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, it’s true. They do believe it. I think, when you talk to your clients or we talk to ours, the people who are interrogating them actually believe what they're telling them, even though it’s utterly and complete drivel.

and from the second interview:

"MAHER ARAR: Well, I do agree 100% with what I just heard. I can tell you, for example, during the first two weeks of my stay in Syria, I was physically beaten. What happened during this initial period is I just wanted them to leave me alone, even in that dark and damp underground cell. But after a while, the psychological torture that I endured during this lengthy period, I was ready – I was ready, especially by the end of my stay, by the end of the ten-month period in this underground cell, I was ready, frankly, to confess to anything. I would just write anything so that they could only take me from that place and put me in a place where it is fit for a human being. I was – not only that, I was ready to endure more physical beatings, more physical beatings just to get rid of this place."

congratulations, america.