When coercive interrogation becomes torture

1.00pm - By PAUL VALLELY

Experts in torture are not surprised by the details in the stories of abuse which continue to emerge from US-run prisons in Iraq. And the more that emerges the less it seems to be the work of a handful of sadists or perverts. Rather they are in line with sophisticated techniques of modern torture.

At the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in London, which has dealt with tens of thousands of torture cases over the past three decade, one of its senior staff, Sherman Carroll yesterday said: "The idea of it being a few bad apples won't wash. It looks increasingly like a systematic process.

"And there have clearly been conscious attempts by psychologists to make the techniques culturally relative to a Muslim population," he added, referring to reports of enforced nakedness, the simulation of oral sex, forced masturbation and naked human pyramids which seemed calculated particularly to offend followers of Islam.

The techniques, which rest on principles of psychological disorientation rather than inflicting physical pain, were pioneered in Russia and China after the Second World War. They included humiliation, hooding, disorientation and depriving prisoners of sleep, warmth, water, food and human dignity. The KGB and Chinese secret police passed them on to the North Koreans during the Korean war, in which British prisoners of war were subjected to the new interrogation techniques.

British military intelligence, realising how effective the innovations were, applied similar methods in colonies like Kenya, Aden and Cyprus. They were carried over to Northern Ireland too.

In 1970 a unit from the British army's Intelligence Wing deprived 12 IRA suspects of food and sleep, placed hoods over their heads and forced them to lean against walls with only their fingertips while playing into their ears a piercing high-pitch screech of "white noise".

When the incident became public the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that the practices were inhumane, degrading and unlawful. Edward Heath's government banned the techniques in 1971.

In these years, when the Cold War rather than terrorism was the main threat to the West, the tide turned against torture. In 1984 the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment was enacted. The international community, with the US State Department at the head, set up operations to monitor torture. The State department still produces annual reports, with Burma, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Turkey being censured in the latest.

But though both the UK and the US signed up to the convention both continued to train selected military personnel in them. At Ashford, in Kent, and at a former US base at Chicksands, the tactics are used to train special operations soldiers, the SAS, SBS, pilots, paratroopers and others who might be captured behind enemy lines.

In R2I resistance to interrogation training a strict 48-hour time limit is imposed. Stripping naked and sexual humiliation is part of the system of ill-treatment and degradation.

But in 1997 it became clear that the United States employs such techniques on its enemies. Then two CIA interrogation manuals became public. They spelled out the theory that detention should prolong the shock of capture by disrupting the things on which the prisoner's sense of identity depends - continuity in surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others.

"Detention should be planned," one manual says, "to enhance feelings of being cut off from anything known and reassuring."

Psychological rather than physical pain is more effective, one manual says: "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself."

Threats trigger fears more damaging than pain itself. Actual pain often produces false confessions, whereas psychological pain undermines the prisoner's "internal motivational strength".

President George Bush last June denied that the US is using torture, in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay or Iraq. But on Wednesday his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that sleep deprivation, dietary changes and stress positions are being used.

Pentagon lawyers, according to the US pressure group Human Rights Watch, have drawn up a 72-point "matrix" of acceptable stress, including: stripping prisoners naked, subjecting them to bright lights or blaring noise, hooding them, exposing them to heat and cold (from 110 to 10 degrees F), and binding them in uncomfortable positions. The more stressful techniques must be approved by senior commanders, but all are permitted.

The lawyers' advice, and the matrix allowing "graduated levels of force", are being kept secret. It is thought to argue that torture conventions do not apply where detainees are formally in the custody of another country. But what is clear is that the advice has created a climate in which US officials and soldiers feel free to deal more harshly with detainees.

Since then a battery of 50-odd special "coercive techniques" was introduced in Iraq last autumn after Major General Geoffrey Miller left Guantanamo Bay to take over as US commander in charge of military jails there.

Apologists for the harsher regime insist that it stops just short of torture. Human rights campaigners disagree. "The UN Convention says torture means 'any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental'," says Sherman Carroll of the Medical Foundation.

In any case, according to yesterday's New York Times, the techniques approved by Pentagon lawyers include 'water boarding', in which a prisoner is strapped down and pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

The paper claims it has been authorised for use against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11 and who the CIA suspect knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

The methods employed by the CIA, it says, are so severe that senior officials of the FBI directed its agents to stay out of the interviews for fear of compromising the FBI's standing in criminal cases.

Such techniques do not work, critics say. "Torture produces hallucinations," says Sherman Carroll, " and confessions that may be lies." There are also concerns that interrogators are notoriously poor at regulating the "graduated levels of force".

In Israel what was called "moderate physical force" was once lawful and security forces ended up torturing as many as 85 per cent of Palestinian security detainees " thousands of people" before Israel's Supreme Court in 1999 outlawed acts such as shaking prisoners, hoods, frog crouching, chair perching and sleep deprivation.

Despite this, according to Human Rights Watch, the practice seems to have increased in the past year and the head of the American defence contracting firm implicated in the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib visited an Israeli "anti-terror" training camp in the occupied West Bank earlier this year.

But US officials insist that torture does work. The leading al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah under "intensive questioning", they say, revealed details of a plot to build a dirty bomb.

Yet even if it does yield fruits, critics insist that torture is always unacceptable. "Victims of Saddam's regime are re-visiting the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture," says Sherman Carroll. "The recent photos have brought flashbacks of their torture under Saddam."

They had thought things had changed. But when they see the old techniques being used again they begin to wonder.

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Herald Feature: Iraq