Prosecuting US Torture

Did anyone in the Bush White House cast an uneasy eye over the new indictment of Gen. Augusto Pinochet? It may seem over the top to mention that old buzzard in the same breath as an elected US President. But consider Task Force 6-26. It sounds like a relic of Pinochet's Operation Condor, whose state-sanctioned acts of murder resulted in the dictator's finally being brought to book after thirty years. In fact, Task Force 6-26 is a secret unit composed mostly of US Navy SEALs operating in Baghdad--its existence unacknowledged by the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, a fact-finding mission for Army generals warned a year ago that Task Force 6-26 was running an off-the-books prison for detainees and applying more-than-moderate physical pressure--and that same task force is implicated in two prisoner deaths. Despite those warnings, Task Force 6-26, with its bland bureaucratic label, operates in Baghdad to this day.

The infamous photographs of depravity at Abu Ghraib may now actually be impeding public reckoning with the latest evidence of operations like Task Force 6-26. The pornographic violence of Abu Ghraib could be hung on low-level, poorly trained reservists like Lynndie England. The latest reports trickling out of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo paint another picture: systematic violence by trained interrogators and systematic deceit by their bosses up the chain of command. FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memos released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act depict Defense Department interrogators--not "rogue" reservists--gagging a Guantánamo prisoner with "duct tape that covered much of his head" for reciting the Koran; squeezing a prisoner's genitalia and bending back his thumbs; punching another's face to a pulp and leaving beaten prisoners moaning in a fetal position on the cell floor. The International Committee of the Red Cross reports physical and psychological coercion "tantamount to torture," with the collusion not just of career leg-breakers but physicians and psychologists. These reports match in sickening detail affidavits from Camp Delta detainees David Hicks of Australia and British national Moazzam Begg.

Critically, in the new reports the chain of evidence ends just a whisper away from Donald Rumsfeld. In June, DIA director Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby complained in a letter to Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's under secretary for intelligence, that two of his staffers had witnessed Special Forces in Baghdad beating a prisoner in the face severely enough to require medical attention. When they protested, Jacoby told Cambone, the DIA officers were threatened and their photos of the injuries confiscated. Meanwhile, FBI officials at Guantánamo were firing off alarmed and frustrated memos to Washington describing beatings, the use of dogs and other "aggressive" measures, which they found morally repugnant as well as likely to produce "unreliable results." The agents were overruled by Guantánamo's commanders and cautioned against too-vigorous a dissent by senior FBI officials. (No one in Congress has asked the obvious: If, as Rumsfeld insists, it is against US policy to torture prisoners, where did these skilled military interrogators learn their craft?)

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