From: Jei (jei@cc.hut.fi)
Date: Fri Mar 05 2004 - 05:24:10 MST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25762-2004Mar3?language=printer
'Torture Lite' Takes Hold in War on Terror
Reuters
Wednesday, March 3, 2004; 8:29 AM
By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Rock music at full blast and the smothering darkness
of a hood are sometimes enough to break a will already frayed by lack of
sleep. If not, the subject can be slapped and shaken senseless, just short
of permanent injury.
Honed against Arab suspects in Israel and decried widely as "torture lite,"
such interrogation methods are now a prevalent part of the U.S.-led war on
terror, human rights groups say.
Yet many experts defend them as a last resort in a race to stop suicide
attacks by al Qaeda, whose diffuse ranks have been notoriously hard for
Western intelligence agencies to penetrate.
"Faced with terrorism, every democracy will resort to torture if it thinks
this will prevent attacks against its civilians. The issue is whether such
methods are used with deniability or accountability," said Alan Dershowitz,
a Harvard University law professor.
Washington denies its forces use torture, despite increasing Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch reports of abuse in U.S. military
stockades in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
British troops in the Gulf have been similarly accused.
The most recurrent complaints include deprivation of sleep or food, and
being forced to sit for hours shackled and hooded in a contorted position.
Many suspects also say their captors beat and shook them, enough to jar and
bruise but not to maim.
These methods -- which U.S. officials describe as "stress and duress" rather
than torture -- recall the "moderate physical pressure" Israel's Shin Bet
security service uses on detainees believed to be withholding information
about impending attacks.
According to Israeli security sources, the Shin Bet has shared interrogation
expertise with American counterparts since the mid-1990s amid fears of new
Islamist violence on U.S. soil.
"The Americans were not equipped for cracking this brand of fanaticism," a
senior Israeli source said. "We helped."
"UNWILLING" INFORMANT GAVE UP SADDAM
Security officials do not give details of interrogations in the war on
terror, making it impossible to gauge their efficacy.
Dershowitz, who has written extensively on legal challenges facing
counter-terrorism agencies, said judicial scrutiny of U.S. methods is
hobbled by the foreign location of many interrogation centers.
For even greater discretion, he said, U.S. forces transfer some detainees to
Third World client states where "torture heavy" is the norm. Amnesty has
also reported such "outsourcing" of interrogations.
Coercion clearly played a part in at least one U.S. coup: the capture of
Saddam Hussein last December after the deposed Iraqi dictator's whereabouts
were extracted from an informant.
"This guy was in interrogation. He wasn't willingly giving stuff up," one
U.S. officer told the Washington Post.
A source who oversaw Shin Bet interrogations for four years said that out of
dozens of suspects subjected then to "moderate physical pressure," only one
did not divulge details that led directly to the prevention of a suicide
bombing or gun attack.
"He was either innocent or too tough," the source said.
According to one Arab affairs expert, such state-sanctioned tactics risk
deepening the enmity they purport to tackle.
"They (U.S. forces and their allies) are only making more and more people
disbelieve in democracy and the so-called international standards of human
rights," said Azzam al-Tamimi of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought
in London.
Anti-torture campaigners further insist that use of force is as likely to
yield false information as anything truly useful.
"There is an assumption that torture is an effective way of interrogation,
but torture is not always an effective technique. People being tortured will
say anything to stop the pain," said Amnesty International secretary-general
Irene Khan.
RUSES, NOT ABUSES
With the war on terror in its third year, Osama bin Laden still at large and
alerts over attacks by his al Qaeda network unabated, security experts are
increasingly circumspect about the U.S.-led campaign -- and employment of
torture in any form.
"We are fighting for our existence ... against Islamists that could be armed
with weapons of mass destruction. But even in those circumstances, I think
that we would find that we were both not being effective and undermining the
things that we really stand for by using torture with prisoners," said R.
James Woolsey, a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
"Any unorthodox (interrogation) methods should be ruses, not abuses," he
told Reuters.
Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon agreed that even "moderate physical
pressure" should come after psychological manipulation has been tried first.
"A good interrogator knows how to play with a terrorist's mind so he ends up
cooperating," Ayalon said.
According to security sources, "truth serums" -- drugs that reduce the
subject's inhibitions -- are self-defeating because separating fact from
fantasy in the ensuing wash of information can be impossible. With doping
ruled out, duping remains an option.
One retired Shin Bet interrogator, Michael Koubi, recounted in an interview
with Atlantic Monthly last year how he terrified suspects into talking by
simply staging beatings within earshot.
"People are afraid of the unknown. They are afraid of being tortured, of
being held for a long time," he told the magazine.
Another trick was to mention a secret about the suspect and tell him it was
obtained from one of his jailed comrades. With the stigma of collaboration
eroded, the suspect would usually be keen to cooperate himself and end the
interrogation, Koubi said.
But Koubi told the magazine it was most important to impose a sense of
intimacy with the subject through common language. "I try to create the
impression that I use his mother tongue even better than he does," he said.
"This embarrasses him very much."
In high-level Washington hearings on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that
prompted the war on terror, U.S. officials linked the lack of forewarning to
intelligence shortfalls -- including too few agents with knowledge of Arabic
and Afghan dialects.
While this gap is bridged, U.S. interrogators may have had to make do with
physical coercion, Dershowitz said.
"The United States has had to use more blunderbuss methods, as it lacks, for
now, the sophistication Israel has in dealing with the cultural challenges
posed by terrorist suspects," he said.
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