D
Dr. Jai Maharaj
Guest
Outsourcing Torture
By Chris Hedges
Monday, October 15, 2007 by Truthdig.com
Distributed by Common Dreams
The Bush administration has called for the respect of human
rights in Burma, a pretty safe piece of posturing, but it
remains silent as Egypt's dictator, Gen. Hosni Mubarak'
unleashes the largest crackdown on public opposition in
over a decade. Our moral indignation over the shooting of
monks masks the incestuous and growing alliance we have
built in the so-called war on terror with some of the
world's most venal dictatorships.
Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 26 years and is grooming
his son, Gamal, to succeed him, can torture and "disappear"
dissidents -- such as the Egyptian journalist Reda Hilal,
who vanished four years ago -- without American censure
because he does the dirty work for us on those we
"disappear." The extraordinary-rendition program, which
sees the United States kidnap and detain terrorist suspects
in secret prisons around the world, fits neatly with the
Egyptian regime's contempt for due process. Those rounded
up by American or Egyptian security agents are never
granted legal rights. The abductors are often hooded or
masked. If the captors are American the suspects are
spirited onto a Gulfstream V jet registered to a series of
dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign
Marketing of Portland, Ore., and whisked to Egypt or
perhaps Morocco or Jordan. When these suspects arrive in
Cairo they vanish into black holes as swiftly as dissident
Egyptians. It is the same dirty and seamless process.
We have nothing to say to Mubarak. He is us. The general
intelligence directorate in Lazoughli and in Mulhaq al-
Mazra prison in Cairo allegedly holds many of our own
detained and "disappeared." The more savage the torture
techniques of the Mubarak regime the faster the prisoners
we smuggle into Egypt from Afghanistan and Iraq are broken
down. The screams of Egyptians, Iraqis, Pakistanis and
Afghans mingle in these prison cells to condemn us all.
We know little about what goes on in the black holes the
CIA has set up in Egypt. But snapshots leak out. Ibn-al
Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured by U.S. forces in late
2001, was an al-Qaida camp commander. He was taken to a
prison in Cairo where he was repeatedly tortured by
Egyptian officials. The Egyptian interrogators told the CIA
that he had confirmed a relationship between Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaida. The tidbit, used by then U.S. Secretary of
State Colin Powell in his United Nations speech, turned out
to be false. Victims usually will say anything to make
severe torture stop. Al-Libi was eventually returned to
Afghanistan, although he has again disappeared.
Mamduh Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen of Australia, was
apprehended in October 2001 in Pakistan, where, his family
says, he was touring religious schools. A Pentagon
spokesman claimed that Habib spent most of his time in
Afghanistan and was "either supporting hostile forces or on
the battlefield fighting illegally against the U.S."
Habib was released a few days after The Washington Post
published an article on his case. He said he was first
interrogated and brutalized for three weeks in Islamabad.
His interrogators spoke English with American accents. He
was then bustled into a jumpsuit, his eyes were covered
with opaque goggles and he was flown on a small jet to
Egypt. There he was held and interrogated for six months,
according to Joseph Margulies, a lawyer affiliated with the
MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law
School, which is representing Habib,.
Habib claims he was beaten frequently with blunt
instruments, including an object that he likened to an
"electric prod." He was told that if he did not confess to
belonging to al-Qaida he would be anally raped by specially
trained dogs. Habib said he was returned to U.S. custody
after his stint in an Egyptian prison and flown to Bagram
air base, in Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo Bay, where
he was kept until his release.
Al-Libi and Habib are but two cases. There are hundreds,
perhaps thousands more. These accounts of American-
sponsored torture in Egyptian prisons are not new. They
hardly make news. But the close cooperation between
Egyptian and American security officials represents a
frightening melding of despotisms, an international cabal
of state-sponsored brutality and abuse. It does away with
the concept of law and human rights. It mocks international
protocols and treaties. It permits the despotic states we
support, such as Egypt, to veer away from democratic
structures and propagate, with our assistance, a more
ruthless tyranny and brutality. It enrages and finally
empowers those who oppose us to engage in the same
behavior. It is dividing the world into competing spheres
of intolerance. In this new world order there is nothing
left to appeal to other than the mercy of someone standing
over you with an electric prod.
Mubarak has in the past few weeks decided to shut down the
last remnants of opposition. He has sent in riot police to
arrest dozens of striking labor leaders, rounded up more
than a thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the
largest opposition group, and tossed seven journalists into
prison. The charges against the journalists range from
misquoting Egypt's justice minister to spreading rumors
about the health of Mubarak to defaming his designated
heir, Gamal. The detainees, as usual, complain of torture
and beatings. And persistent rumors of death squads,
bolstered by the "disappearance" of some of the regime's
most outspoken critics, have turned Egypt into a state that
has mastered the art of internal and external extraordinary
rendition.
The few lonely Egyptian voices and institutions that dared
to speak out against the mounting repression have been
silenced, including the Association for Human Rights and
Legal Aid, which was shut down by the government last
month. The government also recently arrested two political
activists -- Mohammed al-Dereini and Ahmed Mohammed Sobh,
both members of Egypt's tiny Shiite minority -- after the
men publicized testimonies from prisoners detailing torture
in the Egyptian prison system. Egypt's most prominent
dissident, the sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, is in exile,
too frightened to go home and repeat his own brutal
experience in an Egyptian prison.
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights has confirmed
more than 500 cases of police abuse since 1993, including
167 deaths -- three of which took place this year -- that
the group "strongly suspects were the result of torture and
mistreatment." There are now 80,000 political prisoners
held in Egyptian prisons. The annual budget for internal
security was $1.5 billion in 2006, more than the entire
national budget for health care, and the security police
forces comprise 1.4 million members, nearly four times the
number of the Egyptian army.
The United States has subsidized Egypt's armed forces with
over $38 billion in aid. Egypt receives about $2 billion
annually -- $1.3 billion in foreign military financing and
about $815 million in economic and support fund assistance
-- making it the second largest regular recipient of
conventional U.S. military and economic aid, after Israel.
We have nothing left to say to the Mubarak regime. The
torture practiced in Egypt is the torture we employ for our
own ends. The cries that rise up from these fetid cells in
Egypt condemn not only the Mubarak dictatorship but the
moral rot that has beset the American state.
We are losing the war in Iraq. We are an isolated and
reviled nation. We are pitiless to others weaker than
ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals.
Thucydides wrote of Athens' expanding empire and how this
empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant
at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally
imposed on itself. If we do not confront our hubris and the
lies we tell to justify the killing and mask the
destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not
grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if
we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary
form of communication, if we do not remove from power our
flag-waving, cross-bearing versions of the Taliban, the
despotism we empower abroad will become the despotism we
soon experience at home.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School
and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for
The New York Times, is the author of "American Fascists:
The Christian Right and the War on America."
More at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071015_outsourcing_torture/
Jai Maharaj
http://tinyurl.com/24fq83
http://www.mantra.com/jai
http://www.mantra.com/jyotish
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
purposes of research and open discussion. The contents of this post may not
have been authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the
poster. The contents are protected by copyright law and the exemption for
fair use of copyrighted works.
o If you send private e-mail to me, it will likely not be read,
considered or answered if it does not contain your full legal name, current
e-mail and postal addresses, and live-voice telephone number.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views expressed by others are
not necessarily those of the poster who may or may not have read the article.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted material the use of
which may or may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This material is being made available in efforts to advance the
understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democratic, scientific, social, and cultural, etc., issues. It is believed
that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research, comment, discussion and educational purposes by
subscribing to USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more information
go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article for purposes of
your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.
By Chris Hedges
Monday, October 15, 2007 by Truthdig.com
Distributed by Common Dreams
The Bush administration has called for the respect of human
rights in Burma, a pretty safe piece of posturing, but it
remains silent as Egypt's dictator, Gen. Hosni Mubarak'
unleashes the largest crackdown on public opposition in
over a decade. Our moral indignation over the shooting of
monks masks the incestuous and growing alliance we have
built in the so-called war on terror with some of the
world's most venal dictatorships.
Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 26 years and is grooming
his son, Gamal, to succeed him, can torture and "disappear"
dissidents -- such as the Egyptian journalist Reda Hilal,
who vanished four years ago -- without American censure
because he does the dirty work for us on those we
"disappear." The extraordinary-rendition program, which
sees the United States kidnap and detain terrorist suspects
in secret prisons around the world, fits neatly with the
Egyptian regime's contempt for due process. Those rounded
up by American or Egyptian security agents are never
granted legal rights. The abductors are often hooded or
masked. If the captors are American the suspects are
spirited onto a Gulfstream V jet registered to a series of
dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign
Marketing of Portland, Ore., and whisked to Egypt or
perhaps Morocco or Jordan. When these suspects arrive in
Cairo they vanish into black holes as swiftly as dissident
Egyptians. It is the same dirty and seamless process.
We have nothing to say to Mubarak. He is us. The general
intelligence directorate in Lazoughli and in Mulhaq al-
Mazra prison in Cairo allegedly holds many of our own
detained and "disappeared." The more savage the torture
techniques of the Mubarak regime the faster the prisoners
we smuggle into Egypt from Afghanistan and Iraq are broken
down. The screams of Egyptians, Iraqis, Pakistanis and
Afghans mingle in these prison cells to condemn us all.
We know little about what goes on in the black holes the
CIA has set up in Egypt. But snapshots leak out. Ibn-al
Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured by U.S. forces in late
2001, was an al-Qaida camp commander. He was taken to a
prison in Cairo where he was repeatedly tortured by
Egyptian officials. The Egyptian interrogators told the CIA
that he had confirmed a relationship between Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaida. The tidbit, used by then U.S. Secretary of
State Colin Powell in his United Nations speech, turned out
to be false. Victims usually will say anything to make
severe torture stop. Al-Libi was eventually returned to
Afghanistan, although he has again disappeared.
Mamduh Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen of Australia, was
apprehended in October 2001 in Pakistan, where, his family
says, he was touring religious schools. A Pentagon
spokesman claimed that Habib spent most of his time in
Afghanistan and was "either supporting hostile forces or on
the battlefield fighting illegally against the U.S."
Habib was released a few days after The Washington Post
published an article on his case. He said he was first
interrogated and brutalized for three weeks in Islamabad.
His interrogators spoke English with American accents. He
was then bustled into a jumpsuit, his eyes were covered
with opaque goggles and he was flown on a small jet to
Egypt. There he was held and interrogated for six months,
according to Joseph Margulies, a lawyer affiliated with the
MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law
School, which is representing Habib,.
Habib claims he was beaten frequently with blunt
instruments, including an object that he likened to an
"electric prod." He was told that if he did not confess to
belonging to al-Qaida he would be anally raped by specially
trained dogs. Habib said he was returned to U.S. custody
after his stint in an Egyptian prison and flown to Bagram
air base, in Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo Bay, where
he was kept until his release.
Al-Libi and Habib are but two cases. There are hundreds,
perhaps thousands more. These accounts of American-
sponsored torture in Egyptian prisons are not new. They
hardly make news. But the close cooperation between
Egyptian and American security officials represents a
frightening melding of despotisms, an international cabal
of state-sponsored brutality and abuse. It does away with
the concept of law and human rights. It mocks international
protocols and treaties. It permits the despotic states we
support, such as Egypt, to veer away from democratic
structures and propagate, with our assistance, a more
ruthless tyranny and brutality. It enrages and finally
empowers those who oppose us to engage in the same
behavior. It is dividing the world into competing spheres
of intolerance. In this new world order there is nothing
left to appeal to other than the mercy of someone standing
over you with an electric prod.
Mubarak has in the past few weeks decided to shut down the
last remnants of opposition. He has sent in riot police to
arrest dozens of striking labor leaders, rounded up more
than a thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the
largest opposition group, and tossed seven journalists into
prison. The charges against the journalists range from
misquoting Egypt's justice minister to spreading rumors
about the health of Mubarak to defaming his designated
heir, Gamal. The detainees, as usual, complain of torture
and beatings. And persistent rumors of death squads,
bolstered by the "disappearance" of some of the regime's
most outspoken critics, have turned Egypt into a state that
has mastered the art of internal and external extraordinary
rendition.
The few lonely Egyptian voices and institutions that dared
to speak out against the mounting repression have been
silenced, including the Association for Human Rights and
Legal Aid, which was shut down by the government last
month. The government also recently arrested two political
activists -- Mohammed al-Dereini and Ahmed Mohammed Sobh,
both members of Egypt's tiny Shiite minority -- after the
men publicized testimonies from prisoners detailing torture
in the Egyptian prison system. Egypt's most prominent
dissident, the sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, is in exile,
too frightened to go home and repeat his own brutal
experience in an Egyptian prison.
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights has confirmed
more than 500 cases of police abuse since 1993, including
167 deaths -- three of which took place this year -- that
the group "strongly suspects were the result of torture and
mistreatment." There are now 80,000 political prisoners
held in Egyptian prisons. The annual budget for internal
security was $1.5 billion in 2006, more than the entire
national budget for health care, and the security police
forces comprise 1.4 million members, nearly four times the
number of the Egyptian army.
The United States has subsidized Egypt's armed forces with
over $38 billion in aid. Egypt receives about $2 billion
annually -- $1.3 billion in foreign military financing and
about $815 million in economic and support fund assistance
-- making it the second largest regular recipient of
conventional U.S. military and economic aid, after Israel.
We have nothing left to say to the Mubarak regime. The
torture practiced in Egypt is the torture we employ for our
own ends. The cries that rise up from these fetid cells in
Egypt condemn not only the Mubarak dictatorship but the
moral rot that has beset the American state.
We are losing the war in Iraq. We are an isolated and
reviled nation. We are pitiless to others weaker than
ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals.
Thucydides wrote of Athens' expanding empire and how this
empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant
at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally
imposed on itself. If we do not confront our hubris and the
lies we tell to justify the killing and mask the
destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not
grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if
we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary
form of communication, if we do not remove from power our
flag-waving, cross-bearing versions of the Taliban, the
despotism we empower abroad will become the despotism we
soon experience at home.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School
and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for
The New York Times, is the author of "American Fascists:
The Christian Right and the War on America."
More at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071015_outsourcing_torture/
Jai Maharaj
http://tinyurl.com/24fq83
http://www.mantra.com/jai
http://www.mantra.com/jyotish
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
purposes of research and open discussion. The contents of this post may not
have been authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the
poster. The contents are protected by copyright law and the exemption for
fair use of copyrighted works.
o If you send private e-mail to me, it will likely not be read,
considered or answered if it does not contain your full legal name, current
e-mail and postal addresses, and live-voice telephone number.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views expressed by others are
not necessarily those of the poster who may or may not have read the article.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted material the use of
which may or may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This material is being made available in efforts to advance the
understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democratic, scientific, social, and cultural, etc., issues. It is believed
that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research, comment, discussion and educational purposes by
subscribing to USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more information
go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article for purposes of
your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.