- The Lubyanka Prison's heavy oak main door swung open.
I went in, the first western journalist to enter the KGB's notorious Moscow
headquarters -- a place so dreaded Russians dared not utter its name. When
they referred to it at all, they called it "Detsky Mir," after
a nearby toy store.
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- After interviewing two senior KGB generals, I explored
the fascinating museum of Soviet intelligence and was briefed on special
poisons and assassination weapons that left no traces. I sat transfixed
at the desk used by all the directors of Stalin's secret police, on which
the orders were signed to murder 30 million people.
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- Descending dimly lit stairs, I saw some of the KGB's
execution and torture cellars, and special "cold rooms" where
naked prisoners were beaten, then doused with ice water and slowly frozen.
-
- Other favoured Lubyanka tortures: Psychological terror,
psychotropic drugs, prolonged sleep deprivation, dazzling lights, intense
noise, days in pitch blackness, isolation, humiliation, constant threats,
savage beatings, attacks by guard dogs, near drowning.
-
- Nightmares from the past -- but the past has returned.
-
- According to a report leaked to the New York Times, the
Swiss-based International Red Cross has accused the Bush administration
for a second time of employing systematic, medically supervised torture
against suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, and at U.S.-run prisons
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
-
- The second Red Cross report was delivered to the White
House last summer while it was trying to dismiss the Abu Ghraib prison
torture horrors as the crimes of a few rogue jailers.
-
- According to the report's allegations, many tortures
perfected by the Cheka (Soviet secret police) -- notably beating, freezing,
sensory disorientation, and sleep deprivation -- are now routinely being
used by U.S. interrogators.
-
- The Chekisti, however, did not usually inflict sexual
humiliation. That technique, and hooding, were developed by Israeli psychologists
to break resistance of Palestinian prisoners. Photos of sexual humiliation
were used by Israeli security, and then by U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib,
to blackmail Muslim prisoners into becoming informers.
-
- All of these practices flagrantly violate the Geneva
Conventions, international, and American law. The Pentagon and CIA gulags
in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan have become a sort of Enron-style, off-the-books
operation, immune from American law or Congressional oversight.
-
- Suspects reportedly disappear into a black hole, recalling
Latin America's torture camps and "disappearings" of the 1970s
and '80s, or the Arab world's sinister secret police prisons.
-
- The U.S. has been sending high-level anti-American suspects
to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and, reportedly, Pakistan, where it's alleged
they are brutally tortured with violent electric shocks, savage beatings,
drowning, acid baths, and blowtorching -- the same tortures, ironically,
ascribed to Saddam Hussein.
-
- Protests over this by members of Congress, respected
human rights groups, and the public have been ignored. President George
W. Bush just named Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general, his nation's
highest law officer. As White House counsel, Gonzales wrote briefs justifying
torture and advised the White House on ways to evade or ignore the Geneva
Conventions.
-
- Grossly violating the Geneva Conventions undermines international
law and endangers U.S. troops abroad. Anyone who has served in the U.S.
armed forces, as I have, should be outraged that this painfully won tenet
of international law and civilized behaviour is being trashed by members
of the Bush administration.
-
- Un-American Behaviour
-
- If, as Bush asserts, terrorism suspects, Taliban, and
Muslim mujahedeen fighters not in uniform deserve no protection under the
laws of war and may be jailed and tortured at presidential whim, then what
law protects from abuse or torture all the un-uniformed U.S. Special Forces,
CIA field teams, and those 40,000 or more U.S. and British mercenaries
in Iraq and Afghanistan euphemistically called "civilian contractors"?
-
- Behaving like the 1930s Soviet secret police will not
make America safer. Such illegal, immoral and totally un-American behaviour
corrupts democracy and makes them no better than the criminals they detest.
-
- The 20th century has shown repeatedly that when security
forces use torture abroad, they soon begin using it at home, first on suspected
"terrorists," then dissidents, then on ordinary suspects.
-
- It's time for Congress and the courts to wake up and
end this shameful and dangerous episode in America's history.
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- http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/
Eric_Margolis/2004/12/04/765847.html
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