The
Missing Links In The Debate On Disappearances And Torture
By Abid Ullah Jan
10 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Tyranny
usually arises in an interplay between brutality and power. The tyrannical
tendencies in the Bush and Mush regimes, on the other hand, stem from
cowardice invested in secrecy.
Since neither General Musharraf,
nor his master George Bush have the courage of true leaders, they have
always been ineffectual advocates, unwilling to honestly face critics
and unwilling to be held accountable for the implementation of their
own policies and crimes against humanity.
In this context, public debate
about the illegal detentions and the use of torture has always been
hamstrung by the fact that those who carry the ultimate responsibility
for the use of these practices persistently deny that illegal detentions
and the so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques they
endorse, do in fact constitute abuse of human rights and widely recognized
forms of torture.
Unfortunately, in the Pakistani
press, we do not even see a debate about the disappearance of individuals.
All we have are either news reports or a sentence or two reference in
a few far and far between articles. Unlike Bush who detains foreigners
away from the US mainland, General Musharraf is detaining his own people
in hundreds on his own land. CIA and other US forces are torturing and
killing foreigners. ISI and Pakistan armed forces are detaining, torturing
and killing their own people. They are invading and carrying out occupation
forces like operation in their land.
This is because Musharraf
stands shoulder to shoulder with Bush in the “noble” war
of terrorism. ISI and the ministry of Interior is fully involved in
the disappearance of individuals, tortures and deaths. Even the Supreme
Court could not move the ministry to get basic information about the
disappeared persons. Saud Memon, a merchant from Karachi, for example
died on May 18, 2007 after his long disappearance in the hands of Pakistani
and US agencies. Let us agree that he was a terrorist. However, where
did we see due process of law taking place during his long absence in
the hands of ISI and CIA? Was this the right way to kill him as a result
of excessive torture? Remember, this is just one example.
The debate has been mired
in discussion about whether or not the techniques the Pak-US regimes
sanction actually fit the definition of torture even though there is
already a mountain of evidence that they do. For this reason, a more
basic question -- what is the purpose of the US and Pakistani agencies’
use of torture? -- is not clearly addressed. Indeed, the US administration's
insistence on the use of the word "interrogation" has generally
left unquestioned the assumption that the purpose of these practices
is the coercive discovery of information.
Alfred W. McCoy, in A Question
of Torture, says that "the powerful often turn to torture in times
of crisis, not because it works but because it salves their fears and
insecurities with the psychic balm of empowerment." This form of
empowerment in which a sense of control is restored to those who have
experienced a profound loss of control, no doubt played a part in the
psychological processes that shaped the war of terrorism. Even so, we
see George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their General in Islamabad
as eminently practical men. It is doubtful that they chose to institute
a regimen of torture simply to reinvigorate their bruised sense of potency,
but guided as they are by their own innate confidence in gut "rationales,"
we also doubt that they involved themselves in complex analysis fraught
as this always is with the risk of being inconclusive.
It is very obvious (and FBI
admits) that the CIA, FBI and the Bush regime has no evidence of Osama’s
involvement in 9/11 incidents. There is no concrete evidence that an
"enemy" from outside managed to turn three skyscrapers to
dust with two passenger planes. The central function of the pre-planned
war of terrorism was only to restore America's image as an indomitable
power and to crush those who might cherish an ambition to challenge
that power.
Given that those who stand
to the US, Israel and their allies have already demonstrated that they
have little fear of death, it would seem apparent that the only way
they could be intimidated would be by the threat of a fate worse than
death. It thus seems possible that the ISI detention centres and Guantanamo
Bay (and its "dark side" to which Vice President Cheney alluded),
were intended to function not so much as a means for extracting intelligence
vital to the United States' national security, as much as a means to
terrorize existing and would-be individuals who struggle for their right
to self-determination and dare to call a spade a spade with regard to
the United States abuse of power, support of the puppet regimes and
pure injustice. It would be the epitome of fighting fire with fire.
It would send out the message that the “guardians of civilization”
have no fear in venturing outside its perimeters for the sake of consolidating
de-facto colonization and establishing total control of the Muslim world
in particular.
We now know that many of
the so-called interrogation techniques used in Guantanamo and many detention
centres used across Pakistan and Afghanistan were developed during the
Cold War. Their inapplicability to combating the so-called terrorism
would thus be multi-fold. Intelligence during the Cold War involved
the lumbering giants of the Soviet Union and the United States. Valuable
information thus related to government policies, military strategies
and operations run by employed officials. The fact that neither side
could turn its operations on a dime, that all those involved might be
hesitant to die for their cause, meant that in theory "actionable
intelligence" would be ripe for the picking. The only question
would be how this information could most effectively be extracted.
On the other hand, when it
comes to the men currently held captive in Guantanamo and ISI gulag,
it is doubtful that even Dick Cheney seriously entertains the notion
that among these "enemy combatants" there is a single individual
with a single piece of valuable information that would amount to a priceless
piece of intelligence, and which justifies illegal detentions and tortures.
On the contrary, these are
men (and boys) who now abide in some other land, where every form of
certainty has been stripped away. Worse than being deprived of life,
they have been denied their humanity. But even while their detention
has profoundly damaged America's reputation and has put survival of
its puppets at stake, the present administration in Washington has succeeded
in constructing a regime of imprisonment that by most standards constitutes
a condition worse than death.
Very early on in the war
of terrorism a piece of military jargon entered the popular lexicon
because, highfalutin as it might sound, everyone had a sense of what
it meant: asymmetric warfare. David and Goliath, stripped of moral underpinnings
and the political insight that concentrated power rarely if ever serves
collective interests, is all about the functional advantage that a weak
power can have in relation to overbearing might: flexibility.
We've witnessed it again
and again over the last six years. The giant is slow to turn and so
his small opponent is always quick to find a new angle of attack.
Capture a person resisting
illegal war and occupation; call him a terrorist and what is the vital
intelligence he might be forced to cough up? Most often, nothing. His
comrades in the struggle for self-determination already know he's out
of commission and no “terrorist” plan, however advanced,
is burdened by anything comparable to the inflexibility of the affairs
of terrorist states. A decision to switch to resistance plan B (or C,
D, or E) can be made in a matter of moments.
So what do you do with your
"high value" captives? Treat them in such a way that those
who might follow in their footsteps will pause in terror.
The goal of the war of terrorism
was to terrorize “terrorists” –- the occupied nations
-- and force them into submission? Would you agree Mr. Cheney and Mr.
Mush?
May be their lips will remain
well-sealed until the unlikely day both of them face indictment along
with their colleagues for their crimes against humanity. Until then,
most of us seem to have submitted to the argument that the debate of
disappearance and torture should be limited to questioning the technique
alone. Whereas The question of illegal detentions and torture is not
a question of technique alone.
Abid Ullah Jan is the author
of seven books on international affairs, including: “The Ultimate
Tragedy: Colonialists Rushing to Global War to Save the Crumbling Empire,”“Afghansitan:
The Genesis of the Final Crusade,”“The Musharraf Factor:
Leading Pakistan to its inevitable demise,”“From BCCI to
ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues” and “After Fascism:
Muslims and the Struggle for Self-Determination.”
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