Western media are reporting headline
claims that “new evidence supports claims about Syrian state detention
deaths”, saying that “a leading rights group has released new evidence that up
to 7,000 Syrians who died in state detention centres were tortured, mistreated,
or executed”, noting that this information is a moral wakeup call and demanding
that officials being held to account should be “central to peace efforts.”
However, as is usually so, not everything is quite
as it seems. So let’s take a look at the
facts.
First the timing.
As has been commonplace the timing of the reports like
these have almost always coincided with important diplomatic meetings or just
after important UN resolutions are passed.
For example, beginning in mid-March claims began
to pour in that Assad had been using chlorine bombs against his opponents. Media
reports would cite the fact that only 2 months later the government had
already been accused of using chlorine 35 times. What they failed to mention however was that no claims were made for an
entire 7 months before this. So what
changed after these 7 months?
Well, a UN resolution was passed condemning the
use of chlorine, that’s what.
The governments alleged chlorine campaign “began
just over a week after the UN security council passed a resolution under
chapter 7 of the UN charter condemning its use,” the Guardian would report. For more than half of a year no claims are made and then a week after a UN resolution is
passed, all of a sudden a total of 35 are made in just under 2 months.
If Assad was really using chlorine, why would he
wait a full 7 months only to use it at the exact time that it would prove to
be the most disastrous for him?
This, coupled with the fact that former OPCW
(Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) inspectors admit that
there was insufficient
evidence to prove the use of chlorine, let alone assign blame for who did
it.
And further troubling still is that the claims
came from the “White Helmets” “civil defense group”, who have been notorious for
producing false claims against the Syrian government. In actuality the White Helmets are part of a slick
propaganda campaign aimed at mobilizing
support for foreign intervention and calling for a “no-fly zone” to oust the
president. They have financial links to Western-backed
NGOs who relentlessly work towards furthering the US agenda in the region, and
are themselves embedded with al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Their primary function is to demonize the Syrian government while acting
as al-Qaeda’s clean-up crew, both literally and in terms of propaganda, as one
video shows them waiting to clean up dead bodies moments after al-Qaeda commits
summary executions against unarmed civilians.
They have produced numerous fake videos, fake photos, and fake
narratives in order to manipulate public opinion towards their bias.(1)
Needless to say, their words aren’t credible.
In terms of the the Caesar photos, they too are
published days before an important Syrian peace conference between the US and
Russia, further raising questions as to whether the timing has anything to do
with helping Syrian detainees or everything to do with political impact.
As noted by Human
Rights Investigations, a previous report of the photos was done by
Carter-Ruck and Co. Solicitors of London and published through CNN and the
Guardian in January of 2014. The
Carter-Ruck report claims that the 55,000 images available show 11,000 dead detainees. However, according to the recent HRW report
only 28,707 of the photos are ones that they have “understood to have died in
government custody” while the remaining 24,568 are of dead soldiers killed in
battle. That is, half of the alleged
“torture victims” are actually dead soldiers.
Of the remaining half (6,786), HRW maintains that
they “understand” the photos are of dead detainees, this is where the media is
getting the “7,000” figure from, yet they themselves admit later on that they
were only “able to verify 27 cases of detainees whose family members’
statements regarding their arrest and physical characteristics matched the
photographic evidence.”
So, in other words, half of the original batch of
photos aren’t torture victims, while of the other half only 27 can be verified
by HRW.
As well, previous reports of the photos also coincided with
important diplomatic events like the 2014 Geneva II conferences. However, at that time, UN Human Rights Chief
Navi Pillay admitted
that the reports were unverified: “the report… if verified, is truly
horrifying.” While it was admitted by
outlets like Reuters that they were unable “to
determine the authenticity of Caesar’s photographs or to contact Caesar”
while Amnesty International notes that they too “cannot
authenticate the images.”
Leaving that aside however, let’s say that they do prove that the Syrian government tortured 27
individuals, and that holding the officials “to account should be central to any
peace efforts.”
It follows then that the major offenders should be
held to account. Namely the United
States.
Of the top 10 recipients of US foreign aid
programs in 2014, all
of them practice torture while at least half of them are reportedly doing
so on a massive scale, according to leading human rights organizations.
For example, according to the UN torture in
Afghanistan’s prisons continues to be widespread, while
according to Human Rights Watch in Kenya police “tortured,
raped, and otherwise abused and arbitrarily detained at least 1,000
refugees between mid-November 2012 and late January 2013.”
The worst abuses
of torture in government detention centers however were in Nigeria, which received
$693 million of US taxpayer money.
There, according to Amnesty, nearly
1,000 people died in military custody in only the first 6 months of 2013. This means that “Nigeria’s
military has killed more civilians than (Boko Haram) militants did” within
the same timeframe. Recently, the
Nigerian army, instead of fighting Boko Haram has massacred
upwards
of 1,000 Muslims belonging to a peaceful movement opposed to extremism.
In terms of Israel, by far the leading recipient
with $3.1 billion, the Public Committee against Torture in Israel accused the
government of torturing
and sexually assaulting Palestinian children suspected of minor crimes,
while also keeping detainees in cages outside during winter. “The majority of Palestinian child detainees
are charged with throwing stones, and 74 per cent experience physical violence
during arrest, transfer or interrogation.”
Not to mention our own widely publicized torture
program.
According to the official narrative, the CIA’s extraordinary
rendition programs began under Bush after 9/11 and were considered “rogue
elements” and “aberrations” to normal CIA practice, they were approved at
the highest levels of government, but were eventually ended under Obama in
2009.
Yet as leading international security scholar Dr. Nafeez
Ahmed found in a recent
and thorough investigation “Obama did not ban torture in 2009, and has not
rescinded it now. He instead rehabilitated
torture with a carefully crafted Executive Order that has received little
scrutiny.”
It demanded interrogation techniques be brought in
line with the US Army Field Manual, which is in compliance with the Geneva
Convention. However, the manual was
revised in 2006 to include 19 forms of interrogation and the practice of
extraordinary rendition. “A new UN
Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) review of the manual shows that a wide-range
of torture techniques continue to be deployed by the US government,” Ahmed
notes, “including isolation, sensory deprivation, stress positions,
chemically-induced psychosis, adjustments of environmental and dietary rules,
among others.”
In his book “Torture and Impunity: The U.S.
Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation” the highly renowned Professor of History at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alfred McCoy shows that from the 1950s
onward the CIA spent billions “improving” interrogation techniques.
At the start, the emphasis was on electroshock,
hypnosis, psychosurgery, and drugs, including the infamous use of LSD on
unsuspecting soldiers, yet they proved ineffective. It was later found that sensory disorientation
and "self-inflicted pain", such as forcing a subject to stand for many
hours with arms outstretched, were far more effective means of breaking
individuals; the exact torture techniques it has been shown the US still employs
to this day.(2)
The CIA found that by using only the deprivation
of the senses, a state akin to psychosis can be induced in just 48 hours.
They found that the KGB’s most devastating torture
technique of all was not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing victims to
stand for days on end. “The legs
swelled, the skin erupted spreading legions, the kidneys shut down, and
hallucinations began” explains McCoy, “all incredibly painful.”
Refined through decades of practice, “the CIA’s use
of sensory deprivation relies on seemingly banal procedures: heat and cold,
light and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine,” yet this combines to form
“a systematic attack on the sensory pathways of the human mind” for devastating
effect.
These are not “aberrations”, but instead the
fruition of over half a century’s work in the experimentation of the science of
cracking the code of the human mind, of the perfection of psychological torture
into its most sophisticated forms.
“With the election and re-election of President
Barak Obama, the problem of torture has not, as many of us have once hoped, simply
disappeared, wiped away by sweeping executive orders,” McCoy explains, “Instead
it is now well into a particularly sordid second phase, called impunity.”
Simply put, impunity is the political process of
legalizing illegal acts.
“In this case, torture.”(3)
Instead of ending, US torture “continues to be
deployed by the US government” in its most destructive forms.
It has been re-packaged and rehabilitated,
codifying into law, and vanished from the general public consciousness.
Furthermore, not only does the US engage in
torture on a mass scale, it and its allies as well “outsource” their torture to
various regimes, utilizing their intelligence and security services to do their
dirty work for them.
It was recently revealed by numerous Libyan
dissidents that the UK government had entangled itself in
a deep and sordid relationship with Muammar Gaddafi that amounted to “a
criminal conspiracy”, as heard before the UK high court.
A conspiracy where the UK had become “enmeshed in
illegality” and involved in “rendition, unlawful detention and torture.”
The victims claim that British intelligence
routinely blackmailed them, threatened their families with unlawful imprisonment
and abuse if they did not cooperate.
Information was extracted through torture in prisons in Tripoli and fed
into the British court systems as secret evidence that could not be challenged.
Yet this merely represents a wider trend whereby Western
governments commit horrendous crimes in collusion with foreign states, and then
use those same acts as justification for aggression against them.
The United States attempted to justify the
invasion of Iraq on non-existent WMD’s after it had supplied the same weapons
to the country decades prior to wage war on Iran.
As well it was Gaddafi’s alleged brutality and use of
torture that was invoked to justify the devastating attack on Libya that has left the
country in shambles and overrun with suffering and terrorism.
And so too with Syria.
Not only is the United States by degrees of
magnitude more culpable for the crime of torture, it also was intimately involved
in offshoring its crimes to Syrian jails.
A key participant in the CIA’s covert rendition
program, Syria was one of the “most common
destinations for rendered subjects.”
So while torture in Syria is all too real, what is
commonly left out is 3 little words: “with our support.”
First we utilize, exploit, and propagate the atrocities,
and then proceed to bask in our own moral righteousness as we denounce others
for the crimes that we helped commit, utilizing them to justify further atrocities
and aggressions for shortsighted geopolitical aims.
If “officials being held to account” are really
“central to any peace effort” in regards to torture, we know exactly where to
find them: right here at home in Washington and London.
Notes:
1.)
For more on this, see “‘White Helmets’: New Breed of Mercenaries and Propagandists,
Disguised as ‘Humanitarians’ in Syria”, 21st
Century Wire, Pt. 1: http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/09/01/white-helmets-new-breed-of-mercenaries-and-propagandists-disguised-as-humanitarians-in-syria/,
Pt. 2: http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/09/01/white-helmets-new-breed-of-mercenaries-and-propagandists-disguised-as-humanitarians-in-syria/,
& overview with interview: http://www.mintpressnews.com/us-propaganda-war-in-syria-report-ties-white-helmets-to-foreign-intervention/209435/.
2.) Alfred
McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S.
Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation.
3.)
Alfred McCoy giving a lecture on his book “Torture
and Impunity” at Madison’s Overture Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgazW9sRrW4.
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