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One of the guard towers at Guantanamo Bay

After five years, Bring Hicks Home!

On 9 December 2001, Australian man David Hicks was jailed at Guantanamo Bay.

As we write this page, it was five years ago. He's innocent, and he's still there.

What's on this page

Today five years ago, David Hicks started his nightmarish imprisonment at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Nightmarish, when you consider the detailed report from The Age's Ian Munro and Penny Debelle - an article which is also a clarion call by the Melbourne newspaper to start an action: see the last paragraph of the report.

Next, Sydney Morning Herald's legal eagle Richard Ackland argues that the time may come soon that Australian politicians should be wary of international travel through countries where they may be picked up, detained, and charged under an international War crime indictment.

Also on this page, Naomi Klein reports on the 'culture of torture' of her neo-conservative government and she traces some of its origins.

Quick links

Bring Hicks home

The Age
Ian Munro and Penny Debelle
December 2, 2006 - 8:05PM

He lives in a cell of featureless walls, 24-hour lighting and a single window of frosted glass that in daylight glows like a fluorescent globe.

For five years, David Hicks has occupied spaces like this, caught between a US Government that has been unable to prosecute him and an Australian Government that refuses to try to free him. This sentence without trial, in conditions so secret that he cannot be photographed, could drag on for another two years unless the Federal Government asks the United States to send him home.

Hicks' military lawyer, Major Michael Mori, says Australia is tolerating a terrible situation. While Hicks has been in legal limbo, John Walker Lindh - the so-called American Taliban who trained at the same camp as Hicks - has been charged, pleaded guilty and sentenced. But Lindh broke American law; Hicks has not broken Australian law.

"America would not tolerate this for one of its citizens," says Mori. "Nor would it tolerate any politicians sacrificing some American citizen to the whim of a foreign country, regardless of whether they are our ally or not. It just doesn't happen."

Lindh and Hicks trained at the al-Qaeda-run camp, al Farooq, before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Training included weapons familiarisation, maps and topography, battlefield operations and explosives. Hicks allegedly also trained for two months at a Lashkar-e- Toiba camp in Pakistan.

Another convert to Islam to attend al Farooq, and to observe bin Laden, was Jack Thomas. He has fared much better than Hicks. While Hicks was captured by the Northern Alliance and handed over to American forces in Afghanistan in November 2001, Thomas avoided capture in al-Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan. When finally detained in January 2003, Thomas was held by Pakistani security for five months and released. After returning to Australia, Thomas was charged, remanded, tried, convicted of two charges and acquitted of two other terrorismrelated offences.

He has since appealed successfully against his convictions. Thomas' case was subject to months of pre-trial argument. All told, he spent 14 months in custody, but is presently free and subject to a control order that also is being challenged in the High Court. Whatever else might be said of Thomas' experiences, he has had the benefit of a robust and transparent legal system.

After Hicks' capture, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer dismissed concerns that the Government had abandoned one of its citizens, saying those who got involved with groups like al-Qaeda were "bound to get into trouble". More recently, the Government has urged the US to try him swiftly.

"The United States has always told us that it believes it has sufficient information to be able to put Mr Hicks on trial," Attorney General Philip Ruddock said recently. "Australia's view has always been that this should happen as quickly as possible."

Ruddock says that Australia continues to push the US ("however, we have not given the United States a specific deadline") and recently promised Hicks' father, Terry, that inquiries would be made about his son's physical and psychological welfare.

But Mori says challenges to the new military commissions - authorised by US Congress after the first commissions set up by President George Bush were declared illegal - will seriously delay Hicks' case. "We're probably talking the end of 2008 or 2009 as the next time the Supreme Court will rule on the legality of the commissions," Mori says.

In contrast to Australia's compliance with the military commissions, Britain demanded the US release its citizens from Guantanamo more than 2 years ago. Associate professor at Monash University's Global Terrorism Research Unit, David Wright-Neville, regards Hicks' treatment as outrageous in a human rights sense, and counterproductive from the perspective of counter-terrorism. He says the denial of justice and due process smacks of victimisation and threatens an entire community within Australia.

"David Hicks has been offered up as a sacrifi ce to the Bush administration," Wright-Neville says. "They had to let go of the Poms and the Swedes, so they want some token white guy so they can say we are prosecuting Europeans, not just Pakistanis and Saudis."

David Matthew Hicks' road to Guantanamo seems to have begun in his mid-20s, when he converted to Islam at an Adelaide mosque. But its roots lie deeper, in a thirst for adventure combined with a youthful fascination with the Silk Road, the old trade route from China to the West through Afghanistan and neighbouring Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. When his relationship with his de facto wife ended, he was free to pursue that dream.

Hicks and Jodie Marie Sparrow met at a rodeo in 1992, when Hicks was 17. By 1995, they had two children. A year later they had separated. After a period in Japan training horses, Hicks went to Kosovo where he undertook military training, supporting the Muslim forces.

Back in Adelaide in 1999, he adopted Islam, changed his name to Dawood and found his way to Afghanistan by seeking out Islamic radicals in Pakistan. US authorities alleged he engaged in "hostile action" in Pakistan before training with al-Qaeda. After two years' incarceration, he was charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, aiding the enemy and attempted murder, but the charges lapsed when the initial military commissions were ruled unlawful in June this year.

Hicks' status as an alleged enemy of the US who was supposed to have taken up arms against it was referred to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals created in 2004. This followed a series of legal challenges by detainees, including Hicks.

On August 17, 2004, Hicks was confirmed as an enemy combatant. But this was a system that cleared only two of the first 230 individuals it reviewed. It was a process that barrister Lex Lasry, QC, thought profoundly flawed.

In a report for the Law Council of Australia, Lasry said the tribunals were comprised of military officers who would have to contradict their own chain of command to find in favour of a detainee. Also, detainees were not allowed to be represented by a lawyer, the tribunal proceeded from an assumption that detainees were enemy combatants, and the detainees could not know of classified evidence against them. Writing before the US Supreme Court declared the military commissions illegal six months ago, Lasry said that by the time the trials and their subsequent appeals were done, the process could have taken many more years.

"Throughout this period, the detainees, including David Hicks, remain incarcerated. That this can be allowed to occur is genuinely outrageous. This situation could never be replicated in an Australian criminal court.

"A delay of this nature would have resulted in a grant of bail to an accused on the grounds of 'exceptional circumstances' years ago."

In Adelaide, Hicks' Australian advocate, David McLeod, a conservative lawyer with military experience in Iraq, said Ruddock should be held to a commitment to have Hicks' case dealt with quickly, and to bring him back to Australia if he could not be properly tried. McLeod said Hicks could not be properly tried because the authority of the new military commissions was already under attack; he had a legal opinion from six senior Australian lawyers who believed the new commissions violated Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. The legal review by three QCs and three professors also found further serious delays in Hicks' case were almost inevitable.

"Like its predecessor, the Second Military Commission is a legal experiment which is vulnerable to legal challenge," the legal review said. "Indeed, by its very structure and the nature of the trial procedures, such a challenge is invited. If David Hicks or others pursue their legal entitlements through the appeal process in the United States, further delays of some years will be inevitable."

Even the fresh charges against Hicks have been delayed. After the US Supreme Court handed down the landmark legal decision in the case of Hamdan v Rumsfeld, the charges against Hicks were negated by the finding that the commissions were illegal. The new charges cannot be filed until regulations are passed by the US Secretary of Defence, a position thrown into turmoil by the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, who is soon to be replaced by a former CIA director, Robert Gates. Mori says the initial charges against Hicks should reassure Australians that Hicks, who has abandoned his Muslim beliefs, was not a terrorist threat.

"I think people were expecting David would be charged with killing somebody, or planting a bomb, yet he wasn't," Mori says. "What were the specifics? He was guarding a tank, he went to training camps . . . you expect they would then say he then engaged in combat and shot someone, but they don't because he did not do anything."

When Mori visits Hicks at Camp Five at the Guantanamo Bay military prison early this week, it will be the prisoner's first contact since October, when the alarm was raised over Hicks' deteriorating physical condition. Sent back into virtual solitary confinement in March this year, Hicks, 31, was said to be suffering depression and a range of physical problems, including fluctuating weight, poor eyesight and back pain.

Hicks has not practised Islam for two to three years. He is patriotic to Australia and jumped to the defence of Australia when taunted during an interrogation, Mori says.

"The only time I think David was cross with them was when they were bad-mouthing Australia," he says. "The interrogators started bad-mouthing Australia and it was the only time I think he ever got riled up with them."

Earlier this year, Hicks wrote to Prime Minister John Howard, Ruddock and Downer declaring his commitment to the country and intention to be a model citizen. In the letter, Hicks said he was not the same person he was three years ago and wanted to further his studies, live a lawabiding life with his family, and see his two children.

Shadow attorney-general Nicola Roxon says she has no confidence in consular reports about Hicks' living conditions. The visits, 17 in all, were irregular and with Hicks having refused a recent visit, it was clear the relationship between him and Australian officials had broken down.

Responding to evidence to the Senate Estimates Committee on October 31 that Hicks was not being held in solitary confinement, Mori says: "I don't know what else you'd call it."

Geoff McDonald of the Attorney-General's Department's security law branch told senators that Hicks was not in solitary confinement and that conditions for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay "are equivalent to a maximum-security facility in the US".

"He is in a single-occupancy cell," McDonald continued. "The cells in the general block area have windows providing natural light. He continues to have access to an exercise facility in a group area. During those exercise periods, he can communicate with others. In fact, his conditions are quite similar to those who are in custody awaiting trial for terrorism offences."

Mori says the account given to the committee was "a halftruth". "If you see what's in (US maximum security) cells, they have open windows to the hallway. With Hicks, they cover it up. In the US, they have clear glass to see outside, which Hicks doesn't have. They also get comfort items to help them endure that isolation. Some of them have TVs, you know, Walkmans, as many books as they can fit in their cell, those type of activities which David doesn't have. So, in some aspects, his conditions are more severe than in our maximum security prisons. His access to books in limited.

"They also can have family visits and weekly phone calls. His family visits are only when there's a hearing and he's been lucky to get phone calls once every six months. Yes, it's similar, but his conditions are worse than maximum security in the US.

"Hicks is allowed out of his cell for up to 90 minutes a day, including showering time. If there was an English-speaking detainee in the adjacent exercise area, which is smaller than a squash court, then yes, he might have some interaction," Mori says.

"He does not have a window. It's a piece of frosted glass. When I saw him last, the lights were being left on 24 hours a day. The way they punish him is to take away his toilet paper."

At last count, 340 detainees held at Guantanamo had been repatriated to their country of origin. Of the 434 who remain alongside Hicks, a further 110 have been judged as eligible for release. In a statement last month, the US Department of Defence said: "Departure of these remaining detainees approved for transfer or release is subject to ongoing discussions between the United States and other nations. The United States does not desire to hold detainees for any longer than necessary."

Roxon says the Australian Government's handling of Hicks' case is driven by an excessive zeal to back the US in its war on terror.

"If Hicks can't be tried in a proper court process, then he should be released," she says. "I think the Government sees it as a symbol of being tough on terror. If we are going to be tough on terror, that means we can't throw out all the things that make this democracy with it, or else the purpose of having the fight seems to be gone."

Howard maintains that Hicks should face a military commission because he allegedly "resumed his activities" with al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks.

"I am not happy about the time that is being taken, but people should understand that if he is brought back to Australia he can't be tried for these offences because they were not offences under Australian law at the time they are alleged to have taken place."

But Law Council of Australia president Tim Bugg says the passage of time and the resulting loss of evidence means Hicks could not have a fair trial. "The Federal Government's inactivity and refusal to do anything is just extraordinary. There's an Australian citizen in the most appalling circumstances and the Government has done nothing to assist," he says.

Bugg says it appeared that political considerations rather than principle lay behind the Government's stance. "Because of that, the Government and the minister involved deserve to be condemned."

Meanwhile, Mori heads to Guantanamo with no good news for his client. He says he honestly has no idea when Hicks' trial might proceed, and the most optimistic prosecution estimate is next July, deep into his sixth year of prison.

"It's like every time a carrot is held out before the Australian Government, they seem to chase after it, instead of deciding to stand up for Hicks," he says.

Asked why the US continues to hold Hicks, he says: "You're asking the wrong question. It's not that America is pulling, Australia is pushing. And why? Because Hicks has not violated Australian law, which is the most bizarre rationale for abandoning one of your citizens.

"The whole system is about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it's not about David Hicks, nobody cares. Nobody in America cares about David Hicks. Hicks is there because of the Australian Government. All they have to do is ask to bring him home."

Bring Hicks Home - how you can help

To be jailed for five years in Victoria you will need to kill someone while drunk driving, or be convicted of rape or manslaughter.

Once in prison, to be placed in solitary confinement you will need to be among the most violent, or the highly vulnerable.

David Hicks has not been convicted, but he has been jailed - for five years, much of it in solitary confinement, out of reach of his family and supporters.

He is an Australian citizen who has trained with terrorists, but he has broken no Australian law. By any measure, he has done his time.

Since 2002, hundreds of men like him have departed Guantanamo for countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. These countries have included Albania, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Yemen.

The Sunday Age invites readers to register their support to bring David Hicks home, and we will pass it on to the Federal Government.

Send your messages to bringdavidhome(at)theage.com.au

http://www.theage.com.au/.../bring-hicks-home/.../1164777845596.html

Hicks v Howard could see the tables turn

Sydney Morning Herald
Richard Ackland
December 8, 2006

John Howard and Alexander Downer said the scary white powder sent to the Indonesian embassy in June last year was a "biological agent" and egged on the idea that Australia was in the grip of a bio-terrorism attack. Even though the advice at the time indicated there were no dangerous spores in the substance, the Prime Minister couldn't contain himself. Sending the powder to the embassy was an act of "murderous criminality", he said.

It turned out to be a bit of self-raising flour, the stuff Janette Howard used to make sponge cakes for Liberal Party fund-raisers in the good old Wollstonecraft days.

Maybe there were nasty spores in her recipe, because I suspect her sponges have caused significant problems for the biorhythms of senior Liberals ever since.

After all, they gave us those evil boat people, those weapons of mass destruction, the murderous white powder, and that dangerous terrorist David Hicks.

Like all the petrifications that have been foisted on us, Hicks has long lost the capacity to frighten our pants off. It's just odd the Government hasn't cottoned on that its Hicks rhetoric is as stale as an unsold sponge at a Bennelong raffle.

It is the eve of Hicks's fifth year of incarceration. The tide is turning on this case as more and more Australians are justifiably disgusted at the Government's demonisation of him and its slavish parroting of the US line.

Hicks was picked up in Afghanistan, where he was guarding a tank for the Taliban. He was caught by the Northern Alliance and sold to the Americans for $1000. For his first 30 months he was held without charge. For the first two years he did not have access to a lawyer. He has no legal right to challenge his detention because he was in a newly invented category - "enemy combatant" and held in what the US Administration mistakenly thought would be a "legal black hole" prison.

Howard, Downer and Philip Ruddock repeatedly chant that they want to see Hicks's case dealt with as quickly as possible by the United States. Five years on that has worn utterly thin. It presupposes that awaiting the detainee at the end of this "quickly as possible" process is something akin to a fair trial, which it ain't. The military commissions are set up to ensure convictions. If they wanted fairness the Americans would have put him through the courts martial system, something the military lawyers pressed for, but it was rejected by the White House.

Since the US Supreme Court found in June that the proposed military commission trials for Guantanamo prisoners were unconstitutional, Hicks has not been re-charged. The initial charges were feeble in any event. The "aiding the enemy" allegation has evaporated and will not be laid again, while the "conspiracy" and "attempted murder" charges were so outside the norms of the law of war that they had to be bolstered with piles of cement in the new US Military Commissions Act.

The person who more than anyone else turned the tide of public opinion is Major Michael Mori, Hicks's Pentagon-appointed lawyer. He has made several visits to Australia, the most recent during last month's meeting in Fremantle, Western Australia, of the standing committee of attorneys-general.

Ruddock vetoed Mori's proposed presentation to the full gathering, but it went ahead "off Broadway", so to speak. Arising from that the state and territory attorneys were able to pin Ruddock on a spate of exaggerated or unreliable statements. These include that Hicks is not being held in solitary confinement, that he has access to natural light, that he can visit a "library", that his lawyers have contributed to the lengthy delays in his proceedings, that there is no legal process available to deal with him in Australia and the military commissions will result in a just outcome.

Each and every one of those statements has been made by the federal Attorney-General, Ruddock, and they are all demonstrably misleading.

A group of distinguished Australian lawyers, including a retired federal chief justice, a former Commonwealth solicitor-general and criminal, international and constitutional law practitioners and academics, have just formulated a legal opinion that has an alarming conclusion.

They say that the proposal to put Hicks before a fresh military commission is a contravention of the Geneva Conventions, that such a trial would be in contravention of the Australian Criminal Code and that to knowingly counsel or urge a trial to be conducted before such a military commission would constitute a war crime under the Australian Criminal Code.

War crime indictments could be drawn up in other countries that claim "universal jurisdiction" - just as Germany is doing in respect of the outgoing US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

It could mean that in future Howard, Downer and Ruddock could not travel to countries that claim universal jurisdiction for crimes committed elsewhere. Such countries include Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Germany.

Just like Henry Kissinger, and now Rumsfeld, our ministers might have to be very careful with their future travel arrangements.

http://www.smh.com.au/...the-tables-turn/2006/12/07/1165081086221.html

'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate

The Nation - lookout
by Naomi Klein
December 26, 2005

It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George W. Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.

It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture." It is here in Panama and, later, at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from across the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions--and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."

Some of the Panama school's graduates returned to their countries to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners, the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador and military coups too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.

And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How could they? To do so would require something totally absent from the current debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials long predates the Bush Administration and has in fact been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.

It's a history that has been exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his upcoming book A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an indispensable and riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.

It's not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples"--so too do many of torture's most prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.

Does it somehow lessen the horrors of today to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture to wipe out its political opponents--that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins, expressing her shock that the United States is running a prison gulag, wrote that "it's just this one administration...and even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Dick Cheney." And in the November issue of Harper's, William Pfaff argues that what truly sets the Bush Administration apart from its predecessors is "its installation of torture as integral to American military and clandestine operations." Pfaff acknowledges that long before Abu Ghraib, there were those who claimed that the School of the Americas was a "torture school," but he says that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so." Perhaps it's time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks coaching illegal torture techniques, all readily available in both Spanish and English, as well as the hair-raising list of SOA grads.

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never Before"? I suspect it has to do with a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this Administration's crimes. And the Bush Administration's open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented--but let's be clear about what is unprecedented about it: not the torture but the openness. Past administrations tactfully kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were practiced in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush Administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush Administration's real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette, more than the actual crimes, that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: By daring to torture unapologetically and out in the open, Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.

For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.

In Latin America the revelations of US torture in Iraq have not been met with shock and disbelief but with powerful déjà vu and reawakened fears. Hector Mondragon, a Colombian activist who was tortured in the 1970s by an officer trained at the School of the Americas, wrote: "It was hard to see the photos of the torture in Iraq because I too was tortured. I saw myself naked with my feet fastened together and my hands tied behind my back. I saw my own head covered with a cloth bag. I remembered my feelings--the humiliation, pain." Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured in a Guatemalan jail, said, "I could not even stand to look at those photographs...so many of the things in the photographs had also been done to me. I was tortured with a frightening dog and also rats. And they were always filming."

Ortiz has testified that the men who raped her and burned her with cigarettes more than 100 times deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent whom they called "Boss." It is one of many stories told by prisoners in Latin America of mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of their torture cells, proposing questions, offering tips. Several of these cases are documented in Jennifer Harbury's powerful new book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way.

Some of the countries that were mauled by US-sponsored torture regimes have tried to repair their social fabric through truth commissions and war crimes trials. In most cases, justice has been elusive, but past abuses have been entered into the official record and entire societies have asked themselves questions not only about individual responsibility but collective complicity. The United States, though an active participant in these "dirty wars," has gone through no parallel process of national soul-searching.

The result is that the memory of US complicity in far-away crimes remains fragile, living on in old newspaper articles, out-of-print books and tenacious grassroots initiatives like the annual protests outside the School of the Americas (which has been renamed but remains largely unchanged). The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the current torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, these past crimes are being erased from the record. Every time Americans repeat the fairy tale about their pre-Cheney innocence, these already hazy memories fade even further. The hard evidence still exists, of course, carefully archived in the tens of thousands of declassified documents available from the National Security Archive. But inside US collective memory, the disappeared are being disappeared all over again.

This casual amnesia does a profound disservice not only to the victims of these crimes but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the Administration will deal with the current torture uproar by returning to the cold war model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects every "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government"; it says nothing about torture training or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators. And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by US commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similarly lawless units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq's Interior Ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA's William Colby, who when asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix--a program he helped launch--replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese program."

And that's the problem with pretending that the Bush Administration invented torture. "If you don't understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity," says McCoy, "then you can't begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus--closing a prison, shutting down a program, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But, McCoy says, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."

The Center for American Progress has just launched an advertising campaign called "Torture is not US." The hard truth is that for at least five decades it has been. But it doesn't have to be.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/klein