Word: ghraib
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...images out of Abu Ghraib prison fit into the canon of torture tactics? Soldiers claim they were told by military intelligence officers to "soften up" the detainees for questioning. Certainly, putting hoods over prisoners' heads and stripping them naked would conform to common, if primitive, interrogation-prep tactics. Ilan Kutz, an Israeli psychiatrist who has witnessed military training for interrogations, confirms that sexual humiliation is also a well-known tool. "The idea of interrogation is to break down the person so all his resistance is shot, and then he'll tell you anything," he says. "In the process, sexual humiliation...
...trick is knowing when to stop. The behavior of the military police at Abu Ghraib seems to blur into hazing, sadism and mockery. Whatever the motives, says Kutz, the soldiers virtually guaranteed that the inmates would be susceptible to post-traumatic stress--and useless to interrogators. "This is stupidity. It's not useful. In fact, it's harmful," says a former Israeli military intelligence interrogator. "After a man's humiliated like this, if there was a chance he'd open up, now there's no way. If there was a chance to recruit him and send him back...
...enemy's psychological vulnerability. In Vietnam, it was cold temperatures. Army special-forces soldiers put prisoners of war in lockers for four or five days, and they lived at borderline hypothermia, he says. In Iraq, cold has been replaced by sexual insecurity. While the official agrees that the Abu Ghraib soldiers were undertrained and undersupervised, he insists that similar tactics--used more carefully--are effective. "When women have power and control over you, that sets the male psyche out of its equilibrium. He's not dominant anymore. It's not for the squeamish. But the typical Arab male will...
Today the U.S. military says hoods are no longer used at Abu Ghraib. Sleep deprivation is allowed only with the permission of commanding officers. Prisoners are no longer put in stress positions, says Miller, the current commander of U.S. prisons in Iraq. But Miller also says that sleep deprivation was never used in the 22,000 interrogations he oversaw at Guantanamo Bay, which he ran from November 2002 to March 2004. Other sources who have served at the base tell TIME sleep deprivation was used for certain prisoners. So were forms of humiliation: female guards routinely watched while detainees used...
While nothing compared to the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime, the actions of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib unquestionably violated international law. What's more, for two years reports have piled up about "stress and duress" techniques military and CIA officers are using on al-Qaeda and Iraqi captives. Those tactics--torture lite--also go against international rules; their practice may have encouraged the crimes at Abu Ghraib. --By Mitch Frank...