Flashback
by digby
Four members of a US special operations unit in Iraq have been disciplined for using electric Taser stun guns on prisoners, the Pentagon says.
Spokesman Lawrence DiRita said the four had been switched to other duties and could face a criminal investigation.
He said they had been punished for excessive use of force.
He was speaking after it emerged that interrogators from a different part of the US army had reported seeing members of the unit abusing Iraqi prisoners.
Memos obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a civil rights group, detail the experiences of US Defence Intelligence Agency workers who were told to keep quiet about the alleged abuse.
The documents also show that special forces officers ignored FBI fears over their interrogation methods.
FBI and Defence Intelligence Agency concerns were ignored or brushed aside by special forces, says the ACLU.
The ACLU obtained the documents under the US Freedom of Information Act.
The memos were written in June, two months after photographs were published of abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail, near Baghdad.
At a Pentagon news briefing on Wednesday, Mr DiRita said four individuals had received “administrative punishments for excessive use of force – it in particular was emphasised it was the unauthorised use of Tasers”.
He said he did not know what form the punishment had taken, but it would normally involve loss of pay and demotion to a lower rank.
According to the memos obtained by the ACLU, detainees held in Iraq often arrived at prisons, including Abu Ghraib, bearing “burn marks” on their backs.
[…]
Seven US military police and an intelligence officer have been charged in connection with the abuse. One reservist has been jailed for his role.
It’s interesting that the military actually punished people for the use of tasers in a war zone. But here in the US we have police defending their use on people who are belligerent over traffic violations.
I have often wondered about the use of tasers in the torture regime. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that they aren’t mentioned very often in this debate? (It has come up from time to time in different reports.) Electric shock is a tried and true method of obtaining confessions and has been used for that purpose since electricity was first harnessed.
This article from the Boston Globe is a very useful compendium of torture devices and methods through the years and “electrotorture” has been at the top of the list of preferred methods for the last century — particularly, it turns out, by democracies:
The most famous electrotorture device was adjustable, portable, and based on the magneto, a simple generator that produces a high-voltage spark. The idea of using a magneto generator for torture came to be closely associated with the Nazis, who employed it ruthlessly in France and Belgium during World War II. But it wasn’t the Germans who developed it: It was the French colonial police, the Sûreté, who pioneered the technique and used it throughout the 1930s fighting Vietnamese nationalists. The Nazis learned about the technology from a Vichy police officer, Inspector Marty of Toulouse, in 1942.
Although the Gestapo carried magneto torture to Paris and Belgium, the key distributors of magneto torture after the war were the United States and France. The French resumed magneto torture in Vietnam as early as 1947, passing it to the South Vietnamese, who passed the technique to American military interrogators during the Vietnam War. The Americans introduced magneto torture into Brazil in the late 1960s, and – just as the French had – the Americans eventually brought it home. Chicago police used magneto torture in the 1970s and 1980s to extract confessions. Most alleged incidents implicated Commander Jon Burge, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and the detectives he supervised.
Electrotorture is only one example of how torture spreads via democracies. “Forced standing” is a technique used in the Soviet Union and made famous by the hooded men of Abu Ghraib: They were forced to stand for hours, balanced on a box with the threat of electric torture if they collapsed. It is not nearly as harmless as it sounds: Humans are not designed to stand utterly immobile, and accounts of the practice from Soviet-era victims and psychologists hired by the CIA describe immense pain.
(But that was just a bunch of bad apples from Appalachia having fun with the prisoners, right? The fact that this is a known Soviet style torture method is simple coincident. Move along, citizens …)
It seems unlikely to me that tasers weren’t at least considered as part of the torture regime. Nearly every cop in America is armed with one these days. So the question is, was the use of tasers ruled out at some point? (And if that’s the case, what does it say about their common use on American citizens for simple failure to comply with a police request?) Or is it that tasers are so accepted that the torturers commonly used them to interrogate prisoners and nobody felt it was necessary to even mention it because it was so obviously legal and “harmless?” (That story linked at the top indicates otherwise, but perhaps that was an anomaly.)
I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the answer to that question were revealed. If Americans tasered prisoners as part of their interrogation scheme, it leads to all kinds of unpleasant associations with the worst torturers in history. On the other hand, if tasers are considered so off limits that waterboarding and painful stress positions are considered to be less cruel means of extracting information, their continued use on American citizens would have to be questioned. Either way, the use of electrotorture would finally be debated.
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