Editorial Desk :
The UN Committee against Torture urged the United States on Friday to fully investigate and prosecute police brutality and shootings of unarmed black youth and ensure that Taser weapons are used sparingly, in a report that appeared in our daily. The panel’s first review of the US record on preventing torture since 2006 followed racially-tinged unrest in cities across the country this week sparked by a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury’s decision not to charge a white police officer for the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.
The committee decried “excruciating pain and prolonged suffering” for prisoners during “botched executions” as well as frequent rapes of inmates, shackling of pregnant women in some prisons and extensive use of solitary confinement. Its findings cited deep concern about “numerous reports” of police brutality and excessive use of force against people from minority groups, immigrants, homosexuals and racial profiling. The panel referred to the “frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals.” The US delegation reported that 20 investigations had been opened since 2009 into systematic police abuses and that more than 330 police officers had been prosecuted for brutality. Some 148 inmates are held at the US Guantanamo base in Cuba amid reports, the committee’s report said, of “a draconian system of secrecy surrounding high-value detainees that keeps their torture claims out of the public domain”.
In June 2006, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that all detainees held by the United States in Guantánamo Bay are protected by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Under the US War Crimes Act of 1996, violations of Common Article 3 constitute felonies. In order to protect military officials who commit questionable acts, the Bush Administration pushed for the passing of law that would reduce the scope of Article 3.
The Military Commissions Act (MCA), ratified on October 17, 2006, redefined the terms of Common Article 3. The Act adopted the narrow definition for “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” used by the Administration in 2002. In doing so, the MCA expanded the types of abuses military personnel and agents can use in interrogations and limits the ability to hold those officials accountable. After the US dismissed United Nations concerns about torture in 2006 by redefining the terms of Article 3 one UK judge observed ‘America’s idea of what is torture … does not appear to coincide with that of most civilized nations’.
Torture in the US has had a long history with torture being used against slaves from before independence. Lynchings and other acts were also common against blacks – these were murders, mostly committed against blacks which were never solved. The publication of the Wickersham Commission’s “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement” in 1931 highlighted the widespread use of covert third degree torture by the police to force confessions, and led to a subsequent decline in its use over the 1930s and 1940s.
American officials were involved in counter-insurgency programs in which they encouraged their allies, such as the ARVN to use torture, and actively participated in it, during the 1960s to the 1980s. From 1967 to at least 1972, the Central Intelligence Agency coordinated the Phoenix Program, which targeted the infrastructure of the Communist National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (“Viet Cong”). The program killed 26,000 Viet Cong. Critics of the program assert that many of those identified by the program as Viet Cong members were actually civilians, who when captured suffered torture by the South Vietnamese Army, under CIA supervision.
In 2005 a Channel 4 documentary “Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons” showed video of naked prisoners being beaten, bitten by dogs, and stunned with Taser guns and electric cattle prods. In one case a prisoner is strapped to a restraint chair and left for sixteen hours; two hours after being unshackled he dies from a blood clot. In another, mentally ill prisoner Charles Agster is suffocated to death. Another prisoner is found with a broken neck, broken toes and internal injuries following an argument with guards; after one month in a coma he dies from septicaemia.
A 2010 memoir by Wilbert Rideau, an inmate at Angola Prison from 1961 through 2001, states that “slavery was commonplace in Angola with perhaps a quarter of the population in bondage” throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The New York Times states that weak inmates served as slaves who were raped, gang-raped, and traded and sold like cattle. A 1999 report by Human Rights Watch raised concerns over conditions in Red Onion State Prison. The report states that “Virginia Department of Corrections has failed to embrace basic tenets of sound correctional practice and laws protecting inmates from abusive, degrading or cruel treatment.”
It is disappointing that the world’s foremost power in favour of human rights would resort to torture whether in the War on Terror or in its prisons.
The human rights advocates all over the world look to the USA as a force to gather strength from. Although there is no evidence that the torture that goes on in domestic prisons is mandated or approved by the Federal or State governments, there is conclusive evidence to point to the complicity of the US in the torture of inmates at Guantanamo Bay, even though spy agencies like the CIA know very well that torture is of no use and results in the getting of information which is almost always unreliable. For a country which prides itself as being the leader of the free world and frequently chastises other countries like China violation of human rights the UN Panel report should act as a wake up call for itself. In the name of fighting terrorism, the US has to be careful if bad examples are set by practicing terrorism. We are of the view that the brute militarism committed by USA in dealing with Muslim terrorism is proving counter-productive. There is need for understanding the problem in proper perspective. Israel is a vile influence on the USA without which there will be no cause for Muslim terrorism.
