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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth says America's use of coercive interrogation techniques inevitably leads to nightmares like Abu Ghraib.
May 6, 2004 | When he first saw the photographs of Iraqi prisoners suffering abuse at the hands of American soldiers, Kenneth Roth was shocked but not surprised. Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based human rights organization. In March -- a month before CBS News and the New Yorker revealed details of abuses by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- HRW issued a report alleging that U.S. troops had engaged in the similar mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan.
The White House and the Pentagon have tried to portray the incidents of abuse in Iraq as isolated episodes, the work of a few misguided soldiers and officers. In an interview aimed at Arab television viewers on Wednesday, President Bush explained that, in a democracy, "everything is not perfect" and "mistakes are made."
But Roth and other human rights activists see a pattern here, and they say it's not an accidental one. Roth says the abuses in Iraq are part of a "systemic problem" that arises from the U.S. government's approval of "stress and duress" interrogation techniques and its failure to crack down on soldiers and intelligence officers who go too far.
"This is not simply a few rotten apples at the bottom of the barrel," Roth says. Rather, he says, what happened in Iraq is the inevitable result of a "culture of permissiveness" that started in the highest offices in Washington and has now spread to the jail cells at Abu Ghraib.
Roth set forth his concerns about U.S. interrogation techniques earlier this week in an open letter to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. In it, he called on the Bush administration to make "dramatic, and systematic, changes in the treatment of prisoners held by the United States around the world, both to ensure compliance with U.S. legal obligations, and to repair the damage these abuses have caused to the credibility of the United States."
Salon spoke with Roth by telephone Wednesday.
You've seen the photographs from Abu Ghraib. What do they tell you about what was happening there?
One of the most interesting things about the photos is that they were taken at all. The soldiers in the photos seem to be so relaxed, almost relishing the abuse that they were meting out. That strikes me as evidence that this was not some clandestine, rogue operation, but that these soldiers thought they were acting with the acquiescence, if not the overt consent, of their superiors.
Now, I guess there's a question of whether those superiors were within the prison chain of command or the military intelligence chain of command. But these soldiers were not acting as if they had anything to hide. And that, to me, suggests a more systemic problem.
Do you believe that the "systemic problem" is one of inattention to what individual soldiers are doing on the ground, or that U.S. troops have been directed to engage in the abuse of prisoners?
The soldiers, through their attorneys, have said that they were directed to "soften up" the detainees. So in this particular case, it sounds like they were directed.
But it's worth noting that Abu Ghraib isn't the only place where allegations of this sort have come out. Human Rights Watch has interviewed a number of people who have been detained at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the principal U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan, and we received very similar accounts -- not the overt sexual abuse, but stripping detainees naked, dousing them with water, lengthy sleep deprivation, various forms of abuse.
What makes me believe this is a systemic problem ... is that it seems to be reflective of the so-called stress-and-duress interrogation techniques that the Pentagon and the intelligence services have adopted as what they view the appropriate way to interrogate detainees.
