Dirty wars: on the unacceptability of torture--a conversation with Olga Talamante.

• Author: Thomas, Suzie Dod

"THE BURLAP BAG FELT ROUGH AND SCRATCHY AGAINST MY CHEEK, BUT IT ALSO smelled earthy and deceptively comforting. Thick bandages already covered my eyes so the bag's only purpose was to frighten me. And it worked. I knew I had entered another dimension. "Are these words from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison? From the detention center at Guantanamo? From Afghanistan? They very well could be, but these are the words" of Olga Talamante, a 55-year-old Chicana activist from California, describing her experience as a torture victim 32 years ago in an Argentina prison in 1974.

Talamante's memories of when she was tortured are never far from the surface. The publication of the long-suppressed pictures of Abu Ghraib victims last year and the report from the U.N. Commission on Human Rights finding that practices conducted at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo amounted to torture (Brecher and Smith, 2006) lifted the curtain on the uses of torture in President Bush's war on terrorism and rekindled memories of Talamante's horror. "'Every time I read a new story about U.S. forces participating in similar acts, it takes me back to that secret torture room," she says. The fact that a debate has arisen and even exists" regarding the use of torture outraged her and prompted to speak out about her experiences again after over 30years. It is our hope that this interview contributes to strengthening the human rights and social justice perspective within the present discourse on torture, in addition to denouncing the current increased U.S. practice of using and legitimating torture to ostensibly obtain a greater benefit or good.

In May 2006, a U.N. anti-torture panel of nine experts in Geneva charged with monitoring U.S. compliance with the Convention Against Torture ratified in 1994 by President Clinton (see Box 1) rebuked the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies and recommended closing the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba and stopping the transfer of suspected terrorists" to countries where they may face torture. Acknowledging that there had been mistreatment of detainees, the U.S. made a commitment that all government agencies, including contractors, were to be prohibited from engaging in torture at all times and in all places, and that suspects would not be transferred to countries where they were more likely to endure torture. However, the U.N. committee was skeptical about the sincerity of the U.S. in complying with such pledges and challenged its assertion that some parts of the 1994 anti-torture convention do not apply in times of war (Lynch, 2006). Their skepticism is understandable, given that the Bush administration has usurped the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution (Savage, 2006). Among those he can ignore are military rules and regulations, which would cover the treatment of detainees and torture. The week before, the Council of Europe issued a separate investigative report that said that the U.S. had created a "reprehensible network" of dealing with terror suspects, highlighted by secrete prisons believed to be in Eastern Europe and other nations around the world.

Box 1 : CIA's Hidden History of Torture Despite claims to the contrary by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others that "we don't torture," the fact is that torture is neither a recent nor an aberrant U.S. practice. Alfred W. McCoy (2006b) points out that the U.S. has long relied on a psychological, not physical, form of torture, which is masked by the absence of any visible scars, complicating any legal definition of torture. A closer examination reveals a hidden history of CIA torture. From 1950 to 1962, the agency led a costly effort to crack the code of human consciousness, an endeavor that culminated in the creation of psychological torture--the first revolution of this cruel science in centuries. Experimenting with sensory deprivation, researchers found they could induce a state of psychosis in just 48 hours of total sensory isolation. They also explored self-inflicted pain (i.e., forcing victims to stand for days, etc.) and found it was effective in breaking prisoners' resolve. With its legitimating scientific aura and avoidance of obvious brutality, in 1963 the CIA combined these two methods of psychological torture in the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual that soon spread among allied agencies at home and abroad. In a dissenting opinion in a European Court of Human Rights investigation, Judge Demetrios Evrigenis of Greece wrote concerning allegations that the British had committed torture when they were found using the CIA techniques against IRA suspects in 1971: "there are new forms of suffering that have little in common with the physical pain caused by conventional torture, which can produce the disintegration of an individual's personality and the crushing of his will." In 1994, President Clinton signed the U.N. Convention on Torture. To preserve the U.S. prerogative to continue using psychological torture, however, Clinton issued a signing statement subscribing to reservations drafted earlier by the Reagan administration; it evaded the use of the word "mental;' thus redefining torture to exempt psychological techniques. This contradiction remained buried until it exploded 10 years later at Abu Ghraib. The photographs of the Iraqi torture victims bear the trademarks of these techniques, adding to them attacks on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity, and identification of individual fears and phobias to exploit them. For more information on the history of torture and the CIA, see Alfred McCoy (2006b). Furthermore, Pentagon officials headed by Vice President Dick Cheney's office and by the Pentagon's intelligence arm decided to omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention from its new detainee, policies, signaling a shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards. The provision, which bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," had been the subject of a lengthy debate at the Pentagon (and opposed by uniformed officers, military lawyers, and the State Department) as the policies on detainees and interrogations were being redrawn for a new U.S. Army Field Manual that was to be issued in April of 2006 (Barnes, 2006). This forms part of a broader pattern in which the Bush administration has usurped power to increase its jurisdiction over key issues, including torture. (See Box 2 for other changes in the legal underpinnings of the practice of torture.)

Box 2: Legal Underpinnings Are Modified Since unleashing the war on terror after September 11, 2001, President Bush's legal advisers in the White House and Justice Department translated his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, crafting controversial legal principles that allowed for the widespread use of torture. The notion that Bush's executive power allows him to override laws and treaties eviscerated the Geneva Conventions so that a captured fighter became an "enemy combatant" instead of a "prisoner of war," effectively removing the protections afforded by the Conventions and allowing the U.S. to employ false imprisonment and torture in secret prisons. This shift and the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes represent a dangerous departure from domestic and international norms. Even former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor decried the administration's attack on the judiciary as starting the country down the road to dictatorship. The descent into the "moral abyss" of torture (in the words of the ACLU) was facilitated by the policies and decisions taken at the highest levels of the Bush administration, with Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Albert Gonzalez bearing responsibility for creating the legal framework and climate in 2002 that led to the recent unraveling of domestic and international law in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan. For more information, see McCoy (2006a) and Romero (2005). On June 10, three detainees at Guantanamo committed suicide (Risen and Golden, 2006). Advocates for the victims said they believed the suicides were a result of the deep despair felt by inmates who are being held indefinitely. Their families are calling for an independent investigation, stating that the victims were pushed to it by torture and the lack of attention paid to their health (Shihiri, 2006). President Bush has expressed a desire to close Guantanamo the future, but postponed that decision due to unresolved issues before the Supreme Court that will determine the jurisdiction in which detainees should be tried: military or federal courts (Risen and Golden, 2006; Cloud and Lewis, 2006).

Peronista (the progressive youth organization of the larger Peronist Movement), joining in its efforts to bring about social change. I was 24 years old, and a long way from the garlic fields of Gilroy, California, where my parents and I had worked while I was growing up and where my parents were still employed.

SDT: This was quite a drastic change. What were the experiences that politicized you as a young woman, leading you to university and ultimately to Argentina?

OT: Growing up in Gilroy, the agricultural area of the Santa Clara Valley, was my initiation in political awareness. We lived in a labor camp, in a warehouse that had been divided into single, various-sized rooms, to which families were assigned according to size. My family--my parents, my two brothers and I--was one of the smallest in the camp. Most families had at least five children, and some had as many as 10. Our single room had no furniture, no stove, no refrigerator. It did have a sink, running water, and a kerosene stove. There was a communal outhouse and shower room for all families to use. We rose at the crack of dawn...