freedetainees.org

Spencer Ackerman

If the era of unconscious American patriotism that began on September 11 ended in April 2004, when CBS News and the New Yorker magazine published the infamous torture photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, then perhaps the hangover of euphemism that clouded America’s understanding of its post-September 11 wars began to lift on June 18, 2008. On that day Physicians for Human Rights released a report documenting the experiences of 11 men who had been tortured in US prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The humiliation, degradation and violence had broken them, the report showed, and the men endured substance abuse, psychological afflictions and even suicidal tendencies long after their release.

As difficult to read as the report itself is – it speaks in matter-of-fact terms about the ruined lives of men who, among other things, confess to being raped by US troops – in a sense, it is less important than its short foreword. In it, a respected military leader issued a stark judgment on America’s turn to what Vice President Dick Cheney euphemistically called “the dark side” in the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations,” wrote US Army Major General Antonio Taguba, “media accounts and reports from human-rights organisations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.”

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