Outsourcing torture

The torture of prisoners of war at offshore U.S. military bases is in line with a Pentagon strategy now taking shape, remarkable for its contempt for international law and traditional military procedures.

ON May 13, 2005, the United States Department of Defence released a list of military bases in the U.S. that it wanted to close. The list went to a public body (the Base Realignment and Closure Commission) that will hold hearings around the country. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that 62 major military bases in the U.S. would be either closed or scaled back. The closing of just short of 10 per cent of the domestic bases would save the military about $48.8 billion over 20 years.

The closing of the bases, which are spread out across the U.S., will impact many regional economies. With the continued slowdown of hiring in the industrial sector, the military provides needed jobs to the economy. There is, however, an electoral strategy to the proposal. The closures will largely take place in the northeast and the mid-west, both Democratic bastions, while a moderate expansion will take place in the south and the southwest, which are the core regions of the Republican support base.

Local elected officials are likely to fight hard for their constituents against the larger interests of the military. Even those who oppose the growth of the military, like Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, are eager to stall the closure of bases in their home States. As the Pentagon released this preliminary list, it also heard from the Overseas Basing Commission, which has studied the totality of the 700 U.S. military facilities across the planet. The commission recognised the need to reposition U.S. military assets because of the altered geopolitical situation, but it cautioned against a hasty pullout from older bases. Rumsfeld had wanted to recall 70,000 troops (and their 100,000 family members), mainly from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries, and to redeploy them elsewhere. The Overseas Basing Commission argued that "the pace of events needed to be slowed and re-ordered", a criticism that provoked a firestorm from the Department of Defence.

Despite this, the commission did not dispute Rumsfeld's contention that the base strategy had to be redesigned as a result of post-Cold War shifts in U.S. strategy. The only dispute was about the timing. Part of the new strategy is to "outsource" military bases from the U.S. (where they are expensive) to allied countries. The U.S. government has formal, public agreements for some kind of base structure in 93 countries. Some of these bases are a result of wars of conquest (the Guantanamo base in Cuba, held since 1898), and others came into U.S. possession as a result of the Second World War (notably in Europe and East Asia). At Potsdam in 1947, President Harry Truman noted that while the U.S. "wants no profit or selfish advantage out of this war, we are going to maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace".

The vast infrastructure from the Ramstein air base in Germany to the Okinawa base in Japan results from the post-Second World War policy to encircle the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and to maintain control over the regions that became U.S. allies. Such large Main Operating Bases (MOBs), notably the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean and the Incirlik air base in Turkey, remain essential for the forward deployment of U.S. forces. However, as the U.S. found in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the political efficacy of these bases (Turkey, as an example) is questionable.

For that reason, the Pentagon has now widened its theory of bases. In many of these 93 countries with which the Pentagon has agreements, the U.S. maintains a lean capacity. With India and Singapore, for instance, the U.S. conducts joint exercises to bring the forces into "interoperability", to ensure, in other words, an emotional, technological and operational link-up between the two armed forces. In Thailand and Senegal the U.S. government maintains "cooperative security locations" (CSLs), which are often small facilities attached to a civilian airport or else in remote locations that are sustained by private contractors (often ex-U.S. military personnel). Hidden from public view, the CSLs allow the U.S. military to extend its capacity without much political fallout.

For the 2003 Iraq war, the U.S. more extensively used the smaller (and more secure) base in Doha, Qatar, rather than the very visible Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia. Interoperability and the CSL concept are two examples for Rumsfeld's new lean/mean military in which, as he reported in the 2002 military review, the armed forces would "pursue additional opportunities to outsource and privatise". The Pentagon hopes to use the smaller facilities as "lily-pads", so that, like frogs, the deployments can hop from one to the next until they reach the area of conflict.

In the wake of the Afghan war, the U.S. returned partly to the older strategy of seizing bases as the fruit of conquest and creating new MOBs in friendly countries. The Bagram base outside Kabul is an example of the bases seized, while the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) air base in Uzbekistan is an example of a new MOB. Both bases allow U.S. forces to conduct operations in Afghanistan, although both are also valuable geopolitical locations in the U.S. strategy against Iran and China. The K2 base is laid out in a grid to resemble the area in New York City where the World Trade Centre used to stand, with its roads named for Wall Street and Fifth Avenue (this is not unusual: in southern Iraq, the U.S. army named one of its main camps, Bucca, after a fallen New York City firefighter). At each of these bases, the U.S. maintains a lean local presence (at K2, the army laid off thousands of Uzbek employees after the base had been set up). What is as yet not known is whether these bases will, like their counterparts in East and South-East Asia, spawn large sex work industries. As of now there have only been a few reports of sex workers being brought to Bagram from Ghazni.

In 2002, U.S. courts heard evidence that a private contractor, DynCorp (engaged to protect Hamid Karzai, and involved in Iraq), bought young Russian and Ukrainian women in Bosnia during 1999 as "sex slaves" for their private troops. The two men involved in this case were not charged; indeed, DynCorp fired the two whistleblowers. With this precedent, perhaps these private firms will continue such practices on the increasingly privatised bases.

At K2, U.S. troops rotate in and out, and their presence is screened from the local population by the Uzbek army. When challenged on this support to the U.S. base, the Uzbek Parliament noted that this is "the logical continuation of our country's firm and consistent policy aimed at resolutely fighting international terrorism". A 1970 U.S. Senate report recognised that these bases not only are for military purposes but "all but guarantee some involvement by the United States in the internal affairs of the host government".

The Uzbek and Afghan regimes, while sovereign, are spokes around the hub of U.S. power. Not for nothing, then, that the people of both Uzbekistan and Afghanistan recently rioted against their regimes' collaboration with the U.S. military and the harsh treatment of prisoners in both countries. In Uzbekistan the direct cause of the rebellion in the city of Andijan came from the arrest of 23 people accused of being associated with the Hizb ut-Tahir (Islamic Liberation Party), while in Afghanistan the unrest began in response to a Newsweek report on a copy of the Koran being flushed down a toilet during an interrogation.

What these cases reveal is that these new bases are not simply logistical centres for U.S. operations, but torture facilities where the U.S. and its allies have outsourced torture. Human Rights Watch notes that there are perhaps 24 secret detention centres, "at least half of which operate in total secrecy". The Pentagon has used these overseas bases to hold and torture suspected terrorists even as it has transported detainees to third countries that are past masters in torture (Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan). This latter policy, known as extraordinary rendition, once more uses private firms or the U.S. military's Special Forces (by its Special Action Programme) to transport prisoners to "ghost prisons" where they are without any international protection.

None of this should be a surprise. A week after 9/11, Vice-President Dick Cheney told the U.S. media: "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies. That's the world [our enemies] operate in. And so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. We may have to work through, sort of, the dark side." Saddam Hussein and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are being held in these "ghost prisons".

The U.S. government has denied the report on the desecration of the Koran, just as it attempted to use the story as a way to further muzzle the press. (Newsweek has been asked to grovel, a move that has sent a chill through the press rooms of the U.S.) While Newsweek might not have an unimpeachable source for its report, there are a large number of corroborating statements of this nature from detainees. The abuse of the Koran is part of a pattern to break prisoners by an assault on Islam. In an October 11, 2002 legal brief written by the Guantanamo interrogation unit's lawyer, Army Lt. Colonel Diane E. Beaver, notes that "the issue of removing published religious items or materials" would only be objectionable if the prisoners were U.S. citizens. Since they are not, the lawyer authorised the removal of such materials, as well as the shaving of devout Muslim prisoners.

In March 2005, Admiral Albert Church released his report, which played down the widespread abuse in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, even his report noted (with an unbelievable shift of culpability to the soldiers), that "two female interrogators ... by their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees' religious beliefs". Everything that these soldiers did conformed to the logic of President Bush's February 2002 claim that anyone arrested in connection with the "war on terror" is an "enemy combatant", and therefore outside the provisions of the Geneva Convention. The "torture memos" justified the outsourcing of torture, with one of its authors, John Yoo, brazenly arguing: "Historically there were people so bad that they were not given the protection of the laws. If you were an illegal combatant, you didn't deserve the protection of the laws of war."

On May 20, 2005, The New York Times reported on the forcible death of two presumed innocent Afghans at Bagram. The coroner, Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, noted of the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah: "I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus." Held at Bagram in late 2002, both men suffered beatings and all manner of torture at the hands of their U.S. captors. Out of a ferocious sense of revenge, boredom and impunity, the American interrogators beat them to death. In August 2004, in an internal report, the army investigator Lt. General Anthony Jones noted that Captain Carolyn Wood had instituted "remarkably similar" interrogation procedures for both Bagram and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

These deaths even provoked Afghan President Hamid Karzai to demand custody of the detainees in Afghan-run prisons. Yet, there is nothing extraordinary about them: they are a direct result of the offshore torture strategy mapped out by the Pentagon. Rumsfeld has long wanted to downsize expensive domestic bases and replace them with "frontier stockades" staffed by private corporations and by private contractors. These are now being built as Rumsfeld's vision comes to life. In 2002, Rumsfeld made systematic his contempt for the military procedures as much as for international law. He encouraged the military "to take greater risks". He pushed them to "break the `belt and suspenders' mindset within today's military". The new outsourced strategy is vintage Rumsfeld, whose vision is a perfect merger of corporate and cowboy logic.