Mute Witness

by Eric Martin

One of Andrew Sullivan's guest bloggers, Chris Bodenner, passes along this chilling account of torture and wrongful detention as perpetrated by the Iranian regime:

Mowj Camp reports that a deaf and mute man was tortured in Evin prison for several days before he was released. “A detainee, who was suspected of pretending to be deaf and mute, was severely tortured for several days to make him speak until finally he was released after a doctor confirmed that he was really deaf and mute.”

Although I'm not sure if it's necessarily a common occurrence, it does stand to wit that detainees that are deaf and mute - or otherwise incapable of communication due to a mental handicap - will have a rougher go at it if a regime practices torture and/or detention without due process.  After all, they will almost always appear to be holding out against their interrogators/captors, rather than being incapable of response due to some physical malady.  And so they will likely suffer more on multiple levels.  This incident reminded me of an episode that Alex Rossmiller describes in his book Still Broken.  From a review I wrote: 

Toward the end of Rossmiller's rotation in Iraq, he was brought in to help with some detainee in-processing - he had been tracking some insurgent activity, and earlier that night there had been a raid conducted using his intel.

One of the soldiers came over to the main table, his face tired but his eyes alert.

"We didn't' find the guys we were looking for, but grabbed some dudes at the targets' houses and then did some follow-on ops, too. We've got around forty or fifty coming in," he declared.

This news was alarming. Some of the evidence against our targets was questionable to begin with, and now we had dozens of guys who just happened to be in the houses we hit? In an environment filled with bad sources, double-dealings, a lack of knowledge of culture and language, and endless cases of mistaken identity, it was likely that few if any of our detainees were involved in the insurgency, and probably none would have intelligence value. I figured we would have to let most of them go.

Rossmiller was wrong of course. Instead, the deeply traumatized and humiliated prisoners were shipped off to Abu Ghraib prison - where they will remain imprisoned for months or years without formal charges or contact with the outside world. The process resembles a Catch 22 of sorts: anyone picked up in the field is sent to Abu Ghraib because those doing the initial processing figure that Abu Ghraib will sort out the insurgents from those wrongly detained. Yet at Abu Ghraib, the SOP is to assume that all incoming detainees are guilty and thus detain them for at least three months. Rossmiller captures the impact of these techniques on counterinsurgency efforts. He points out the dubiousness of these practices to one of the participating soldiers, and the soldier replies:

"Yeah, well, we'll get affidavits that they all had weapons and resisted detention, and that's enough to lock 'em up for a while. Anyway, if they're off the streets, they're not setting IEDs, right?"

"I guess," I replied. But if they weren't before, they would be when they got out.

It actually gets worse. Throughout the grueling and time consuming processing, as several of the detainees try in vain to ascertain the charges against them, some begin to ask, out of concern, about another detainee (the brother of some, cousin of others) who is mentally handicapped and/or deaf and mute. Later in the evening, Rossmiller sees some soldiers attempting to interrogate a detainee who stands mute, confused and otherwise fits the description of the mentally challenged detainee. Rossmiller tries to intervene and explain the situation, to no avail. "Naw, he's fuckin' faking. I'm sending him to Abu G," is the only response he gets. Perfect.

Toward the end of the night, one of the detainees asked for permission to speak, and was eventually granted that right. What he said left an indelible mark on Rossmiller:

"When you came to our country, we hoped law would return. We still have that hope."

Rossmiller recalls:

That day I saw an entire family of brothers sent away - seven in all, I think. One of them was almost certainly retarded...A civilized country and a civilized people cannot presume guilt. Guilt without evidence is anathema to a functioning civil society, and rule of law is vital to win a war that is more about minds than weapons or troops. Pragmatically, a system that incarcerates scores of innocents is a broken one, destined to be fought by those it victimizes.

Although it borders on banal in the extreme to have to point this out, but detention without due process combined with torture will lead to all manner of horror story.  And yet our government willingly put us in the same company as Iran's regime in this regard.  Lovely. 

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

And yet our government willingly puts us in the same company as Iran's regime in this regard.

Typo correction: Obama is maintaining the policy of extra-judicial imprisonment of kidnap and torture victims, so it's present continuing tense, not past.

[Marty]

"That day I saw an entire family of brothers sent away - seven in all, I think. One of them was almost certainly retarded...A civilized country and a civilized people cannot presume guilt. Guilt without evidence is anathema to a functioning civil society, and rule of law is vital to win a war that is more about minds than weapons or troops. Pragmatically, a system that incarcerates scores of innocents is a broken one, destined to be fought by those it victimizes."

"Although it borders on banal in the extreme to have to point this out, but detention without due process combined with torture will lead to all manner of horror story. And yet our government willingly put us in the same company as Iran's regime in this regard. Lovely."

Really? You think anything we've done with a few hundred POW's is comparable to this? I don't think we should shirk from the moral (and legal) dilemma we have created, but this, really?

[Turbulence]

Our government doesn't put us there: we do. We are an evil people. Our leaders, drawn from among us are evil. Our soldiers, drawn from among us are evil. Maybe they don't mean to be evil, but somehow, they keep doing evil things. Because we demand it of them. And because we don't stop them. And because we refuse to punish them after the fact.

This is what the United States is: torturing retarded men until they "confess". I'm so proud.

[Jesurgislac]

You think anything we've done with a few hundred POW's is comparable to this?

"Whoever saves a single soul it is as if he saved the whole world."

And I believe the converse is true, too.