Torture and Mind Games: the Takes in London and Tehran

By Scott Horton

Of course, the swap was not a swap. But the fifteen British sailors and marines are now home in Britain, and an Iranian diplomat is back in Tehran. And both sides are decrying their treatment.

The British service personnel gave a number of television and print media interviews with accounts that are consistent. They were subjected to mind games and heavy pressure to extract a confession that they had strayed into Iranian waters. With a confession, they were told, they would be able to go home and see their families. They were separated and told that the others had already confessed. As the New York Times reports quoting a young Marine named Joe Tindell:

“We had a blindfold and plastic cuffs, hands behind our backs, heads against the wall,” Royal Marine Tindell said in an interview with the BBC. “Someone, I’m not sure who, someone said, I quote, ‘Lads, lads, I think we’re going to get executed.’

“After that comment someone was sick, and as far as I was concerned he had just had his throat cut. From there we were rushed to a room, quick photo, and then stuffed into a cell and didn’t see or speak to anyone for six days.”

The British personnel do not claim that they were exposed to physical assault or anything that John Yoo would consider to be “torture” (if, indeed, John Yoo would consider anything to be torture). But the methods used clearly crossed the line of what the Geneva Conventions permit to be used on military personnel, particularly the suggestion of mock executions. Indeed, the Geneva Conventions would preclude coercion of any sort.

Unfortunately, the United States crossed just these lines in its treatment of military captives in Iraq – a fact which is now well documented. A particularly striking case involved the incarceration of Lieutenant General Hamid Zabar at Abu Ghraib. As one NCO testified, interrogators were frustrated over the general's refusal to give information and an officer settled on a new technique: they seized his 16-year old son, dragged him before his father and threatened to kill him. Indeed, compared with many of the practices found at Bagram, Volturna, Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib, what happened to the British service personnel was pretty mild.

About the same time in Tehran, an Iranian diplomat, Jalal Sharafi, was reporting that he had been repeatedly tortured while held by the CIA. The Associated Press reports Sharafi saying

he was approached by agents while shopping in Baghdad. The agents allegedly showed him Iraqi Defense Ministry identification papers and were driving U.S. coalition vehicles.

He said they took him to a base near Baghdad airport and interrogated him in both Arabic and English, questioning him mainly about Iran's influence in Iraq and assistance to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government and Iraqi groups. Sharafi did not provide additional details about his captors or their nationalities.

U.S. officials allege that Iran provides money and weapons to Iraqi Shiite militias.

After the initial interrogation, Sharafi said that his captors ”softened their behavior and showed leniency to encourage” him to cooperate.

Iranian TV reported that his body still bore signs of torture. The United States denied it had anything to do with Sharafi's detention, but Iraqi lawmakers have stated that he was seized by an Iraqi army unit commanded by American officers and was transferred to CIA control. The zone around Baghdad International Airport is tightly controlled by U.S. Forces, and it seems highly improbable that anyone could detain a visiting diplomat there without U.S. knowledge and consent.

Who is to be believed? Unfortunately, the answer is that all the charges of abuse and mistreatment detailed by the British service personnel and the Iranian diplomat are highly credible, because they correspond to practices which are now well established. The United States claim not to be involved in the abduction of Sharafi isn't believed by anyone, including the U.S. authorities issuing the denials. All of this collectively reflects a descent into barbarity.

President Lincoln's advisor, Francis Lieber, considering the failure to apply the rules of war at the opening of the Civil War, said: ”all growth, progress, and rearing, moral or material, are slow; all destruction, relapse, and degeneracy fearfully rapid. It requires the power of the Almighty and a whole century to grow an oak tree; but only a pair of arms, an ax, and an hour or two to cut it down.” In the Persian Gulf today we are witnessing the willful destruction of humanitarian values which are an American legacy, and our government joins with its adversaries in doing them in.