[By Dan Gardner -- Montreal Gazette
A 15-year-old Canadian is arrested in Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials accuse
the boy of murdering a man.
The teen is locked away in a high-security prison. All the other prisoners
are adults. Most are accused of being hard-core killers, but such is the
nature of Saudi justice that not one of these inmates has actually been
tried.
The boy is interrogated relentlessly. He isn't beaten or subjected to crude
tortures. But his Saudi jailers do inflict many psychological torments,
including forcing him to stay awake and answer questions for hours and,
when he is allowed to sleep, shaking him awake every few hours and moving
him from place to place.
According to Saudi documents which surface later, the boy is also "placed
in isolation for up to three weeks." Creating severe disorientation and a crushing sense of helplessness are the
goals of such techniques. They always work.
Throughout the early part of the ordeal, the boy is not allowed contact
with family or lawyers. These restrictions are gradually eased, but still
he remains in limbo. He is not charged, not tried. Weeks, months, and years
crawl by.
Finally, six agonizing years after the boy's arrest, he is charged and set
to be tried before a military court that has been specially constituted
with unique rules, for the purpose of trying the boy and the other
prisoners. Some Saudi justice officials publicly denounce the courts. They
are rigged against the defendants, they say.
And the Canadian government? It doesn't seem terribly concerned about any
of this.
Other foreign nationals -- all adults -- were arrested by the Saudis in
circumstances similar to those of the Canadian boy. In every case, their
governments asked the Saudis to send them home for trial. In every case,
the Saudis agreed.
But the Canadian government has refused to make the same request. Some
Canadian politicians even make snide comments about the boy in public,
suggesting he's guilty and deserves whatever the Saudis do to him.
This is the story of Omar Khadr, of course. The only difference is that the
government holding the boy -- imprisoned so long he is now a man -- is that
of the United States.
And that difference makes all the difference. If the Saudis, or any other
"Third-World government", for that matter, had subjected Khadr to the
treatment he has received at the hands of the U.S. government, the whole
country would rise in outrage and any politician who refused to move heaven
and earth to get Khadr back would soon find himself / herself unemployed.
It isn't "any other" government that is holding Khadr, however. It is the
government of the United States. And a great many Canadians seem to believe
the government of the United States is incapable of inflicting savage
injustice on a 15-year-old boy.
Look at what is known. Look at the law. Call it what it is.
Six years ago -- around the time that Omar Khadr was on his way to
Guantanamo, but long before the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal broke --
I started work on a series of articles about torture. I studied the
research. I talked to victims and therapists. I travelled to three
countries -- Egypt, Turkey and Uzbekistan -- where it's easy to find those
who have been on either side of the blindfold.
And I spent a lot of time writing about how Americans were handling
prisoners in the post-9/11 world. I was criticized for this. Torture is
electric shocks and severed fingers, people said. Americans don't torture.
How dare I suggest otherwise?
I dared, because I had discovered two things in the course of my research.
The first is that torture is a constant temptation. When the cause is
righteous and the going hard, abusing prisoners will look like an easy and
effective way forward. Even the best men and women can succumb.
I also realized that the popular image of torture is wrong. It's not about
mutilation and medieval instruments. Torture is a psychological process and
physical pain is only one of many tools in the torturer's kit. So-called
"psychological torture" techniques - prolonged sleep deprivation, threats,
stress positions and the like -- can be just as effective. And while they
may not scar the flesh, they certainly can scar the mind.
None of this was hard to figure out; any fair-minded observer will see it.
The U.S. State Department has. Its annual reports on human rights are
filled with descriptions of sleep deprivation and similar techniques that
are explicitly condemned either as "ill treatment" (a lesser category of
abuse that is also illegal) or torture. And that's when they're inflicted
on adults.
Of course these condemnations are exclusively directed at other
governments. The State Department reports cover human rights in every
country on the planet -- except the United States.
Far too many of us have taken a similar approach. What we would condemn in
other circumstances is accepted with a shrug when the officials responsible
are American. It's blind faith: Americans don't do this.
But Americans DID do this, and more. And now somebody's got to pay.
(This article was slightly edited for the Canadian Islamic Congress Friday
Magazine.)
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