Taxonomy of Torture: Stress positions

A detail from the Taxonomy of Torture from the interactive feature Slate: What is Torture?

Name: “Stress positions, like standing”       

Source: Decision Memorandum from Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes II to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for commander, U.S. Southern Command, Dec. 2, 2002; CIA KUBARK manual       

Description: Posing a detainee in an erect standing position for a period of several hours. No restraints or external devices are used. Variations of this technique include the extension of one's arms outward to the side. In an addendum to his memo approving this technique, Rumsfeld asked, "I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"       

According to one Army intelligence officer with personal knowledge of these practices, soldiers in the field developed harsher variations of the stress technique. In one position reportedly improvised by soldiers in the field, known as a "short shackle," detainees are bound at the wrist and ankle with metal or plastic handcuffs and then doubled over with their wrists bound to their ankles, either while lying on the ground or sitting.

Other stress positions documented by Army investigators include the suspension of detainees from a shackle in the ceiling, with the arms extended, sometimes without their feet touching the ground. This practice bears a striking resemblance to the "strappado" first used in the 13th and 14th century during the Italian Inquisition, in which victims were suspended from the ceiling with a system of ropes and weights to induce pain in a series of five degrees of increasing intensity. Army investigators found that a version of strappado was used on Mullah Habibullah and Dilawar at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

Physical, Psychological, or Other Effects: In 1956, the CIA commissioned two Cornell Medical Center researchers to study Soviet interrogation techniques, including standing for extended periods of time. They concluded, "The KGB simply made victims stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours—producing 'excruciating pain' as ankles double in size, skin becomes 'tense and intensely painful,' blisters erupt oozing 'watery serum,' heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.

In 1999, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled the use of sleep deprivation and stress positions to be forms of torture. Specifically, that court forbade Israeli security agencies from using the "shaback" position, in which a detainee's hands are tied behind the back of a chair in a painful position while he is hooded; and the "frog crouch," in which a detainee is forced to crouch on his toes with his hands bound behind his back for a long period of time.

Locations Used: Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan      

Legal Opinion: These tactics violate Geneva's proscriptions against physical abuse and probably against humiliating and degrading treatment. FM 34-52 recognizes this by stating that it is physical torture to force "an individual to stand, sit, or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time."

In 1978, the European Court of Human Rights decided in a case from Northern Ireland that "five techniques" used to interrogate suspected Irish Republican Army members were unlawful. The techinques were "wall-standing" (a stress position); hooding; subjection to noise; sleep deprivation; and deprivation of food and drink. The court held that such tactics were not torture under the European human rights convention but constituted "inhuman and degrading treatment," a standard analogous to the one in the CAT and ICCPR. In light of this decision, international law would likely prohibit the stress positions that the U.S. has used.

via Adam Kotsko.

Comments

[Virgil Johnson]

Torture has been used throughout the centuries by tyrannical governments, whatever form a government chooses to use - because torture is not isolated to form of government (unfortunately). The United States has been using torture almost from it's inception, it just has never been done in the open.

What is not usually known about torture is that it is never used to extract the "truth' - instead, it is used to fabricate a lie in support of a global, national, or local policy. Most people know you can make someone confess to anything when torture is used - they will confess to leaping over tall buildings in a single bound if this is what will halt the torture.

In order to produce evidence for a war, this administration has resorted to extrodinary

[Virgil Johnson]

rendition after the fact of using torture and it being exposed. The use of this method is supposed (extraordinary rendition)to quell the outcry against the direct employment of torture - although the process of direct torture continues, it just has been hermetically sealed from public observation.

Here is a pre-warning sign you can always use to head off torture - whenever a government, through it's own words or through it's loyal press begins to villify and demonize certain people, torture is always close behind or presently in practice. When you begin to see torture paraded on your TV in various entertainment programs, and straining definitions of what torture is - that is a sure sign it is in full swing.

Once again for emphasis, torture is never used to get to the so-called truth, but always done so confessions can be given to support a certain foreign or domestic policy. It is always used when we want to rob other nations of their resources, or gain some form of political power in whatever region, usually both. I know it is an ugly picture, the question is not it's disgusting existence, but what are you going to do about it?

[Jodi]

Virgil--I like very much the way you broaden thinking about torture--'it is used when we rob...' what that says to me is that outrage against torture needs to be coupled with outrage against violence and exploitation inflicted on populations more generally; it should not be viewed in isolation, as if that is the only kind of violence we abhore, cannot tolerate, etc.