Via Hilzoy, Jumah al Dossari’s sickening account of life in Gitmo reminds me that I owe a response to Sonny Bunch’s response to my criticisms of his argument (got all that?) that forcing prisoners to spend up to twelve hours confined in coffin-sized boxes does not constitute torture.
Here is the UN’s definition of that latter term:
… any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.
And here’s the CNN report on the practices at issue:
The U.S. military is segregating violent Iraqi prisoners in wooden crates that in some cases are not much bigger than the prisoners.
The military released photos of what it calls “segregation boxes” used in Iraq.
Three grainy black-and-white photos show the rudimentary structures of wood and mesh. Some of the boxes are as small as 3 feet by 3 feet by 6 feet tall, according to military officials. There was no image released of a box that size.
The average Iraqi male is 5 feet 6 inches tall, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health. That leaves little room for a prisoner to move once placed inside.
Never having been so imprisoned, I am of course unable to speak to the severity of the pain that attends such treatment, but it does strike me as something that is likely to be extraordinarily nasty.
Here is Sonny, though:
Of course you don’t need to ["make prisoners uncomfortable" in such ways]; you do it specifically to make them uncomfortable and teach them that there are consequences for for being a hazard to the prisoners, the guards, and themselves.
True, but that is once again exactly the issue, which is whether the fact that torture is supposed to accomplish something makes it something less than torture.
Oh, wait – I guess I’m not supposed to use that word:
… being uncomfortable for a couple of hours does not constitute torture.
That is once again true. Having a pebble in your shoe, or eating a meal you don’t much like, or sleeping on a lumpy mattress, are all “uncomfortable” things, and none of them are torture. But being made to spend (which is different from merely happening to spend) twelve hours (which is more than “a couple” of them) in a windowless box that barely allows you to sit down or move around is not merely “uncomfortable”; it seems, rather, to be a straightforward case of what the UN’s presiding definition would count as torture.
Here is an account from a prisoner:
Zubayda’s “hard time” began when he was locked into the “tiny coffin” for hours on end, which he described as excruciatingly painful. It was too small for him to stand or stretch out, so small he said he had to double up his limbs in a fetal position. Because of his recently healed injuries, he described this position as particularly agonizing, since it caused his wounds to repoen … A source familiar with Zubayda’s account described the tiny coffin box as “unbearable, most terrible.” Article 21 of the Third Geneva Convention – which applies to all prisoners of war – specifically prohibits such forms of cruelty, which are classified as “close confinement.”
Does that sound merely like something that “makes a prisoner at Guantanamo kind of uncomfortable”, or does it seem to you more like a matter of “severe pain or suffering”? I’ll let the readers decide:
And then there’s this:
If it did [constitute torture], half of the prisons in this country would be shut down. Month-long stretches of solitary confinement happen all the time in prisons; I would argue that those punishments are far more deleterious to the mental health of inmates than sitting for (up to) 12 hours in a box big enough to sit down (albeit kind of uncomfortably) in.
Supposing Sonny is right about the second part of this, then I’m happy to bite the bullet on the first. We could, I take it, take care of at least half of the necessary closings-down simply by ending the War on Drugs.
Filed under: civil liberties, morality, torture
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