Arnon Grunberg

Specific

Common

Many Iraqis I spoke to in Baghdad told me that torture is still common in Iraq. (Torture is I’m afraid common in most countries.)
A friend alerted me to this article by Mark Danner about torture by the C.I.A, which was published a couple of days ago in the Times (a longer version of this essay can be found in the NYRB): ‘It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.
Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’” He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific.... No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”’