U.S. Torture and Abuse of Detainees
“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)
Each day brings more information about the appalling abuses inflicted upon men and women held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. U.S. forces have used interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep—in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort, and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while incarcerated.
This must end. Torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices should be as unthinkable as slavery. U.S. Department of Defense officials have announced that certain stress interrogation techniques will no longer be used in Iraq. But President Bush should ban all forms of abuse during interrogation in Iraq and everywhere else that the United States holds people in custody. It is wrong in itself and leads to further atrocities.
Recent Reports and other Campagin Documents:
- "No Blood, No Foul": Soldiers' Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq
- Questions and Answers: United States Before the Committee Against Torture
- By the Numbers
- Q & A on Military Instruction Number 10
- Leadership Failure
- Getting Away with Torture?
- The Road to Abu Ghraib
- “Enduring Freedom:” Abuses by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan
- “Empty Promises:” Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard Against Torture
- Guantanamo Bay
- Military Investigations into Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody
- Preventing Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in U.S. Military and Intelligence Detention Facilities
- U.S. Condemnation of Interrogation Techniques Abroad
- "Outsourcing Torture"
- Torture and the Law
- Q&A: The Legal Prohibition Against Torture
- Military Contractors and the Law
- Prisoner Abuse: How Different Are U.S. Prisons?
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