A recent account of Russian torture caught my eye. During the counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine liberated Balakliya, where they discovered what a Ukrainian official described as a “torture camp” fashioned from a police station. One former prisoner, who told the BBC he had been detained at the station for more than 40 days, described how the Russians used electricity in their interrogations. “They made me hold two wires. There was an electric generator. The faster it went, the higher the voltage. They said, ‘if you let it go, you are finished.’ Then they started asking questions. They said I was lying, and they started spinning it even more and the voltage increased.” Another prisoner told the BBC “she regularly heard screams from other cells.”
It seems there really is nothing new under the sun:
He was suspended from hooks, with his feet resting on the side of a large cylindrical drum attached to wires and a battery . . . When Mr. Habib did not give the answers his interrogators wanted, they threw a switch and a jolt of electricity went through the drum . . . The action of Mr. Habib “dancing” on the drum forced it to rotate, and his feet constantly slipped, leaving him suspended by only the hooks on the wall . . . This ingenious cruelty lasted until Mr. Habib finally fainted.
This is part of what my former client, Mamdouh Habib, described the first time I visited him at Guantánamo. Habib, who is Australian, had been one of the four petitioners in Rasul v. Bush (2004), in which the Supreme Court held that he and the other Guantánamo prisoners could challenge their detention in federal court. When I met him a few months after the decision, he told me the United States had rendered him from Pakistan to Egypt in 2002, where he was subjected to spectacular tortures, including this creative use of electricity. Another involved nudity and a German Shepherd dog.
Naturally, Habib confessed. Or more properly, he signed blank pages, which the Egyptians helpfully annotated with a laundry list of supposed sins against the United States. Habib, they said, confessed to a leadership role in al-Qaeda and a prominent part in the 9/11 attacks. I wrote up what Habib told me of his rendition and torture, got it cleared by the Department of Justice, and promptly emailed it to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who wrote a front-page article describing his mistreatment, from which this snippet is taken.
That article appeared in January 2005, the same day former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales testified at his confirmation hearings to become Attorney General in the Bush White House. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin held up the Post article and asked Gonzales whether Habib’s rendition to torture had been illegal. Gonzales assured him that Habib’s account, if true, violated U.S. law. A few days later, I got a call from the Australian embassy telling me Habib would be released. A few weeks after that, I accompanied him on a flight from Guantánamo to Sydney on a sleek Gulfstream jet chartered by the Australian government. I am the only lawyer who has been allowed to accompany a client home from Guantánamo. He was never charged and has been free ever since. The United States no longer maintains he had any connection to al-Qaeda or 9/11, and has never condescended to defend its role in his torture.
But that was back in the days when testimony about American involvement in torture could still influence events. Revolting images from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were still fresh. Reports of prisoners beaten to death were coming to light from places like Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and confidential sources were leaking accounts to journalists of sadistic brutality by U.S. soldiers. The president’s decision to jettison the Geneva Conventions had provoked howls of outrage, and Congress had finally begun to reassert its constitutional authority “to make rules for the Government and Regulation of the…