David Hicks: The Indelible Stain of Torture

Below is an excerpt of another story I wrote for Australia's New Matilda magazine. Hicks continues to dominate the news out here-- still featured on front pages and filling the Op-Eds of all the big papers. Read my take below, or check out the whole piece here.

This week, David Hicks is undergoing a final round of interrogation at Guantánamo Bay before his transfer to Adelaide's Yatala Labour Prison to serve out his nine-month sentence. As part of his plea-bargain agreement, Hicks agreed to ‘co-operate fully, completely and truthfully in post-trial briefings and interviews.’ Hicks’s Australian solicitor, David McLeod, wryly said that this final interrogation would take place ‘hopefully without the torture this time.’

Five years since he was first arrested by the Northern Alliance at an Afghani taxi stand and turned over to US forces for a cool US$1000, torture remains an enduring element to the unfolding David Hicks saga.

Hicks arrived at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002 wearing the standard US sensory deprivation suit — goggles, facemask, earplugs, and shackles. In Cuba, Hicks suffered a long list of physical and psychological tortures including sleep deprivation, total isolation, and being forced to endure stress positions for long periods. The effects, according to Hicks in a 2004 affidavit lodged at Guantánamo Bay, were profound. Hicks said:

The interrogation process ruled the detention camps and the lives of detainees. Co-operation with interrogators offered the only means of relief from the miserable treatment and abuse the detainees suffered. Those who failed to comply suffered abuse until they gave in.

Hicks’s conclusions about torture at Guantánamo Bay are similar to the US military’s own Cold War-era findings into communist methods of coercion. In 1954, a US Marine Corps inquiry into Soviet and Chinese interrogation methods found that America’s Cold War enemies ‘developed, and perfected, a diabolical method of torture which combines degradation, deprivation and mental harassment, and which is aimed at the destruction of the individual’s will to resist.’

The panel determined that the Soviet People's Commisariat for Internal Affairs’s (NKVD)methods of torture — including forced standing, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and induced hypothermia — ‘can be applied to an individual continuously over such a long period of time by a skillful, ruthless and determined enemy that one of three events inevitably takes place: A. The victim’s will to resist is broken, and he responds as the enemy desires. B. The victim becomes insane. C. The victim dies.’

From what is known about Hicks’s incarceration, ‘event A’ has clearly occurred.

[...]

At its heart, Hicks’s plea does not reflect the guilt or innocence only a fair trial could deliver. Instead, it reveals the desperation of a man anxious to come home — an Australian subjected to an array of tortures once reserved for Stalin’s ‘enemies of the State.’