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THE SOCIAL EDGE INTERVIEW: AUTHOR AND ACTIVIST JENNIFER HARBURY

by Gerry McCarthy

Jennifer Harbury's investigation into torture began when her husband disappeared in Guatemala in 1992. She told the story of his torture and murder in her book Searching for Everardo.

     Harbury received her law degree from Harvard. She has lived and worked with human rights activists, peasants, and Mayan villagers in Guatemala. Harbury has also worked with members of the U.S. Congress and the Organization of the American States to locate her husband and 35 other members of the Guatemalan resistance believed to be held by the military. She currently directs the STOP (Stop Torture Permanently) Campaign at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

     Harbury's book Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture was just published by Beacon Press. I reached her in Washington, DC to speak about the book.

Gerry McCarthy: In Truth, Torture, and The American Way you write that: "Where the official use of terror has been widespread, the entire community will suffer collective trauma. This manifests itself in many ways, including high rates of alcoholism and domestic violence, as well as widespread apathy and distrust toward community." One example you cite is Guatemala where violent street crime --once unusual-- is now at frightening levels. Can you talk to me about this?

Jennifer Harbury: Using Guatemala as an illustration (although it's certainly not the only example) it's agreed on by many people who study the question of torture, that the reason an army or intelligence force carries out systemic or extraordinary levels of torture is because they want to terrorize and traumatize the community to prevent them from taking certain actions.

     That was certainly true in Guatemala, for example, where 300 people in a village would be shot to death, disembowelled, or raped in an afternoon --and then thrown down ravines or into mass graves. Or where the death squads would pick up a local unionist or church leader --mutilate them badly-- and leave them in the town park in front of the church in the morning.

     In one area of Guatemala, I remember a nun telling me at one point she was awakened at 4 o'clock in the morning and told there were 12 mutilated bodies in front of her church. It's usually a message being sent. You can imagine what it's like --especially for young people who grew up in the streets watching these horrific levels of violence and disregard for human life. Let alone for people who've lost family members in that way, or who themselves have been tortured. I certainly know what it was like to look for my own husband. But one of my closest friends in Guatemala is missing 17 people in her family --many of them children.

     No society can take that kind of emotional battery for years without showing the results of trauma --just as an individual will show results of trauma.

     That's not to say that many extraordinary human beings are not able to go through such trauma and somehow overcome it --and not show any side effects or consequences. Other than a great deal of pain when they remember or speak of the past. But many people will show the results of that trauma.

     Let me provide another illustration. For example: our own troops coming home from Vietnam. Many did extraordinarily well. For example: Senator John McCain is doing excellent work even though he is a torture survivor, and has huge trauma in his own past. But many did come home and had a lot of problems trying to settle down into a normal life again. It's a sad thing that so few of us were supportive enough of those people, or really understood what they were going through.

     Another example is that battered or abused children will very often become batterers themselves later on. That's a well-researched and studied phenomenon.

GM: You write about Sr. Dianna Ortiz many times in the book --in fact you dedicate the book to her and "to all those in secret torture cells who have come face to face with the CIA." Can you tell me what Sr. Ortiz has meant to you in your life and work.

JH: To begin with she is just a remarkable woman. She is an extremely strong woman too --and absolutely a leader in the field of human rights and for better understanding and empowerment of survivors of torture. She's also just an exquisite person, and one of the most gentle and sensitive souls that I know. But she is much more than that.

     In 1992 I was looking for my husband in Guatemala. Eventually I learned that he had been tortured for two years then killed by Guatemalan military intelligence officials who were also on CIA payroll as paid informants. For two years they were torturing my husband before they killed him with full knowledge of the CIA. None of this was passed on to Congressmen and Senators who were trying to assist me during that two-year period. Had the information been properly passed on to the intelligence committees --we could have saved his life.

     Sr. Dianna was on the opposite side of the same coin. We knew each other very well through all this time period and helped on each other's cases. She was a young sister of the Ursuline order that was in Guatemala teaching young school children to read and write. In 1989 she was dragged through a convent garden hedge and taken away and severely tortured. It was absolutely horrific. They had inflicted one hundred and eleven cigarette burns on her back alone when the session ended.

     But what she had said from the beginning is that a North American-speaking man (who spoke poor Spanish, but who understood English well and eventually spoke English) came into where she was being tortured. He knew where she was. He knew how to enter the building she was in --although it was strictly off-limits and top-secret. He also knew her torturers on a first name basis, and had authority to demand that she be released to him. Because she was a U.S. citizen and there already was an uproar about her kidnapping.

     This man then drove Sr. Dianna out of the building. She then leaped out of the jeep and eventually went back to the U.S. authorities and said: Get that person to take you to that place --there are other people dying in there.

     For many years she was smeared by our State Department. The U.S. officials involved insisted there could be no such North American man that Sr. Dianna spoke about. The reason being is: How could an American intelligence official know where these clandestine prisons were unless he was directly supporting this? Because what our government had always said was that we were giving military aid and training --and trying to professionalize the Central American armies. If we knew where people were being tortured to death and went in and out (and did not save them) that's a direct accomplice to murder. Which is certainly a phenomenon that has become increasingly clear.

     After Sr. Dianna went through her vigil, I started investigating and found more than 20 cases which we documented (and I've included in my book) of people either in Central America, Latin America, or Vietnam who had exactly the same kind of torture practices used on them that we've seen in the photographs and government records out of Gauntánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And they had a North American intelligence official in their cell. Sometimes these officials were advising, listening, and supervising. In other words: aiding and abetting.

GM: Toward the end of the book you explain that: "It is rather significant that while the CIA and other intelligence branches were carrying out their own socio-political agenda in Central and South America, where no genuine threats to the U.S. were presented, many crucial indications of various serious security threats in other regions were missed altogether. Millions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars and countless intelligence agents were committed to hunting down and wiping out church leaders, student activists, peasant movements, labor unions, and other dissidents for decades on end. Had our funding and personnel instead been limited to purely defensive matters, would the development of the nuclear bomb in India, the missed spies, and even the September 11 attack have been detected in advance?" Why doesn't the issue receive the attention it deserves in the big media?

JH: Our big media is becoming more narrow, confined, and inaccurate --to be honest. Also: they're shying away from exactly the issues we're speaking about which could be controversial. It's vital to our security issues as a nation that we really look at the problem and deal with the roots of it. For example: it's vital that we all understand that if we allow torture, repression, or use of "shock and awe" techniques of detainees --it does not create safety. Look at the historical equivalents in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Vietnam and Algeria (under the French). For a little while people settle down and the bombings and counter-attacks become lower. But within a short period of time, the outraged home community joins together and throws the invaders out. That's exactly what we're seeing in Iraq now. People were throwing flowers to our troops. Now our poor troops are in more danger than they've ever been of a suicide bombing or roadside attack. So we've greatly decreased the security of our own troops and frankly for the people in our own country.

     One of my greatest concerns (apart from the torture issue) is what I find from constantly reading CIA files and their interpretation of the data they're receiving. Their own politics have become so skewed. They have put themselves in such a bubble of information. They only trust each other. They really don't share their information with anyone else --not even the intelligence committees that are supposed to be supervising them. They don't trust information coming in from other sources. They don't share information. For example: information that they should be sharing with the FBI in the case of September 11. Everything the CIA read is skewed by their political bent. As a result, they've chased after people who were doing church and union work (for example). Instead of doing what they should be doing --which is serious defence work.

GM: In the book you write that the current status quo gives the CIA de facto impunity for crimes against humanity. You argue for certain basic reforms needed to restore balance and protections don't you?

JH: Yes. It would put the CIA in the same legal position that our police, FBI, and military troops are in.

GM: Are there are any hopeful signs that political lawmakers in Washington will introduce some of these reforms?

JH: It's going to take a little bit of time. But I'm happy to see that our public is starting to raise enough "hue and cry" about these issues that our elected officials are having more confidence. There are a number of bills on Capitol Hill to start dealing with torture issues. It's nowhere near far enough. We're not even close to the things that I recommend in the book. But at least it's a beginning. I'm hoping that by laying out all the different pieces of the issue --and trying to dispel some of the confusion that's been created by official disinformation on the subject of torture-- that people will feel more and more confident to go to their elected representatives and insist on the need for reform.

GM: In the book you write that things were slowly improving on the torture issue before September 11.

JH: Yes. General Pinochet was arrested in Europe and put on trial in Spain. Then he was sent home to face trial. There were a number of de-classification things going through Congress for Central America. That was wonderful. The Alien Tort Claims Act cases were starting to go through. There were serious efforts at reform. Things were moving forward in a very serious way.

     With September 11 we've gone backward way past the Constitution. Even Patrick Henry himself said if we allow torture to come from the Old World --where so many of the colonists had fled exactly those practices-- then we're "lost and undone."

GM: You write about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in the book. You explain that: "If the abuses were indeed cases of individual excess, then the court-martial and imprisonment of the few soldiers involved is adequate. But if the torture techniques really were a standard operating procedure for intelligence work, authorized and ordered by high-level officials, then persons like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld must also stand trial. Otherwise a secret and illegal policy remains in force, and our servicemen and women are serving jail sentences alone for simply following orders." Is there a secret and illegal policy on torture that remains in force today?

JH: Absolutely. Look at the photographs of Abu Ghraib and then read the different military reports and investigation of the accounts of other soldiers (including those of the 82nd Airborne Division that were in a New York Times article recently). Then you look at survivor's statements and forensic reports of the people who have been killed in our custody. There are certain specific practices in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo that weren't just made up on a Saturday night by a few soldiers out of control at the prison. They are uniform practices: slamming people head first into walls, water boarding, attacks by vicious dogs, sexual humiliation, no food, denial of toilet privileges, hanging them from the legs until their limbs turn black. Look again at the recent New York Times article.

     If you look at Central and Latin America --identical torture techniques were used there with North American intelligence officials in the cell. One example are the vicious dogs used on Sr. Dianna Ortiz in Guatemala. The water pit is described in the Afghan file. People have to stand on tiptoe in a pit so they don't drown. Precisely the same thing was found in my husband's file in Guatemala --where people doing these things were on the CIA payroll again. The drowning of people (or water boarding) has happened to most of my survivor friends out of Latin America. The extreme temperatures, denial of food, and the denial of toilet privileges --that happened all the time. It goes all the way back to Vietnam where you can read about the cold room (for example) or the tossing of people out of helicopters.

     Even Operation Phoenix took the form of death squads in Latin America and is now Operation Scorpio in Iraq. I'd refer you to the recent description of the death of General Mowhoush who was battered so badly by the Scorpios that his ribs were broken. They sat on his chest and rolled it back and forth with his head in a blanket roll until he suffocated. The CIA intelligence official who had trained and supervised the Scorpios was present as the man died. The more things change the more things stay the same.

     Even with the results of my own investigation into my husband's murder I was told again and again by everyone in the government (as was Sr. Dianna) that these were just a few rogue operators. They had been fired. It would never happen again. Everybody was being investigated --that was the American way. It would never happen again.

     A decade later I'm sitting here seeing identical practices being massively carried out. We're told over and over that we now have to allow these kinds of torture since September 11. Everything is different. All I can say is: If we want to be safe we have to stop these practices immediately. Otherwise we're going to launch a hundred years' war --and no one is going to be safe. The people that will pay the bill first are our young servicemen and women --and they don't deserve it.

Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.