No Mr. Nice Guy

“Full of crap” was how former US vice president Dick Cheney described a Senate intelligence committee report on brutal interrogation techniques employed by the Central Intelligence Agency on terror suspects.

Those methods nailed down the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and other high-value terrorists; the methods were legally justified and kept America safe, Cheney argued, in so many words.

“He is in our possession, we know he’s the architect, what are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks?” Cheney asked, referring to Mohammed, who incidentally stayed for a while in Manila where he reportedly pursued a Filipina nurse in Malate.

“I’d do it again in a minute,” Cheney said. “How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 people on 9/11?”

A similar mindset is common among security forces worldwide, even in advanced economies and stable democracies. It’s common in the Philippines, where some cops were caught breaking their boredom by fashioning and using a “Wheel of Torture” on detainees.

War is never pretty, the argument goes. It can be additionally nasty in asymmetrical warfare; there’s a reason guerrilla wars are called dirty wars.

The Islamist terrorist attacks constitute a particularly nasty type of asymmetrical warfare: borderless, targeting civilians – the greater the body count, the better. Sleepers who are seen as law-abiding members of the community, women and even children are turned into actual deadly weapons, approaching large crowds with bombs strapped to their bodies.

It’s a safe bet that among security forces, including our own, there is a strong belief that no one can be nice fighting this type of war.

*   *   *

This doesn’t mean that security officers are completely without qualms about the use of torture as a national security tool. We learned about Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition not from victims but from insiders who believed their comrades were going too far.

The same is true in several cases in the Philippines wherein video footage and photos of beatings of suspects were leaked to the media. Some intelligence officers have eschewed beating suspects and instead used a truth serum with success in interrogation. But the serum can kill a prisoner with health problems and must be administered by a doctor with the required expertise.

Still, the report of the US Senate may make some Philippine intelligence officials wonder what all the fuss is about.

As human rights victims of martial law will attest, they were raped, repeatedly beaten, burned with cigarettes, and electrocuted through their genitals and breasts.

Over the years, as human rights advocates gained a stronger voice worldwide, interrogators shifted to methods that leave no visible marks.

Sleep deprivation? Our military and police do that. Stripping detainees naked? Check – for both men and women. Kneeling on broken glass? Check – although mung beans or rock salt is used here.

Waterboarding? It’s not clear who learned from whom; did the Americans teach it to our lawmen, or did they learn from us?

What we see in Hollywood movies is usually a detainee with his face covered with a piece of cloth through which water is poured to simulate drowning. In our country, tougher suspects get water laced with chili.

Another version employed here uses a drum of water and a board that swings like a seesaw. The suspect is strapped to the board as his head is dunked into the water repeatedly.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was reportedly waterboarded 183 times by the CIA. Maybe Pinoys would have done a quicker job, if he had been exported here for interrogation. But so far I haven’t heard of the Philippines being among the countries tapped by the US for extraordinary rendition.

Philippine security forces go one step further, executing detainees or making them disappear. This is done not only to members of the Abu Sayyaf and New People’s Army but even to ordinary crime suspects.

*   *   *

Some years ago, law enforcers received numerous complaints about foreigners in Manila’s Tourist Belt being conned into sex by prostitutes who turned out to be cross-dressers. The foreigners were then robbed, usually after being drugged. How the lawmen dealt with the problem has become the stuff of legend.

After repeated warnings from lawmen to the gang leader failed to stop the activities, the gang members were found dead in Ermita, their bodies piled on top of each other.

The worst death was reserved for the leader: the Manila garrote. A car engine fan belt was looped like a noose around his neck and a pipe was inserted between the belt and neck. The cross-dresser was strangled to death as the pipe was rotated and the belt tightened. This is also a method of interrogation from which a detainee might be allowed to survive.

When found, the gang members had no cardboard signs hanging from their necks declaring “magnanakaw, huwag tularan (robber, do not emulate)” – as we saw in Manila several years later in a spate of “salvaging” of suspected petty criminals – but the message was clear. For a long time there were no complaints in the Tourist Belt from foreigners about fake female sex workers.

As election results have shown many times, Pinoys like this kind of law enforcement. This is due to the weakness of the criminal justice system. Extrajudicial methods are brutal, but they render swift justice, with the bad guys getting no chance of parole.

Such methods, of course, can be easily abused, with innocents among the victims.

In the US, there’s a lot of discussion over a particular method mentioned in the heavily redacted CIA reports: “rectal rehydration” or feeding through the wrong end of the digestive tract.

Even intelligence pros in our country are unfamiliar with the method, wherein Ensure or pureed food is inserted into the rear end of a suspect while he is placed in a head-down position.

This is supposedly meant for prisoners who refuse to eat. Critics correctly ask what happened to intravenous feeding, or even putting a tube down the mouth to force-feed (OK, a man can bite the interrogator or spit out the food in this way). Clearly rectal feeding intends not only to provide nourishment but also to humiliate.

Security forces, like Cheney, will ask: why quibble with humiliation when you are dealing with a mass murderer who will readily kill more, if given the chance?

The answer to that question will define modern civilization.