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Australian Guantanamo: Pamela Curr asks if strategies of systematic de-humanisation in Australian detention centres owe anything to US torture techniques.

Article Excerpt
My father had a rawhide whip that his father had brought from Africa. He told us that it was a symbol of man's inhumanity to man. As young children even before we really knew what the words meant, we knew that this whip was a thing of dread. Reading Michael Otterman's book American Torture reminded me of this early lesson in human rights abuse.

Otterman's book details the journey of American torture and interrogation techniques from their covert operation phase in the late 1950s to the overt operations of today. The analysis is especially chilling because it details the evidence of doctors and psychologists working with military and intelligence agencies in experimenting on human beings to explore the limits of their endurance. It is a step-by-step guide detailing how spirits were broken and lives were lost in the search for a mythical formula that would wring information from the 'enemy'.

The journey is a repugnant one for anyone with a belief in the preciousness of human rights. It helps to explain how the cruelty in Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo was condoned and encouraged. Techniques were assembled into programs like the Phoenix program, DDD (Debility, Dependency and Dread) and SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). Most recently employed in Guantanamo, such techniques were specifically designed to 'convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him or his family'. Lead-up techniques include 'yelling, painful stress positioning, isolation for up to 30 days at a time, 24 hour interrogation and using detainees' individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) ... to induce cooperation ... by weakening the detainee's mental and physical ability to resist'.

The details of these methods bear a chilling similarity to methods used in Australia's immigration detention centres. Let me state at the outset that I am not saying that people detained in the Australian detention camps and centres (IDCs) were subject to the same torture or interrogation as prisoners of the American government in Iraq, Afghanistan or Cuba. However, analysis of the practices and methods used in Australian IDCs does reveal disturbing patterns akin to the methods employed by the US government to get information from those suspected of being terrorists or of having information about terrorists. While Australian detainees were not tortured, harsh aggressive methods were used with the officially expressed intention of pressuring long-term detainees to sign forms agreeing to 'voluntarily' leave Australia. This latter measure was revealed in a leaked memo in which John Okley, a senior immigration bureaucrat, said 'the key to ensuring voluntary departure lies in the creation of a credible threat of involuntary removal'.

When we consider that asylum seekers in detention centres have committed no crime and are seeking protection from a country that is signatory to the Refugee Convention, we are left...

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