I got two things badly wrong when writing about torture by US security forces in my novel Empire State. First, I did not properly understand the savage intent that had entered sections of the US army, military intelligence and CIA. Second, I did not imagine that a civilised country had so many people on hand capable of enjoying the pain and abuse they inflicted. This is not so much a comment on America as on human nature and, perhaps, my own naivety. But it is interesting how quickly things unravelled under General Janis Karpinski in the Abu Ghraib prison. In the pictures published last week, we have seen only the less shocking abuse. The investigating officer, Major General Antonio M Taguba, excluded the more disgusting photographs from his report because of their "extremely sensitive nature". The public is to be spared the more gruesome parts of the record, all made by the torturers themselves.
We don't need to go into the detail of what happened at Abu Ghraib. Suffice to say that prisoners were killed, sodomised, beaten and abused, the last for no other reason, it is clear, than to provide entertainment for the misfits and wacko freelancers who ended up running Saddam's torture centre. It is enough to know that 20 deaths and assaults that have occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq are currently under criminal investigation.
The scale is so much larger than I had envisaged. What I had taken as limited and extremely secret use of torture conducted by intermediaries, in Jordan and Syria but principally in Egypt, turns out to have been a much broader operation - and one that incorporated opportunistic sadism as well as unquestioning acceptance of the belief that the best way to get the truth from a man is to hurt him.
While researching the subject, I became convinced that the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan contained a "hard site", the most extreme of the detention centres. I had no firm evidence, but a conversation with a US contractor in an Egyptian coffee house convinced me that the death of a prisoner that had occurred after the Afghan war was no accident. His colleague's eyes danced as though I was being dim when, on another occasion, I asked about the use of torture.
What I did get right was how quickly America distances itself from such actions by the rapid deployment of euphemism. I knew about "stress and duress" techniques and "extreme renditions", but not until the Taguba report had I heard the phrases "inappropriate confinement conditions" and "set favourable conditions for subsequent interviews".
At Abu Ghraib, orders went out to military police "to facilitate interrogation by setting conditions". This meant a thorough beating. The use of the word stress is interesting, because it appears in the testimony of a witness named Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, who said of one prisoner: "They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put him in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately 24 hours." The word stress once meant mental, emotional or physical strain. There was no sense that finality or termination would result from "stressing out". Now we know differently.
The appearance of contractors is an important part of the story. The US military has been overstretched by the invasion of Iraq, and so relies on what is really a policy of outsourcing. Contractors carry out roles as disparate as the guarding of prisoners and filling in for special forces. On the ground they look no different from US army personnel, but in reality they may have less training and are certainly less answerable for their actions.
The military complain that control is lacking, but what they don't say is that having a group of people working at one remove from official forces benefits the war against terror. That has certainly, until recently, been the policy of the CIA and Pentagon when debriefing terrorist suspects with the help of America's more barbarous allies in the Middle East and North Africa. The point was that America could not be held directly responsible because no US citizen - certainly none that I could trace - was applying the electrodes to a suspect.
President Bush's response to the revelations was: "That's not the way we do things in America." Technically, that's true, because the actions were carried out abroad. One suspects his feeble attempt at exculpation will not be much challenged because the country is still suffering from a festering post-9/11 victimhood, which means its response cannot be faulted. In these circumstances the American imperium, the Empire State, thinks itself beyond reproach.
· Empire State is published by Orion, price £6.99.
