Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture

I am one woman who has spent a total of four months in Iraq. And this is what I have seen and heard.

The tortured are frightened, certain that they remain under constant threat, but uncertain from where the threat will come. Some are angry. The best 'testimony' I can give is to recall the time when we of CPT learned that our colleague Tom Fox had been murdered. Shortly after the shock of that news, we learned that the Iraqi media was reporting that Tom's body bore signs of torture. Team members who to that point had been stoic with resolve melted in horror. Everything stopped as we tried to find out whether this was true or not. Tom was beyond the pain of any torture, so I suppose our prayers then were really for ourselves: please, God, don't let it be true. Don't let him have been tortured. In Tom's case, we are told that in fact his body did not bear signs of torture. All I can tell you from those few days of uncertainty is that a prison envelops you. It is a prison of the horror of the imagination. I don't know how those who have suffered the torture themselves ever find their way out.

To stop this way of being and acting that we call torture, we have to be willing to see it. We must see and we must tell.

At the beginning, I asked you to lean forward in your chair. The leaning forward is what is known as a 'stress position', staying in one position for a prolonged period of time. In Abu Ghraib, prisoners were, among other things, restrained for prolonged periods of time in stress positions. The beauty of the stress position (please understand that ironically) is that it doesn't require reliance upon an uncertain supply of electricity nor does it require any special training; but most of all, it leaves few if any marks, only excruciating and lasting pain.

I didn't appreciate myself the depth of the cruelty of the stress position until I listened to my colleague, Jim Loney, one of 4 CPT'ers kidnapped in Baghdad on November 26, 2005. Jim described having to sit in one position, handcuffed to his fellow captives, leaning forward with no back support, for 10 hours. Ten hours doesn't seem so long in the context of a life time. And these men had varying degrees of meditation skills. But the pain, the physical pain, was excruciating.

Few of us have endured what Jim endured. But for 20 minutes or so, you were invited into the world of the prisoners of Iraq and other places of torture around the world. And so as you lean gratefully back in your chairs, I leave it to you, is it torture?