Monstering by Tara McKelvey

Author:Tara McKelvey [TARA MCKELVEY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

SHOCK TREATMENT

Few accounts of the application of electricity, or the threat of its use, during interrogations in Iraq have been reported in detail in the U.S. media.Yet descriptions of the technique were provided by Dilami, as well as by other detainees I met in Amman, and accounts appear as well in government documents. On April 13, 2004, for example, Sergeant Matthew K. Travis of Camp Pendleton, California, First Marine Division, suggested using electrical shock on a prisoner at a detention facility at Al-Mahmudiya, Iraq, according to a transcript of his general court martial. He was tried in Fallujah, Iraq, on August 19, 2004. Travis had previously worked a twelve-dollar-an-hour factory job in Jacksonville, North Carolina. He had prepared for battle in Iraq during his army training. Instead of fighting in combat, though, he was put in charge of detainees at a facility in Mahmudiya.As a guard, he had become increasingly frustrated with one prisoner, a five-footten-inch man in his mid-twenties, for petty offenses like tossing trash out of his cell. One day Travis told a soldier, Private First Class Andrew J. Sting, about his idea of shocking the detainee with electricity as a way of disciplining him for the infractions.

“Look what I found,” Travis said, holding out a set of wires, as Sting recalled. Travis explained how the electricity would be transmitted through three-and-a-half feet Romex wires, or basic household wiring, that would be plugged into a converter box. Sting is the son of an electrician. He agreed to hold the wires and the converter and to assist in the disciplinary procedure.The prisoner was escorted out of his cell. His hands were secured in flexicuffs, and his head was covered in a sandbag.

“Let’s get him,” Sting recalled Travis saying.

Sting walked behind the prisoner and put the wires on the detainee’s shoulder. Nothing happened. Sting fiddled with the converter box and tried again, placing the wires against the prisoner’s forearm until 110 volts of electricity were transmitted into his body. Travis and Sting were found guilty of detainee-related misconduct. Travis was sentenced to fifteen months of confinement, and Sting to one year.15

Like many (perhaps most) tools of torture and abuse, electricity is an instrument that is easily accessible and serves a dual purpose. People who have been tortured say that ordinary household objects, such as a chair or table leg, are used often during abusive interrogations. Electrical devices and wires are easy to find at a military camp. And the use of electrical shock inflicts an added layer of torment that a piece of furniture cannot impose. It is worth noting the case above because it was apparently not the only time a detainee was subjected to electrical shock while being held in U.S. custody in Iraq. Other prisoners also accused their captors of applying electricity to their bodies.

One detainee, a thirty-four-year-old Iraqi man who was on a Most Wanted list issued by the U.S. military, was captured on April 27, 2004, at his home in Tikrit. He was taken to

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