MANMOHAN'S DAUGHTER EXPOSES TORTURE IN US PRISONS
By Parveen Chopra, New York, October 24, 2007 (IANS)

The US-based daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has co-authored a book which gives substantial evidence that torture and abuse of prisoners in US detention centres abroad were widespread and systemic and not confined to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The book 'Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond' has been co-authored by Manmohan's daughter Amrit Singh, an attorney who works for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The book says that torture and abuse of prisoners held in US detention centres abroad were not perpetrated by anomalous sadists, as claimed by the Bush administration and draws on over 100,000 government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Columbia University Press has recently published the book written by Singh and Jameel Jaffer, also an ACLU attorney. The book reproduces a couple of hundred such documents including interrogation directives, FBI e-mails, autopsy reports and investigative files.

The authors have tried to prove in the book that the abuse of prisoners was pervasive in US detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. They also connect the torture of prisoners with the decisions made by senior military and civilian officials. "The documents show that senior officials endorsed the abuse of prisoners as a matter of policy - sometimes by tolerating it, sometimes by encouraging it, and sometimes by expressly authorising it," the book says.

"Administration of Torture" is the most detailed account so far of what reportedly took place in American prisons abroad. Records from Guantánamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating "stress positions", held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorised with military dogs and deprived of human contact for months. Files from Afghanistan and Iraq describe prisoners who had been beaten, kicked and burned. Yet, autopsy reports declare the deaths in US custody as homicides resulting from strangulation, suffocation and blunt-force injuries.

The book appeals that those responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable, "not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again".

Amrit Singh was educated at Cambridge University and Oxford University in Britain and Yale Law School in the US, and has been working for ACLU since 2002.