I don’t know how many people out there have seen this yet but the site www.freedetainees.org recently released photographs of "segregation boxes" that detaineees are kept in Iraq. They can be viewed at “Prisoner Boxes” in Iraq. I don’t know how placing someone in a 3x3x6 box can be considered anything other than torture. My Oxford American Dictionary defines torture as "the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do or say something, or for the pleasure of the person inflicting the pain." Being isolated in a wooden box in extreme heat is both psychological and physical torture.

I struggle with how to respond to these images and the others that have come out of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. They evoke in me both a sense of outrage and a sense of powerlessness. I am outraged that the government of the United States is torturing people. Torture is morally repugnant. It is also illegal under both national and international law. I feel powerless to stop the torture. Truth be told it might be possibly to force the government to stop the torture–both the House on UnAmerica Activities Committee and COINTELPRO were ultimately defeated–but I don’t really know how one would go about doing so. Replace the current administration with another? Most likely the next administration will continue to torture people, they will just be more circumspect about it. Speak out against it? After people know what is going on how do you convince them to act? How can you convince them that their actions can change things? The government regularly tries to convince us that it does not pay attention to protesters. Take legal recourse? So far the court cases against the current administration have mostly resulted in semantic shuffling. The actions remain the same but the words for them change.

Ultimately, one must have hope. We live in a time in human history where many struggles for human rights, dignity and economic justice have been won. There is no reason to think that a struggle to end torture would not also ultimately be successful. It is hard to imagine all of the unnecessary suffering in the interim. 

In case you can’t visit www.freedetainees.org here’s a picture of one of the boxes: