The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness

[Clara T]

The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness about it

By ignoring past abuses, opponents of torture are in danger of pushing it back into the shadows instead of abolishing it

Naomi Klein
Saturday December 10, 2005
The Guardian


According to declassified training manuals, SOA students - military and police officers from across the hemisphere - were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation", humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions - and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment".

Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.

Yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the location's sordid history. How could they? That would require something totally absent from the debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials has been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam war.

It's a history exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his forthcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesises this evidence, producing a riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture", based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix programme and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1664174,00.html


Cover by Steven Brower and Janna Brower after Ben Shahn, icons by Steven and Janna Brower

Read This Issue:
http://www.thenation.com/issue/20051226

[MalachiConstant]

1. it's an issue that too few people know about.

if only the majority of people knew about death squads, torture, and the school of americas...

[Kagemusha]

2. "But they were all bad people." That's what Arnold said in a movie

I don't think knowing would change a thing except a desire for the government to do a better job of not letting the general public know what it doesn't feel like knowing. Example: Suppressing further photos from Abu Ghraib.

[Clara T]

3. There is a lot of denial on this issue

There is also no shortage of documentation about torture being used by the US in various wars in the 1800's.

On a side note The Nation is one if the very few mags that seems to have actually improved, meaning a "turn to the left", in the last few years.


Cover by Gene Case & Stephen Kling/Avenging Angels

:hi:

[CatholicEdHead]

5. Talk like this has been passee since the "Morning in America" days

:puke:

[bullimiami]

4. not all. the brazen open defiance of international law and the scale and

nature of the cruel depravity are far beyond what has been done in the past.

[Clara T]

6. Not really

The fact that so much was hidden from our history is what makes it seem lesser in scale but the reality is very different. And the depravity is off the charts but scarcely reported.

Torture Is an American Value: Reality vs. the Rhetoric

By S. Brian Willson

<snip>

September 1779, General George Washington's orders "to lay waste…that the country…be…destroyed," instilling "terror" among the Indians, were dutifully carried out by General Sullivan, who promised that "the Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support." Sullivan's campaign has been described as a ruthless policy of scorched earth, bearing comparison with Sherman's march to the sea or the search-and-destroy missions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

In northern California, where I now live, the same grueling history exists. Bret Harte wrote in 1860 that little children and old women were mercilessly stabbed and their skulls crushed by axes: "Old women…lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out…while infants…with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly wounds" lay nearby.

In 1920, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) investigated the conduct of U.S. troops who had occupied Haiti since 1915. More than 3,000 Haitians were killed by U.S. Marines, many having been tortured.

When indigenous Nicaraguan resistance fought against the occupying U.S. forces in the late 1920s, the Marines launched counterinsurgency war. U.S. policymakers insisted on "stabilizing" the country to enforce loan repayments to U.S. banks. They defined the resistance forces as "bandits," an earlier equivalent to the "criminal prisoners" in Vietnam and "illegal combatants" in Iraq. Since the United States claimed not to be fighting a legitimate military force, any Nicaraguan perceived as interfering with the occupiers was commonly subjected to beatings, tortures, and beheadings. When the Somoza dictatorship (installed by the United States) was overthrown in 1979, the Somoza torture centers were immediately destroyed.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11238.htm