[Vision2020] Torture not new in US foreign adventures

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

So Pat Kraut thinks that the press has just made up the accusations of the 
US government condoning torture.  Why then did Condoleezza Rice have to 
apologize to the German government for the "rendering" of a German citizen 
to a secret site for five month's of inhumane imprisonment and 
treatment?  The world press reported this but they did not make it up.

There is a very brave man here in Moscow who crossed the line at the
innocuous sounding "School of the Americas" in Fort Benning, Georgia.  He 
was willing to spend six months in a federal pen to expose the program that 
has trained thousands of Central and Latin American operatives in torture 
techniques.  There was also the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Below is 
an article detailing the sordid
details.  We have become as evil as our enemies.

Nick Gier

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
Guardian

It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George Bush's second term, and an 
announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But 
what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" 
declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on 
downtown Panama City.

It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, 
the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, 
a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been 
"We do torture". It is here in Panama, and later at the school's new 
location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture 
scandals can be found.
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.
It is not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they 
blame abuses on "a few bad apples". A startling number of torture's most 
prominent opponents keep telling us that the idea of torturing prisoners 
first occurred to US officials on September 11 2001, at which point the 
methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the 
sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until 
that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its 
humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed 
"original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing in Newsweek on the 
need to ban torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in 
Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our 
enemies ... that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace 
ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them". It is a 
stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the 
CIA had launched the Phoenix programme and, as McCoy writes, "its agents 
were operating 40 interrogation centres in South Vietnam that killed more 
than 20,000 suspects and tortured thousands more."

Does it somehow lessen today's horrors to admit that this is not the first 
time the US government has used torture, that it has operated secret 
prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase 
the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, closer to home, 
photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? 
Many seem to think so. On November 8, Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott 
made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America 
has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now".

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" 
Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis 
by crying "Never before"? I suspect it stems from a sincere desire to 
convey the seriousness of this administration's crimes. And its open 
embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented.

But let's be clear about what is unprecedented: not the torture, but the 
openness. Past administrations kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes 
were sanctioned but they were committed in the shadows, officially denied 
and condemned. The Bush administration has broken this deal: post-9/11, it 
demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimised by new definitions 
and new laws.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the real innovation has been 
in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons 
and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from 
clandestine etiquette that has so much of the military and intelligence 
community up in arms: Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability. 
This shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practised but 
officially and legally repudiated, there is still hope that if atrocities 
are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and those 
responsible deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called 
"the juridical person in man". Soon victims no longer bother to search for 
justice, so sure are they of the futility, and danger, of that quest. This 
is a larger mirror of what happens inside the torture chamber, when 
prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear 
them and no one is going to save them.

The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the torture debate is that in 
the name of eradicating future abuses, past crimes are being erased from 
the record. Since the US has never had truth commissions, the memory of its 
complicity in far-away crimes has always been fragile. Now these memories 
are fading further, and the disappeared are disappearing again.

This casual amnesia does a disservice not only to the victims, but also to 
the cause of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and 
for all. Already there are signs that the administration will deal with the 
uproar by returning to plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects 
every "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the 
United States government"; it says nothing about torture training or buying 
information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators.

And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death 
squads, trained by the US and supervised by commanders like Jim Steele, who 
prepared for the job by setting up similar units in El Salvador. The US 
role in training and supervising Iraq's interior ministry was forgotten, 
moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a ministry 
dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, 
it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He 
sounded just like the CIA's William Colby who, asked in a 1971 
Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix, a programme 
he helped launch, replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese 
programme".

As McCoy says, "if you don't understand the history and the depths of the 
institutional and public complicity, then you can't begin to undertake 
meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one 
small piece of the torture apparatus: closing a prison, shutting down a 
programme, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like 
Rumsfeld. But he warns, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."
· A version of this article appears in the Nation www.thenation.com
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