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<font face="Arial, Helvetica"><b>Greetings:<br><br>
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. <br><br>
There is a very brave man here in Moscow who crossed the line at
the<br>
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<br>
details. We have become as evil as our enemies.<br><br>
Nick Gier<br><br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=4>The US has used torture for
decades. All that's new is the openness about
it</b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica"> <br><br>
By ignoring past abuses, opponents of torture are in danger of pushing it
back into the shadows instead of abolishing it<br><br>
</font><font face="MS Sans Serif, Geneva" size=1><b>Naomi Klein<br>
Saturday December 10, 2005<br>
Guardian<br><br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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. <br>
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". <br><br>
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. <br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br>
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. <br><br>
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." <br><br>
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". <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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". <br><br>
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." <br>
<b>· </b>A version of this article appears in the Nation
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