03/25/06 "ICH"
-- -- Psychological torture, sleep deprivation,
brutality, severe sexual humiliation, and murder summon
visions of a dank dungeon in a remote region of pre-invasion
Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, replete with evil inquisitors
and hooded executioners. However, those manifestations of
horror did not spring forth from the Axis of Evil. They are
actually drawn from official post-9/11 US policy. Despite
its fabled commitment to human rights, the United States
government has been committing and enabling acts of torture
for half a century. Not even Superman had the power to
snatch “Truth, Justice and the American Way” from the
crushing jaws of imperialistic ambition and avarice.
Ironically titled, Albert McCoy’s A Question of Torture
probes and exposes the extent of “the Land of the Free’s”
involvement in human torture over the years. Only a
mainstream media 90% controlled by five major corporations
(whose executives and major stockholders are amongst the de
facto rulers of the America’s so-called republic) could so
effectively maintain the illusion that the United States is
the world leader in protecting human rights. Somewhere out
there, David Copperfield is burning with envy. Rest easy,
David. They are running out of magic. Destroying our
Constitution and reversing the humanitarian gains achieved
by millions of Americans with a social conscience throughout
our nation’s history , the Bush Regime is extinguishing the
candle of hope America once offered to humanity. Despite the
exhaustive efforts of the media handmaidens, people are
taking notice.
Painstakingly slow ascent....high velocity decline
From our nation’s birth, many fine Americans labored
vigorously to attain a higher moral plane by ending slavery
and advancing the rights of children, minorities, women, and
workers. Contrary to the fairy tale of America’s benevolent
government “of the people”, many amongst the plutocracy and
emerging corporatocracy fought the American evolution of
human rights tooth and nail. Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and company
have taken that resistance to new heights and are plunging
the United States into an abyss of evil, at home and abroad.
Minority Americans, Native Americans, and citizens of other
nations have been aware of this descent for years, even
before the Neocon catalyzed acceleration. However, as the
ruthlessly brazen disciples of Strauss have fervently
attacked human rights, many amongst America's indoctrinated
White working class are smelling the coffee, and it is not
the best part of waking up.
On March 8, 2006, the US State Department released its
Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2005,
in which it detailed human rights abuses occurring in over
190 nations. In an act of supreme hypocrisy, they excluded
themselves. As one can readily discern simply from reading
McCoy's expose' of human torture committed by the United
States since 1950, the United States is far from being a
bastion of "Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".
"Torture is evil, pure and simple," is the
powerful lesson Peggy Piel imparted to her son, Alfred
McCoy. Having spent a year of her childhood in Nazi Germany,
this erudite Jewish American knew a bit about the subject of
torture. Despite his mother's moralistic viewpoint, McCoy
penned his examination of the history of torture committed
and facilitated by the United States in a detached,
analytical manner, without imposing a moral judgment. Noting
over 30 pages of sources, McCoy meticulously researched his
chilling glimpse into America's Heart of Darkness, yet still
maintained relative objectivity. No easy task in light of
the virtually countless egregious violations of human rights
and acts of murder committed by the American Empire and its
proxies.
Abu Gharib was simply a sign of a "few bad
apples"....or was it?
In 1950, the intelligence organization of the “leader
of the free world” began to take a strong interest in
research involving psychological torture.
McCoy summarizes:
“From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in
torture through a massive mind-control effort, with
psychological warfare and secret research into human
consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars
annually—a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind.”
While the United States was trumpeting its deep devotion to
universal human rights, the CIA was busily developing and
funding research to yield “new and improved” torture tactics
with which they could extract information from Cold War
enemies. Utilizing its unique capacity to wield tremendous
power clandestinely, the United States’ intelligence
juggernaut infiltrated and exploited hospitals, divisions of
the military, and universities to enable its research.
Many of the nauseating acts of inhumanity depicted in the
Abu Gharib photos reflect the rotten fruits of CIA labors.
Years of study and experimentation determined that torture
involving physical pain lacked efficacy. The CIA found that
strong subjects usually responded by stiffening their
resistance and weaker ones often gave false information just
to end the pain. Psychological torture, including sensory
deprivation, sensory disorientation, assault on personal
identity and self-inflicted pain appeared to provide a much
richer yield of information. The Abu Gharib photos are a
window through which one can view the CIA-created world of
psychological torture. Hooding, stress positions, extreme
intimidation with ferocious dogs (for which a soldier was
convicted on 3/21), and sexual humiliation are recurring
images in the Abu Gharib pictures and are powerful examples
of CIA torture protocol. Other techniques of psychological
torture the US military and CIA have used on detained
suspects in the “War on Terror” are sleep deprivation,
isolation, and dietary manipulation. As the
Command Responsibility
report by Human Rights First indicates, 45
detainees in the US “War on Terror” have been murdered or
have died as a result of physical abuse. As McCoy argues,
there is a fine line between psychological torture and
physical torture, and as the American Gulag has
demonstrated, torturers usually cross that line.
As an aside, it is important to remember that there are
currently over 14,000 “suspected terrorists” or “enemy
combatants” in US custody. These individuals have been
charged with no crime and have been denied due process.
Guilty until proven innocent. Now that is justice the
American way. Abu Gharib is only an aberration because the
torturers were caught. Inflicting severe psychological and
mental anguish on suspected enemies of the Empire is now
official policy and has taken place at Bagram Air Base, Camp
Cropper, Guantanamo Bay and throughout the American Gulag.
As for the McCain Anti-Torture Law, Bush and his fellow war
criminals are already inventing ways to circumvent it.
Abu Gharib is simply a public display of the psychological
and physical torture the CIA has been implementing and
practicing for years. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA sharpened
its talons through a federal entity called the Office of
Public Safety, a branch of US AID. According to McCoy, the
OPS trained one million police officers in 47 countries. Not
surprisingly, it was not long before these same law
enforcement entities began committing severe human right
rights abuses and acts of torture.
"Practice makes perfect"
It was morally repugnant enough that the United
States killed three million Vietnamese civilians in their
imperialistic escapade into Southeast Asia, euphemistically
labeling them as “collateral damage”. However, McCoy
describes torture policies and techniques which resulted in
the murder of tens of thousands more Vietnamese. The Phoenix
program was implemented by the CIA to eradicate the Vietcong
underground. Under CIA administration and supervision, the
PRUs (aka Provincial Interrogation Centers) of the Phoenix
program degenerated into a collection of South Vietnamese
murderers, thugs and criminals who accepted bribes, presumed
guilt based on gossip, and murdered their detainees after
they completed their interrogation. Ultimately, (if one is
gullible enough to take the word of former CIA director
William Colby), the Phoenix program murdered 20,587
“Vietcong”. Saigon’s government puts the figure at 40,994.
Educating them on the finer points of torture and murder
The CIA also bears responsibility for the creation of
SAVAK, the Shah of Iran’s ruthless secret police force.
SAVAK killed 20,000 Iraqi “dissidents” during the Shah’s
reign. In the Philippines, CIA instruction resulted in 3,257
murders and 35,000 victims of torture by the Ferdinand
Marcos regime.
After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States government
infiltrated Latin America with a vengeance (to stop the
spread of the “Communist threat”). Project X, represented
another CIA endeavor to impart their wisdom in the arts of
torture to ruthless US allies Not satisfied with their 1963
torture manual called
Kubark, the CIA wrote
a sequel in Spanish entitled
Handling of Sources,
Interrogation, Combat Intelligence, and Terrorism and the
Urban Guerilla.
Of the sequel, McCoy writes,
“Apart from these cold-blooded tactics of
kidnapping, murder, beatings, and betrayal, the manual
evidences, in its 144 single-spaced pages, an amorality, a
studied willingness to exploit an ally without restraint or
compunction, hardened on the anvil of the Vietnam conflict.”
Once located in Panama, an odious US Army institution known
as the School of Americas (sometimes called the School of
Assassins) bestowed the CIA’s torture wisdom upon hundreds
of Latin American military officers. The School of Americas
fell under the auspices of Project X and provided the “hands
on” training to accompany the CIA torture manuals.
Interestingly, by 1983 the CIA had begun to re-emphasize the
use of psychological over physical torture when it wrote its
Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual.
A laundry list of CIA-trained Latin American military
personnel and dictators murdered and tortured hundreds of
thousands thanks to the tutelage of Project X.
Of war
crimes, evasion of responsibility and impunity
McCoy notes that the United States took a break and
out-sourced torture to its allies throughout the 1990’s.
Unfortunately for the world, the Bush Regime
opportunistically seized 9/11 to begin its PNAC inspired
quest for global military dominance. In the process, the
administration implemented torture as official United States
policy. Desperately attempting to fend off critics and
preserve the crumbling façade of moral superiority,
America’s ruling class has sacrificed several from amongst
those near the bottom of the food chain. However, calling
the prosecution and conviction of a handful of military
personnel justice would be a farce. Those ultimately
responsible for America’s abject torture continue to act
with impunity.
As McCoy has vividly illustrated, America’s “grunts” at Abu
Gharib and throughout the American Gulag were acting under
the orders of the Bush Regime and under the supervision of
the CIA:
1. On September 11, 2001, George Bush told
Donald Rumsfeld and his staff, “Any barriers in your way,
they are gone.” When they reminded him of legal constraints,
Bush shouted, “I don’t care what the international lawyers
say; we are going to kick some ass.”
2. Six days later, Bush authorized the CIA
to begin rendition of terror suspects to nations known to
commit torture.
3. On November 13, the President determined
that Al Qaeda suspects would be denied access to domestic or
international courts.
4. Close to the end of 2001, Bush’s Justice
Department approved the use of “sleep deprivation and
deployment of ‘stress factors’” for counter-terror
interrogation.
5. Bush decided the Geneva Conventions did
not apply to his “War on Terror” on January 8, 2002.
6. On January 9, 2002, John Woo of the
Justice Department crafted a memo denying application of the
Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act to suspected
members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whom he characterized
as “enemy combatants”. Since they were now neither soldier
nor citizen, the articles of the Geneva Convention barring
“cruel treatment and torture” and “humiliating and degrading
treatment” did not apply to them (according to Yoo’s
perverse logic).
7. As Afghans captured in the “War on
Terror” started populating Guantanamo Bay prison on January
11, Donald Rumsfeld stated that those “unlawful combatants
do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.”
8. On January 18, the man Bush later
elevated from White House legal counsel to Attorney General
(for his loyalty to the Empire) informed the President that
the Justice Department “had issued a formal legal opinion
concluding that the Geneva Convention III on the Treatment
of Prisoners of War does not apply to the conflict with Al
Qaeda.”
9. The following day, Rumsfeld advised his
field commanders that “Al Qaeda and Taliban individuals
under the control of the Department of Defense are not
entitled to prisoner of war status for purposes of the
Geneva Conventions of 1949.”
10. January 22, 2002: Assistant Attorney
General Jay Bybee presented Alberto Gonzales with a 37 page
memo which outlined the means to implement “coercive
interrogation” without legal consequences, affirming that
“neither the federal War Crimes Act nor the Geneva
Conventions would apply to the detention conditions of al
Qaeda prisoners”, and that Bush had the Constitutional power
to suspend US treaties with Afghanistan.
11. Behind the scenes, Bush and Rumsfeld
approved an SAP or “special-access program” within the CIA.
By its very nature, only a handful of top level government
officials are aware of the existence of an SAP. This
particular SAP endowed the CIA, Navy Seals, and Army Delta
Force with the power to assassinate, kidnap and, of course,
to torture. Concurrently, the CIA began creating the
American Gulag by establishing secret prisons in places like
Diego Garcia Island and Thailand.
12. The Bush administration entrusted the
CIA with “operational command” of its long coveted “War on
Terror”, which enabled the United States to abandon FBI and
military restrictions on torture.
13. In August of 2002, Bybee, Yoo, and Vice
Presidential counsel David Addington created another Justice
Department memo “legitimizing” torture. Employing reasoning
which defied the laws of reality, this trio determined that
federal law and the UN anti-torture conventions only
prohibited torture that was “specifically intended to
inflict severe pain or suffering, whether mental or
physical.” They concluded that to be a crime, the torture
must “be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death.” Utilizing this memo, the
CIA could evade responsibility for torturing “enemy
combatants” simply by claiming they were attempting to gain
information rather than to inflict pain. The memo also
constructed a very strict definition of psychological
torture, interpreting many CIA techniques as legal. Most
significantly, in defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision
in
Youngstown Sheet and Tube et al vs. Sawyer,
Bybee and his cohorts asserted that restraints on Bush’s
directives to interrogate would “represent an
unconstitutional infringement of the President’s authority
to conduct war.”
14. At about the same time as the release
of the Bybee memo, the Justice Department gave the CIA
classified permission to utilize harsher interrogation
tactics than the military, including water boarding, a
practice which leads the victim to believe they are
drowning.
Bush and his murderous cabal gave the authorization, the CIA
provided supervision, and the military carried out the
“coercive interrogation”.
A Question of Torture
sheds significant light on the culpability of Generals
Miller and Sanchez in implementing the policy of inflicting
excruciating psychological and physical pain on “enemy
combatants” throughout the military prison system in Iraq,
the nation America “rescued” from Saddam Hussein. America’s
leaders condoned torture and ordered their subordinates to
carry it out. In the tradition of monsters like Pol Pot and
Idi Amin, they revel in their endless access to money,
power, and immunity. Small wonder much of the world hates
the American Empire, and its de facto rulers in particular.
Playing with fire
The CIA has repeatedly demonstrated that they are
slow learners. Brutality, abuse, and torture, whether
physical or psychological, are not only gross violations of
a person’s inalienable human rights; they are ineffective
means of extracting information or modifying behavior. The
FBI is one of the few federal law enforcement or military
entities not implicated in the web of torture emerging in
the “War on Terror” and, according to McCoy’s research, its
agents’ legal, humane interrogation tactics were yielding
respectable results before Bush superseded them with the
CIA.
Besides lacking value beyond its capacity to satisfy
a primal urge for revenge, torture is a double-edged sword
which harms both perpetrator and victim. McCoy points out
that committing torture intoxicates one with power.
Organizations and governments engaging in mass torture
deteriorate as the rule of law and respect for humanity
disintegrates, breaking down their political and social
structures. Objectifying and inflicting suffering upon
helpless human beings leaves deep scars upon the souls of
the torturers and creates monstrous sociopaths Contrary to
the wishful thinking of the Bush Regime, the United States
will reap a bitter harvest once the noxious weeds of torture
grow to maturity.
Realistically, except in the minds of those who
tenaciously cling to their indoctrination from the American
Empire, there is no question that the United States
egregiously violates human rights on a frequent basis. For a
more thorough examination of the cancer of torture ravaging
the United States, read A Question of Torture by Alfred
McCoy.
Jason Miller is a 39 year old activist writer with a
degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with
his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is
working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty
International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International
and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at
willpowerful@hotmail.com
or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at
http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
