Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
April 20, 2013
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
- George Orwell
On April 16, 2013, the newspaper of record “broke” the “news” that the United States government (and thus, the corporations that fund it) has a long and enduring record of supporting the use of torture. A New York Times article by Scott Shane, “U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes,” opens:
“A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that ‘it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture’ and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.”
The report -- all 577 pages of it -- states the obvious (“brutality has occurred in every American war”) but goes on to conclude there has never before been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”
Please allow me to inject some historical context: A 1975 Senate investigating committee exposed U.S. methods of interrogating pairs of Vietcong prisoners. In one case, when the first prisoner refused to speak, he was thrown from an airplane at 3,000 feet. The second prisoner answered all questions but was thrown from the plane anyway. Other techniques involved cutting off fingers, fingernails, ears, or sexual organs of one prisoner while the other looked on.
From Shane and the Times we learn more of the obvious -- and the unpardonable:
According to the report, the use of torture a) has “no justification” and b) has “damaged the standing of our nation.”
Please allow me to inject some historical context: Thanks to CIA and U.S. training, the true American torture legacy lies in the bloody fingerprints found across the globe. Consider SAVAK, Iran’s notorious Shah-era secret police created jointly by the CIA and Israel. Amnesty International deemed SAVAK’s history of torture as “beyond belief.”
In addition, the new report confirms, for example, CIA waterboarding in Libya, the unethical mistreatment of prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay prison, and other home-of-the-brave tactics like slamming prisoners into walls, chaining them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripping them of clothing, and keeping them awake for days on end.
Despite all this, Shane reminds us, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture.
Please allow me to inject some historical context: During the CIA’s holy war against the USSR in Afghanistan, the U.S-.trained and funded Moujahedeen drugged captured Soviet soldiers and kept them in cages. A reporter from the Far Eastern Economic Review told of Soviet soldiers killed, skinned, and hung in a butcher’s shop. “One captive,” he reported, “found himself the center of attraction in a game of buzkashi,” an Afghan form of polo using a headless goat as the ball. In this case, the Soviet captive was used, alive. “He was literally torn to pieces,” said the reporter.
“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases,” said former congress member, James R. Jones, about the new report. “We lost our compass.”
Please allow me to inject some historical context: Ronald Reagan called the Nicaraguan contras “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” This noble group of U.S.-funded “freedom fighters” regularly attacked civilians, cutting off women’s breasts and men’s testicles, gouging out eyes, beheading infants, using children for target practice, and slitting throats and pulling the victim’s tongue out through the slit. One 14-year-old girl was gang-raped and decapitated. Her head was placed on a stake as a warning to government supporters in her village. The chairman of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch concluded “the United States cannot avoid responsibility for these atrocities.”
The Constitution Project study was initiated in 2009, after President Obama decided to not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs. “The United States has a historic and unique character,” Obama said at the time, “and part of that character is that we do not torture.”
Please allow me to inject one last burst of historical context: Dan Mitrione, head of Orwellian-named U.S. Office of Public Safety, trained the Brazilian police force in the 1960s. One of the techniques Mitrione taught involved placing the end of a reed in the anus of a naked man hanging suspended. The other end of the reed is soaked in oil and lit.
In Uruguay, Mitrione was called in to help deal with the Tupamaros, a group William Blum calls “perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful, and most sophisticated urban guerillas the world has even seen.” Under the guidance of Mitrione, the Uruguayan Senate found that torture had become a “normal, frequent, and habitual occurrence.” Techniques included electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, and use of “a wire so thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase the electrical charge.”
Such tactics were honed in Mitrione’s own soundproof basement room. Blum writes of Mitrione’s use of four street beggars to demonstrate the effects of different voltages on different parts of the body. All four men died.
Mitrione was eventually kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros. At his funeral, then-White House spokesman Ron Ziegler stated: “Mr. Mitrione’s devoted service to the cause of peaceful in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.”
But, silly me: As Obama decreed in 2009, we must “look forward, not backward.”
Never forget, comrades: This is what we're up against.
#shifthappens
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Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.
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