not so much at getting information from victims
but as a tool of social control?

Saying something "works" when the listener
hears the intended message, but not the implied?

funny, I was just thinking about him in terms of rubio's comment about how lifting sanctions against cuba would be bad for cubans. definitely one of those WTF moments!

that there won't be any torture."

Imperial wars and occupations provoke widespread opposition and nearly unanimous hostility. ‘Policing’ the occupied country cannot rely on community-wide support, least of all providing voluntary ‘intelligence’ to the imperial officials. The imperial armed forces operate out of fortresses surrounded by a sea of hostile faces. Bribes and persuasion of local collaborators provides limited information, especially regarding the operations of underground resistance movements and clandestine activists. Family, neighborhood, religious, ethnic and class ties provide protective support networks. To break this web of voluntary support network, the colonial powers resort to torture of suspects, family members and others. Torture becomes “routinized” as part and parcel of policies sustaining the imperial occupation. Extended occupation and intensive destruction of habitation and employment, cannot be compensated by imperial “aid” – much of which is stolen by the local collaborators. The latter, in turn, are ostracized by the local population, and, therefore, useless as a source of information. The “carrot” for a few collaborators is matched by torture and the threat of torture for the many in opposition.

Torture is not publicized domestically even as it is ‘understood’ by ‘knowing’ Congressional committees. But among the colonized, occupied people, through word and experience, CIA and military torture and violence against suspects seized in neighborhood round-ups is a weapon to intimidate a hostile population. The torture of a family member spreads fear (and loathing) among relatives, acquaintances, neighbors and colleagues. Torture is an integral element in spreading mass intimidation – an attempt to minimize co-operation between an active minority of resistance fighters and a majority of passive sympathizers.

According to this definition, it is impossible to deny that practices like “rectal rehydration,” “hypothermia,” and “rectal feeding,” hanging a victim on a bar, threatening to rape his or her spouse or children, sleep deprivation, or “waterboarding” applied cruelly for hours and days to interrogate terrorism suspects are acts of torture.

Despite this, in March 2008, President Bush struck down a congressional law that banned the application of “waterboarding” on suspected terrorists, following his official warning that he would veto any legislative action that would limit in any way the use of torture as a valid and legal interrogation method. In response to his critics in the White House, Bush said that it would be absurd to obligate the CIA to respect any precepts legitimized by international law because his agents were not confronting any legal combatants or regular military forces of a state operating according to traditional principles, but rather terrorists acting in total disregard of any ethical norms whatsoever. This was the pretext used by Bush and his cronies to attempt to justify permanently violating human rights under the auspices of “fighting terrorism.” Moreover, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, explicitly authorized in December 2002 the use of at least nine “interrogation techniques,” escaping definition as torture just by using this perverse euphemism. The interesting thing about the case is that the United States joined the aforementioned Convention (that has 145 signatories) in 1994, but made sure to ratify the Protocol so that authority was given to the United Nations Committee on Torture. In other words, just adhering to the Convention was a demagogic act, but lacked the implications of actually combating torture as a practice.

The especially horrific aspect of the report is that it should by no means lead us to believe that everything contained therein is true. It not only shatters the CIA’s central premise that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were necessary to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, the report underestimates the numbers of detainees and tortured compared to other reports on the subject. The U.S. Senate report, for instance, says that the “CIA had 119 people in its custody, 26 of whom were apprehended illegally.” Nevertheless, it is well known that in order to perpetrate these human rights violations, the United States operated numerous secret prisons in Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Afghanistan, and Thailand, as well as collaborated with countries like Egypt, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Jordan, Morocco, Gambia, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti in these interrogations. In addition, some other countries considered European “democracies,” such as Austria, Germany, Belgium, Cyprus, Croatia, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden, along with a slew of other countries, assisted in the transfer and transport of prisoners, with full knowledge of what these individuals were about to face. So the number of victims exceeds the 119 indicated in the Senate report. Keep in mind that Human Rights First, a U.S. non-governmental organization, cited that 779 people passed through the Guantanamo prison since it was created. A special United Natinals report found that in Afghanistan alone, the CIA had detained 700 people and 18,000 in Iraq, all accused of being “terrorists.” Not to mention what happened at the detention camp in Abu Ghraib, a topic explored more extensively in our book.

Finally, we have arrived at three conclusions. First, the report emphasizes the ineffectiveness of torture but circumvents the ethical or political considerations of the issue. This last aspect was only touched on in the twentieth and last part of the report, which expressed marginal concern and regret that the torture used by the CIA “damaged the image of the United States in the world and caused significant monetary and non-monetary harms.” There isn’t any significant reflection about what this means for a country that proudly extolls democratic virtues – professing to be the most important democracy in the world, according to its most devoted publicists – in addition to the “leader of the free world,” having committed horrific practices comparable to the state terrorism carried out in Latin America and the Caribbean in the past. Torture is not only degrading and destroys the humanity of those suffering it. It also degrades and destroys the political regime that orders, justifies or consents to the practice. This is why this latest episode reveals the farcical character of “North American democracy” for the zillionth time. Now, the true nature of the regime could be better characterized as a “plutocratic regime.” Regime, because the powers-that-be are de-facto rulers, the military-financial-industrial complex that has not been voted into office and is therefore no way accountable; and plutocratic, because the regime’s material content consists of the collusion of giant corporate interests who, as noted by Jeffrey Sachs a few days ago, invest trillions of dollars in finance campaigns and political careers, as well as the lobbyists that conspire for their interests and receive remuneration for their efforts in economic benefits of all kinds, amounting to billions of dollars. This is all because the U.S. Supreme Court decided to legalize unlimited political donations that are largely exempted from accountability.

Third and last: the deplorable complicity of the press. All major media outlets knew that the CIA and other special Pentagon forces had integrated torture of prisoners in their standard operating procedures, as described above. But the mass media – not just the rabidly right-wing Rupert Murdoch chain and company – inside and outside of the United States – whether voluntarily and involuntarily – they conspired by not calling the horse by its name and trading truth for all sorts of euphemisms in an effort to soften the news and keep the North American population fooled. The Washington Post, New York Times and Reuters described these interrogation methods as “brutal,” “hard,” or “unbearable,” but never used the term torture. The television station CBS used the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” and Candy Crowley, the chief political correspondent for CNN in Washington, it was “what some may describe as torture.” For the MSNBC news channel (a fusion of Microsoft and NBC) according to Mika Brzezinski, daughter of the imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski and apparently an astute disciple of her father, torture was “interrogation tactics used by the CIA.” These are the people right-wing politicians and intellectuals look to when giving us lessons on democracy and freedom of the press in Latin America and the Caribbean. It would behoove us to take note of their complicity with these crimes and of their absolute lack of moral ethics. They are not in a position to give lessons to anybody.

war criminals regarding 'enemy combatants' not falling under the Geneva Conventions. They created a whole 'other' classification of human beings, using WORDS to dehumanize people they were rounding up to torture.

We should keep using the word torture, no matter how they try to avoid using it.

What they did was horrific, and I don't believe this report was good enough to do anything more than pretend we 'investigated it'.

There should graphic descriptions in the report of the rapes and the sodomy of children in front of their mothers eg.

The public doesn't view beating up a few 'terrorists' as torture.

But I remember the reports from ten years ago, of the women and children who were on video tapes. What happened to those videos? They went through the court system with the Bush gang fighting to keep them from the public.

But some members of Congress were allowed to view them and were horrified, even someone like Lindsey Graham eg, stated to Cheney when he was screaming about Congress even talking about torture at the time, 'Please let us do our job Mr. VP. We are talking about Rape and Murder and Torture here'! But then, nothing.

The whole thing is monstrous and sickening. Even more so that the American people by a majority support torture.