Naomi Klein: Both torture apologists and critics ignore sordid U.S. record

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
The Guardian

...Yet when covering the Bush announcement ("We do not torture"), not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the location's (Panama) 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 (that the US is pure) ... 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."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1664174,00.html

They are Wrong!

Good article thanx K&R

A Question of Torture : CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Alfred McCoy

link to Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805080414/ref=cm_bg_f_3/002-2335023-4421627?v=glance&n=283155

An incredible book I am re-reading right now. The book is written with relative dispassion and with few superlatives relying almost entirely on official reports from independent organizations such as the International Red Cross and Amnesty international as well as declassified U.S. Government archives.

What I found most disturbing is the insight into the reality that almost anyone can be made into a torturer and perhaps even be seduced by its perverse theater of power. There is no such thing as "a little bit of torture". By its very nature torture always gets out of control. Psychological torture is almost always more cruel and more damaging than physical torture. Sen. John McCain himself made this very clear in his own testimony recalling his years in a North Vietnam POW camp stating clearly that if given the choice he would chose physical any time.

Torture does not produce reliable intelligence but it may very well induce the recipient into saying things the interrogator wants to hear.

The author is Professor of History Dr. Alfred McCoy of the University of Wisconsin at Madison also author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Closer than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy and A History of the Philippines

Listen/watch interview with Professor McCoy regarding the subject of torture and U.S. foreign policy on Democracy Now - copy and paste web address:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228&mode=thread&tid=25