Ronald Reagan's Torture

Ronald Reagan's Torture

By Robert Parry
September 8, 2009

Lost amid the attention given George W. Bush’s “war on terror” torture policies was the CIA’s cryptic admission that it also engaged in interrogation abuses during Ronald Reagan’s anti-leftist wars in Central America, another era of torture and extra-judicial killings.

The 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, released last month, referenced as “background” to the Bush-era abuses the spy agency’s “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.” The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching those techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.”

The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.

The euphemism aside, the reality of these interrogation techniques remained brutal, with the CIA Inspector General conducting a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual,” the report said (although the details were redacted in the version released last month).

In 1984, the CIA also was hit with a scandal over what became known as an “assassination manual” prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan contras, a rebel group sponsored by the Reagan administration with the goal of ousting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

Despite those two problems, the questionable training programs apparently continued for another two years. The 2004 IG report states that “in 1986, the Agency ended the HRE training program because of allegations of human rights abuses in Latin America.”

While the report’s references to this earlier era of torture are brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan’s glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier “dark side” on the peasants, workers and students of Central America.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2009/090809.html

If Reagan's henchmen in Latin America, trained at the "School of the Americas," were slaughtering TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND MAYAN VILLAGERS in Guatemala, and countless thousand in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and were, of course, torturing thousands before their deaths, the CIA would want a piece of the action. Keep their thumbnail pullers and genital-zappers in working order.

I tell you, Reagan is one of the biggest genocidal maniacs of the last century. That he is worshiped by our biggest corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies--the New York Times, the Washington Post & brethren--tells us a lot about them.

I just learned, on another thread, that the NYT was doing the EXACT SAME bullshit about coups in Latin America that they're doing NOW, on the coup in Honduras--promulgation of the EXACT SAME lies, by exactly the same sort of fascist LIARS. It is incredible. Brazil. 1964.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x22117
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3893