American Torture -- Past, Present, and… Future? Beyond the Senate Torture Report — TomDispatch: Although what I’ve just described is now generally considered The Torture Story here, it really was only part of it. The other part, also a CIA operation authorized at the highest levels, was “rendition” or “extraordinary rendition” as it was sometimes known. This was a global campaign of kidnappings, aided and abetted by 54 other countries, in which “terror suspects” (again often enough innocent people) were swept off the streets of major cities as well as the backlands of the planet and “rendered” to other countries, ranging from Libya and Syria to Egypt and Uzbekistan, places with their own handy torture chambers and interrogators already much practiced in “enhanced” techniques of one sort or another. Moreover, those techniques migrated like a virus from the CIA and its “black sites” elsewhere in the U.S. imperium, most notoriously via Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, where images of torture and abuse of a distinctly enhanced variety then migrated home as screensavers. What was done couldn’t have been more criminal in nature, whether judged by U.S. or international law. In its wake, its perpetrators, both the torturers and the kidnappers, were protected in a major way. Except for a few low-level figures at Abu Ghraib and one non-torturing CIA whistleblower who went to prison for releasing to a journalist the name of someone involved in the torture program, no American figure, not even those responsible for deaths at the Agency’s black sites, would be brought to court. And of course, the men (and woman) most responsible would leave the government to write their memoirs for millions of dollars and defend what they did to the death (of others). It’s one for the history books and, though it’s a good thing to have the Senate report made public, it wasn’t needed to know that, in the years after 9/11, when the U.S. government created an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, it also essentially became a criminal enterprise. Recently, Republican hawks in Washington protested loudly against the release of that Senate report, suggesting that it should be suppressed lest it inflame our enemies. The real question isn’t, however, about them at all, it’s about us. Why won’t the release of this report inflame Americans, given what their government has done in their names? And in case you think it’s all over but for the shouting, think again, as Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch regular and author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States writes today. Tom
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 01:19:09 +0000
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