[Peace-discuss] Torture is still our government's policy

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has finally released the (redacted) 524-page Summary of its 6000-page report on torture and the CIA, headed “Panel Faults CIA Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations."

President Obama didn't want even the summary published. He made it clear that his administration would not prosecute any of the torturers or the torture-enablers starting with Cheney; his current CIA director, John Brennan, who participated in the program, disputed the report's findings - and won’t rule out torture in the future!

Torture violates both domestic and international law, as well as the U.S. Constitution, but American administrations have practiced it for years - and continue to do so. From Nixon to Clinton they used it against opponents of the Pinochet Regime in Chile and the targets of the Dirty War in Argentina, and elsewhere.

The horrors perpetrated by the CIA and described in the report are only a part of torture by Americans. Seymour Hersh, whose account of rape and child-murder by US soldiers at My Lai, Vietnam, revealed how that war was fought (see now Nick Turse’s 2013 book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam), has charged that “children were sodomized [in the presence of their mothers] in the prison [at Abu Ghraib], and the Pentagon has tape of it.”

Contrary to what most of the media and Obama himself would have us all believe, this president has never actually banned torture. Shortly after his first inauguration, both he and his new director of the CIA explicitly stated that ‘rendition’ was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”

Kidnapping and rendition is simply outsourcing torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, amongst other torture centers employed by the United States. Kosovo and Diego Garcia – both of which house large and very secretive American military bases – if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business, as is the Guantánamo Base in Cuba.

In an even more chilling development, the Obama administration has substituted murder for capture and interrogation. Given the political difficulties of dealing with captives at Guantanamo and elsewhere, drone strikes against those who would formerly be incarcerated have increasingly been Obama’s choice. As the New York Times reported, on what White House aides call “Terror Tuesday,” CIA Director Brennan brings the president “baseball cards” on which those picked out to be killed are listed, and Obama makes the final selections.

The drone strikes kill dozens of others for every “terrorist” listed on the cards; Obama has now killed thousands of people, including hundreds of children, and he continues to send the drones. From Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin & John Heilemann:

"Turns out I'm really good at killing people," Obama said quietly. 
"Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

[Adapted from Steven Jonas, William Blum et al.]