America's Tortured Past

On August 24, an ACLU press release stated:

In response to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, "The government today handed over to the American Civil Liberties Union (one of dozens of documents comprising an unprecedented 130,000 previously secret pages, including) a detailed official description of the CIA's interrogation program." 

Referring to a heavily redacted December 2004 report (originally commissioned by CIA director George Tenet) detailing torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, it "describes the use of abusive interrogation techniques including forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and stress positions." Far worse ones were understated or redacted entirely.

According to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:

Given America's tortured past, none of this should surprise. More on that below.

On August 25 in The New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti headlined: "Report Shows Tight CIA Control on Interrogations." Claiming it "focused on aberrations in the field," the writers said "by no means (did it represent) gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from CIA headquarters and the Department of Justice - control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal."

These same officials said:

To protect national security, they may be subjected to all forms of abuse, innocent or guilty, and the right of "military necessity" justifies the most extreme mistreatment. 

Any form of intense and prolonged physical and psychological torture may be inflicted short of causing injuries resulting in death, organ failure, or permanent damage - continuing America's long tradition of inflicting abusive barbaric treatment.

The Times gave examples, but omitted prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, painful shackling, severe beatings, electric shocks, induced hypothermia, exposure to bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds 24 hours a day, denial of medical care, proper food or enough of it, excruciating force-feeding to hunger-strikers, induced psychological trauma, forced sodomy, threats and bites by attack dogs, being blindfolded and hung from the ceiling by their wrists, and subjected to repeated humiliations, indignities and barbarism for months, even years, although most Guantanamo detainees (and others) committed no crime and were turned in for bounties that snared children as young as 13. 

Deaths resulted from asphyxiation, extreme beatings, and deprivation prolonged enough to cause organ failure. Yet Attorney General Eric Holder plans no more than prosecutorial investigations (by a career Justice Department insider) of "rogue" agents, not top officials who authorized their crimes and bear main responsibility for them.

At the same time, Obama's Interrogation and Transfer Policy Task Force will continue the Bush administration's policy of extraordinary renditions to countries with disturbing histories of torture, provoking outcries from human rights activists. It assures continuation of abusive practices despite hollow assurances of closer monitoring, more humane treatment, and greater access for diplomats - the same never honored Bush administration pledges suggesting a similar betrayal by Obama.

Revealed CIA Report Abuses

On August 28, the Washington Post headlined, "CIA Releases Its Instructions For Breaking a Detainee's Will," then continued:

Manadel al-Jamadi was a victim. Captured by Navy Seals in October 2003, he was beaten and tortured, then suspended from a barred window with his arms tied behind his back. He died in November. Army reservist Charles Graner was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Eight Navy Seals received light administrative punishment for torturing al-Jamadi and other prisoners. Higher-ups at Abu Ghraib remained free to abuse others.

Redacting the worst crimes and omitting all committed at secret "black sites," the CIA report revealed the following:

America's Tortured Past

Many, perhaps most or all countries have used torture at times in their past, so it shouldn't surprise that America did as far back as before the republic's birth. Accused 17th century Salem witches faced abusive interrogations, a less extreme form of waterboarding, grueling trials, death by hanging for those convicted, and at least one victim was crushed to death under heavy boulders. None so far as known was burned alive.

Native Americans were (and still are) victims of genocide through mass slaughter, starvation, neglect, and by exposing them to deadly pathogens like smallpox and other diseases, including influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. 

Entire tribes were annihilated. Columbus exterminated the whole Hispaniola population by torture, mass-murder, forced labor, starvation, disease, despair, stabbing natives for sport, dashing babies' heads on rocks, letting children be eaten by dogs, beheadings, and burning people at the stake among other atrocities, including especially brutal treatment of women.

In the antebellum South, slaves were tortured by whipping, painful restraint, prolonged isolation in a sealed shed with choking tobacco smoke, and by other punishments. Theodore Roosevelt defended water torture (today's waterboarding) called the "water cure" to extract confessions from Filipinos because "nobody was seriously damaged."

In 1995, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD-39) authorizing extraordinary rendition to other countries for interrogations and torture.

Torture As A Weapon of War

In his book, "War Without Mercy," John Dower documented atrocities by both sides in the Pacific war. American forces "mutilat(ed) Japanese war dead for souvenirs, attack(ed) and (sank) hospital ships, sho(t) sailers who had abandoned ship and pilots who had bailed out, kill(ed) wounded soldiers on the battlefield, and tortur(ed) and execut(ed) prisoners."

Japanese ones aside, American atrocities included civilian abuse, burying combatants alive, and routinely using torture against a race called so vile and subhuman that all forms of barbarism were justified to exterminate them.

In the Korean War, mass indiscriminate killing of civilians was commonplace. It got General Curtis LeMay to boast that US planes "burned down every town in North Korea," killing 20% or more of the population. Both sides committed barbaric acts, including massacres and torture.

Korean expert Bruce Cumings explained the "extraordinary destructiveness of the United States air campaigns, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons," to the use of biological weapons, to incinerating whole towns and villages, turning the entire North to rubble, and slaughtering millions of its people, mainly civilians. 

In Hwangjoo County, US forces designated one area a hand-grenade field, killing 500 civilians. Prisoners and civilians were buried alive, burned, drowned, shot, stabbed, and beaten to death. In Hwemun Village in Erang County, one woman, after arrest, was forcibly mutilated. Her breasts, legs, and arms were cut off. Then her eyes were gouged out before she was stabbed to death. Others were beheaded. Thousands of civilians were brutally tortured. One family of six was hanged upside down from a tree and burned alive. Another civilian was skinned alive, then burned to death.

Still others were murdered with bats, spears, stones, sticks, clubs, flails, and pickaxes. Women were assaulted and raped. In all, US forces massacred tens of thousands of civilians systematically, ruthlessly, and brutally, including by disemboweling them while alive.

Barbarity in Vietnam was even worse. Atrocities were widespread and commonplace, including massacres, rape, torture, mutilations, wanton mass destruction, use of chemical and biological weapons, and as Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger: "We're gonna level that goddam country. We're gonna hit 'em, bomb the livin' bejusus out of 'em." Kissinger concurred in replying: "Mr. President, I will enthusiastically support that, and I think it's the right thing to do." 

US forces got carte blanche to carpet bomb, incinerate entire villages, burn people alive, fire freely on civilians, murder wounded prisoners or beat them to death, throw people out of helicopters, torture sadistically, gang rape young girls, and commit every imaginable atrocity to people called gooks, vermin, or as General William Westmoreland described them, "worthless termites." Against them, as in the Middle East and Central Asia, inflicting any form of human suffering is permissible.