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   From: o@o.org   
      
   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   
      
      
   It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George Bush's second term, and an   
   announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But   
   what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture"   
   declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown   
   Panama City.   
   It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the   
   US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a   
   sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been   
   "We do torture". It is here in Panama, and later at the school's new   
   location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture   
   scandals can be found.   
      
      
      
   According to declassified training manuals, SOA students - military and   
   police officers from across the hemisphere - were instructed in many of the   
   same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo   
   and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding   
   and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload,   
   sleep and food "manipulation", humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation,   
   stress positions - and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence   
   Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned   
   "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false   
   imprisonment".   
   Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent's greatest war   
   crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and   
   six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from   
   Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El   
   Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.   
      
   Yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet   
   mentioned the location's 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 (what Garry Wills termed   
   "original sinlessness") 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."   
      
   Does it somehow lessen today's horrors to admit that this is not the first   
   time the US government has used torture, that it has operated secret prisons   
   before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left   
   by dropping students out of airplanes? That, closer to home, photographs of   
   lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think   
   so. On November 8, Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing   
   claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question   
   about its moral integrity, until now".   
      
   Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why   
   do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by   
   crying "Never before"? I suspect it stems from a sincere desire to convey   
   the seriousness of this administration's crimes. And its open embrace of   
   torture is indeed unprecedented.   
      
   But let's be clear about what is unprecedented: not the torture, but the   
   openness. Past administrations kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes   
   were sanctioned but they were committed in the shadows, officially denied   
   and condemned. The Bush administration has broken this deal: post-9/11, it   
   demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimised by new definitions   
   and new laws.   
      
   Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the real innovation has been   
   in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons   
   and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from   
   clandestine etiquette that has so much of the military and intelligence   
   community up in arms: Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.   
   This shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practised but   
   officially and legally repudiated, there is still hope that if atrocities   
   are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and those   
   responsible deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called   
   "the juridical person in man". Soon victims no longer bother to search for   
   justice, so sure are they of the futility, and danger, of that quest. This   
   is a larger mirror of what happens inside the torture chamber, when   
   prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear   
   them and no one is going to save them.   
      
   The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the torture debate is that in   
   the name of eradicating future abuses, past crimes are being erased from the   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)