American torture is back in the news again as Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Central Intelligence Agency, prepares for what could be a rocky Senate confirmation hearing with some tough questions about her role overseeing a secret torture prison in Thailand and destroying tapes of brutal detainee interrogation sessions [...]
American torture is back in the news again as Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Central Intelligence Agency, prepares for what could be a rocky Senate confirmation hearing with some tough questions about her role overseeing a secret torture prison in Thailand and destroying tapes of brutal detainee interrogation sessions.
Haspel’s nomination, and to a lesser degree her earlier appointment as deputy CIA director, reopened what more well-meaning observers, including torture survivor Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), have called “one of the darkest chapters” in US history, the so-called “enhanced interrogation” abuse of men, women and children caught up in America’s endless war on terror. However, post-9/11 detainee abuse can only be called a chapter if we recognize that it is part of a much larger story, one which begins with some of the first European usurpers to set foot on North American soil and one which continues essentially uninterrupted to the present day.
Genocide and Slavery
Torture is almost always a crime attributed to other, less civilized peoples. When most Americans do think of their own country’s torture, if they think of it at all, they usually imagine it to be a regrettable departure the civilized norm misguidedly perpetrated amid the terror and fury ignited by the deadliest attack on US soil in generations. Yet torture has been an unspoken weapon in America’s arsenal since the earliest colonial days. In a nation built on a foundation of genocide and slavery, horrific violence, including widespread torture, was a critical tool for securing and maintaining white dominance in the same way that great global violence has been crucial to perpetuating America’s superpower status in modern times.
The same founding fathers who constitutionally proscribed “cruel and unusual punishment” endorsed and committed the most heinous crimes against both Native Americans and black slaves — witness Thomas Jefferson calling for the “extermination or removal” of Virginia’s Indians. Ever fearful of revolt and revenge, white Southerners subjected black slaves to the some of the cruelest punishments imaginable to break both their physical and psychological ability to resist.
A World of Hurt
By the dawn of the twentieth century, American torture went global following the imperial conquest of former Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, where US occupation troops faced courts-martial for, among other crimes, waterboarding captured resistance fighters. Meanwhile back home, black Americans were scorched, skinned, disemboweled and castrated while still alive by otherwise upstanding citizens, including women and children, during many of the thousands of lynchings that plagued the Jim Crow South and far beyond.
During World War II, the vast bulk of the most barbarous tortures were committed by America’s German and Japanese enemies. Yet rather than punish some of the worst offenders, the United States paid both Nazi and Japanese war criminals for their grisly knowledge as it sought an edge over the Soviet Union in biowarfare, weapons, mind control, espionage and other technologies and techniques. It wasn’t long before the US was carrying out its own torture programs, like the notorious Project MK-ULTRA, while aiding or committing torture in support of brutal dictators in various Cold War hot spots around the world from Vietnam to Iran to Greece, South America and the more recent genocides of Guatemala and East Timor. There are too many other examples to list in this “brief history.”
Torture by the Book
Starting in the early 1960s, the CIA, then the US military, produced torture manuals that were used to instruct both US and foreign personnel in kidnapping, interrogation, assassination and democracy suppression. These manuals introduced or perfected many of the methods that would later become all too familiar to the world as the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the George W. Bush administration in the post-9/11 era. Cold War operatives like Dan Mitrione, a USAID official who kidnapped and then tortured homeless Uruguayans to death in a soundproof Montevideo dungeon to teach local security forces, informed and inspired Bush-era officials who would prove all too willing to authorize appalling physical and psychological tortures in the name of national security.
By September 11, 2001, the United States had literally written the book — a whole series of them — on torture. The shocking slaughter of nearly 3,000 Americans on that bright, blue Tuesday morning, coupled with the hard-line ideology of many leading Bush officials, led to torture becoming official administration doctrine. Bush falsely argued that domestic and international laws against torture no longer applied in the new worldwide war. Justice Department lawyer John Yoo even asserted that the president had unlimited wartimes powers to order the massacre of an entire village of civilians if he so desired.
“If the Detainee Dies, You’re Doing it Wrong”
Although administration and CIA attorneys now endorsed “cruel, inhuman or degrading” detainee treatment as long as it happened abroad, considerable vagueness remained about how much torture was too much. Yoo successfully argued that abuse is only torture if the pain inflicted was equal to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Jonathan Fredman, a CIA attorney, asserted that “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” Plenty of detainees would indeed die, but we’re not quite there yet.
First came Guantánamo Bay, where men and boys captured during the early days of Bush’s anti-Islamist crusade, many of them sold for hefty bounties, were sent for interrogation. Bush called these people the “worst of the worst.” However, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all knew that the majority of GITMO detainees were innocent butrefused to release them, largely for political reasons.
Nonetheless, Guantánamo prisoners were subjected to tortures including severe beatings, interrupted drowning (better known as waterboarding), brutal sodomization, shackling in excruciating “stress positions,” prolonged sleep, sensory and dietary deprivation, solitary confinement, and exposure to extreme temperatures and maddeningly repetitive loud music. Medical professionals, including leading psychiatrists and psychologists, actively participated in, and even devised, these torture sessions and techniques.
“You Can’t Spell Abuse Without Abu”
As the war on terror expanded to include countries that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, people resisting US invasion and occupation, as well as innocent men, women and children, were imprisoned and abused. The most notorious of these torture prisons was Abu Ghraib near Baghdad, Iraq, where prolonged vicious beatings, sexual humiliation and death threats were common, and where men, at least one boy and, allegedly, numerous women were raped by their jailers. As one former guard there quipped, “you can’t spell abuse without Abu.”
Abu Ghraib detainees were forced to sleep in flooded cells without mattresses, stripped naked and forced to crawl and bark like dogs, attacked with dogs, forced to curse Islam and eat pork and food from dirty toilets. Old women were dragged around by their hair, ridden like donkeys and urinated on by soldiers like Sgt. Charles Graner, who was fond of sodomizing innocent detainees with found objects.
“The Christian in me says it’s wrong,” Graner said of torturing prisoners. “But the corrections officer in me says, ‘I love making a grown man piss himself.’”
Gen. Antonio Taguba, who compiled a scathing report on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, concluded that the majority of prisoners there — the Red Cross said 70 to 90 percent— were innocent. Female relatives of wanted Iraqi insurgents were also jailed at Abu Ghraib as bargaining chips. One woman was thrown in a cell with the corpse of her murdered son. Perhaps the most shocking yet little-known fact about Abu Ghraib is that at least 34 detainees died there while in US custody, with nearly half of these deaths officially listed as homicides. By 2006, at least 100 prisoners had died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently.
Tortured to Death
The most well-publicized detainee death happened at the notorious “Salt Pit,” a CIA black site, or secret prison, in Afghanistan, where Gul Rahman died of hypothermia after being stripped naked and chained to a wall in near-freezing temperatures. Abuse of prisoners, who were often kidnapped from third countries in a practice known as extraordinary rendition, was rampant at black sites around the world, including Detention Center Green in Thailand, which Gina Haspel ran in late 2002.
Black site prisoners were hung by chains from ceilings for days on end, stuffed into boxes, deprived of sleep, shackled naked in cold temperatures and subjected to mock executions. Prior to Haspel’s arrival, CIA torturers at Detention Center Green waterboarded the wrong man, a cooperative man, 83 times in a month. In addition to supervising Detention Center Green, Haspel also played a key role in the destruction of videotaped CIA torture sessions.
Scores of friendly nations as well as some of the world’s most notorious dictators, including Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and the mullahs of Iran, cooperated with the CIA’s rendition program. The US also outsourced torture and interrogation by sending abductees to these and other countries knowing they would be abused, as well as by allowing agents from some of the world’s worst human rights violators, including China, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and Libya, to interrogate and even abuse detainees inside Guantánamo.
Bush Impunity, Trump Opportunity
There was widespread hope that the election of Barack Obama, who promised to end and investigate torture, would usher in an age of justice and transparency. However, not only did Obama, who explained that he wanted to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” fail to prosecute or even investigate the policies and actions of the Bush officials who authorized and justified torture, he actively protected them from facing justice for their crimes. Obama also declined to declassify a landmark 2014 Senate report detailing brutal, even deadly, detainee abuse by CIA operatives, and torture continued at Guantánamo and elsewhere under his watch despite an early executive order banning it.
In a very real sense, Obama’s dubious decision to “look forward” set the stage for President Trump to look backwards into the darkest depths of our nation’s past and openly embrace torture, which he did on the 2016 campaign trail when he vowed to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and during his presidency when he nominated two torture supporters to head the CIA. However, unlike the dramatic surge in civilian casualties following Trump’s promise to “bomb the shit out of” Islamic State militants and kill their innocent families, there hasn’t been any reported spike in torture under the current administration. There have, however, been continued allegations of detainee abuse at Guatánamo Bay.
There have also been well-documented cases of abuse, including widespread sex crimes, at prisons, many of them for-profit, holding immigrants and asylum seekers who often languish behind bars for years as their cases slowly proceed through the system. Meanwhile, solitary confinement — which former Vietnam POW John McCain and others have called a form of torture every bit as awful as physical torment — is used to punish and break inmates, including children, at prisons, jails and detention facilities across America.
Return to Darkness?
To this day, not a single US government, military or intelligence official who devised, authorized, supervised or implemented America’s decades-old torture regime has been brought to justice or even criminally investigated for what are very clearly grave violations of domestic and international law. The American people don’t seem to care. A 2016 International Red Cross survey found that nearly half of Americans believe it is acceptable to torture enemy combatants to obtain important information. This, despite the fact that military and intelligence veterans, as well as the Senate torture report, concur that torture doesn’t work and produces unreliable information at best.
Denial — from the highest levels of government to mainstream media still reluctant or refusing to even say or print the word torture to a public which still embraces torture despite its barbarity and inefficacy — is the order of the day when it comes to facing America’s tortured history. Our nation’s failure to honestly examine its darkest deeds raises the all-too-real prospect of their repetition, a chilling possibility that seems likelier than ever given Trump’s choice of Haspel, someone accused of torturing for torture’s sake — and enjoying it.
Originally published on 2018-05-08
About the author: Brett Wilkins is editor-at-large for US news at Digital Journal. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
As President Trump affirms publicly his commitment to friendly relations with Russia at an economic summit in Hanoi, (the first President since Franklin Roosevelt to do so), the press backs the special prosecutor seeking to indict him, while NATO continues to ramp up its forces on Russia’s borders with Europe by bringing in tanks and other ‘defensive’ weapons. Although the United States was founded on Christian principles, and has one of the highest percentages of people practicing a religion of any Western country, most Americans seem not to realize that their country is building a case for nuclear war with the ...
The German occupation forces were those who have been the first to create and recognize a short-lived state’s independence of Ukraine in January 1918 during the time of their-own inspired and supported anti-Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917−1921. As reoccupied by the Bolshevik Red Army, the eastern and southern parts of the present-day territory of (a Greater) Ukraine joined in 1922 the USSR as a separate Soviet Socialist Republic (without Crimea). According to the 1926 Soviet census of Crimea, the majority of its population were the Russians (382.645). The second-largest ethnic group were the Tartars (179.094). Therefore, a Jew V. I. ...
Note: This article was original published by GR in May 2003“It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” - Hermann GoeringGenocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as progress and spreading civilisation.I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam ...
A quick review of Ukraine, Zbig’s Grand Chessboard – How the West Was Checkmated is simple – this amazing work should be in everyone’s reading library. Anyone who cares to understand the situation of what has happened, and is happening in Ukraine needs to read this book. It covers the history of the dissolution of the USSR, the resulting creation of Ukraine, and the history of the U.S.’ attempts through various government and non-government organizations (e.g. Soros) towards the first failed colour revolution (Orange, 2004), then on towards the second attempt resulting in the successful installation of the noenazi puppet ...
On February 2nd, 1943, the 6th German Army, under the command of Field Marshall Von Paulus, and elements of the 4th Panzer Army, surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad. This stunning victory is considered the turning point in the war in Europe, heralding the defeat of fascist Germany.That defeat came on May 2ndth 1945, when the German forces in Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, surrendered to the forces of the Red Army that had captured the city. On May 9th the official act of surrender of the German government and military forces took place in Berlin when ...
At the beginning of March 2017, it will be exactly six years since the beginning of the conflict in Syria. Some journalists even make unfavorable forecasts wondering about the very possibility of reconciliation. Complicated by the foreign intervention on the part of Israel war in Lebanon, for example, had been for about 15 years. But even a six-year term it is too long.That is why we may hope that the meeting in Astana scheduled on January 23 will eventually lead to a positive result. And then there will be an occasion to consolidate the success of the negotiations in Geneva ...
The new coronavirus and its accompanying disease Covid-19 has stopped the globe in its tracks. Governments, markets and news cycles have become dominated by the pandemic. Europe is now the epicenter for the disease, with reportedly more fatal cases of infection than China where the virus first erupted in December.Several European Union countries have declared themselves states of emergencies, including Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy. The 27-member bloc has sealed off external borders. Some states, such as Poland, have begun closing borders with other EU members. Brussels, the administrative center of the EU, is alarmed because the much-vaunted single ...
The two most militarily powerful nations in the West, both free to project naval power and maritime domination anywhere in the world, get together to punish and overthrow regimes they find guilty of human rights abuses and political repression in the name of human rights and promoting democracy: What could possibly go wrong?It is of course NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s new call for NATO, which has already over the past decade exercised its nation-building and promotion of enlightened regime policies with such brilliant success in Ukraine, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan to spread its mantle of protection, enlightenment and peace over ...
Every day signs are looming larger than life as we know it in the wealthiest nation on earth that it’s about to crash and burn, forever changing not for the better. The latest wake-up call arrived in a Guardian article earlier this week. The story features a secret prison not unlike the CIA torture detention centers all over the world whereby the Chicago police hold rounded up US citizens for hours or days at a time for interrogation. The same internationally illegal roundups of suspected “potential terrorists” (which by latest Gestapo America standards can easily be you or me) that the CIA ...
State frontiers are established by human beingsand may be changed by human beings.Adolf Hitler. Mein KampfDiplomacy, with all the conventions of its forms,recognizes only real facts.Charles de GaullePart OneAll of Adolf Hitler’s actions, from the time he rose to power in 1933 until 1939, could be described as one triumph after another. He met each challenge he faced: he took over as head of the country, returned Germany’s lost territories without a struggle, and was given permission from England and France to rearm. But one further task lay before him, and failure now would make his previous achievements almost pointless. ...
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.“I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French ...
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40thanniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende. Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other ...
The grossest thing in American society is the reactionary sentimentality that fill our gossip infected hearts with a chemical reaction every time one of our supposed war heroes moves on to a more peaceful place. The carefully rehearsed statements from useless political figures numb our minds as all those who are sane must collectively wonder what on earth has a fusty bag of bones like John McCain ever done for us? Donald Trump was once new to the political scene and was still capable of burning bridges that were worth burning. It was Mr. Trump’s finest moment when he said ...
For some time the criminal activities of the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (ISIS) seemed to have faded into the shadows. It seemed that this organization in the near future will be broken tie with due to the “heroic” American bombing. However, the ISIS like a fabulous hydra, who immediately has a new head grown in place of a severed one, revived and made further impressive gains.The capture of ancient Palmyra in Syria and the important city Ramadi, the main city of the Sunni province Anbar, located by the way just 100 kilometres far from Baghdad, made the world’s media and ...
The massacre of 22 people—12 doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, along with 10 patients, three of them children—in Saturday’s airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical center in Kunduz, Afghanistan is an appalling war crime for which the US military and Obama administration are responsible.On Monday, the top US commander in Afghanistan admitted that a US warplane carried out the deadly attack, while seeking to shift the blame onto Afghan puppet troops for calling it in.“An air strike was then called to eliminate the Taliban and several civilians were accidentally struck,” Gen. John Campbell told a ...
On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by its publisher, Henry Luce, entitled “The American Century.” The son of Presbyterian missionaries, born in China in 1898 and raised there until the age of 15, Luce essentially transposed the certainty of religious dogma into the certainty of a nationalistic mission couched in the name of internationalism.Luce acknowledged that the United States could not police the whole world or attempt to impose democratic institutions on all of mankind. Nonetheless, “the world of the 20th Century,” he wrote, “if it is ...
At least from the very academic viewpoint, war is a condition of armed conflict between at least two sides (but, in fact, states). There are, historically, several types of warfare as conventional warfare, civil war, lightning war (blitzkrieg in German), total war, hegemonic war, liberation war, war on terrorism, etc. However, according to the used warfare technique, there is, for instance, little war (guerrilla war in Spanish) or according to the (counter)balance of warfare sides, there is asymmetric war as an example.Asymmetric warfare exists in the case when two sides of combat forces (two states, two blocs, a state vs. ...
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
On August 9 [2020], presidential elections were held in Belarus with five candidates bidding to be head of state. According to the Central Election Commission, the incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, won in the first round with over 80% of the votes. Mass protests began in Belarus right after the announcement of the preliminary election results. People went to the streets, expressing their dissatisfaction with the results of the elections that they believe were unfair. Mass protests turned into riots and there were clashes between rioters and the police. Many people were detained and injured, and two protestors died.Representatives of the ...
Several years ago two very distinguished American scholars wrote a book, The Israel Lobby.The book made a very understated case that the Israel Lobby has far more power over the US government and media than is good for America or Israel, as it silences constructive critics who are Israel’s friends. The two scholars were demonized by the Israel Lobby as advocating the return of the Holocaust.The Israel Lobby presented itself as just a poor little weak thing unable to stand up to all the Nazis assailing Israel. Meanwhile the US Congress was unanimously passing outrageous resolutions handed to it by ...
Torture is almost always a crime attributed to other, less civilized peoples. When most Americans do think of their own country’s torture, if they think of it at all, they usually imagine it to be a regrettable departure the civilized norm misguidedly perpetrated amid the terror and fury ignited by the deadliest attack on US soil in generations. Yet torture has been an unspoken weapon in America’s arsenal since the earliest colonial days. In a nation built on a foundation of genocide and slavery, horrific violence, including widespread torture, was a critical tool for securing and maintaining white dominance in the same way that great global violence has been crucial to perpetuating America’s superpower status in modern times.
There have also been well-documented cases of abuse, including widespread sex crimes, at prisons, many of them for-profit, holding immigrants and asylum seekers who often languish behind bars for years as their cases slowly proceed through the system. Meanwhile, solitary confinement — which former Vietnam POW John McCain and others have called a form of torture every bit as awful as physical torment — is used to punish and break inmates, including children, at prisons, jails and detention facilities across America.
