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.
Recommended alternative reading list on the Yugoslav studies not used by mainstream corporative Western mass-media and top Western universities dealing with global security, world politics and international relations. Reading proposed readers below you can complete picture on the Yugoslav studies out of the official Western approach.March Pogrom 2004 Book and Photo EvidenceKOSOVSKA GOLGOTA Intervju 198820 Principal Misconceptions on Kosovo IssueThe Srebrenica Massacre Evidence Context Politics Edward S Herman Phillip CorwinLista Diane Budisavljevic 1941 Do 1945 by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićJosip Broz Tito Bez Maske! by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićHayden Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia by ...
It is quite apparent to everyone that, at present, the socio-economic and political situation in the United States is far from stable and society increasingly polarized. In fact, even members of the current US military and political elite admit this in their public speeches. Hence, President Joe Biden and his team have been trying hard to unite the nation and guide it in a less divisive direction.Since the relationship between the United States and Russia has taken a turn for the worse in recent years, it is quite clear to the author that, nowadays, the US administration has been seeking ...
A woman working at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has been arrested for allegedly selling a 14-day-old baby.Two other women employees from the centre have been detained and are being questioned about other possible cases.Police took action after the state’s Child Welfare Committee (CWC) registered a complaint.The charity has not responded to BBC requests for comment.“We have found out that some other babies have also been illegally sold from the centre,” a police official told BBC Hindi’s Niraj Sinha. “We have obtained the names of the mothers of these babies and are further ...
Fresh calls for a Greater Albania, incorporating the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, have led to an angry backlash from politicians in Belgrade.Sputnik Radio’s Mark Hirst talked to Marko Djuric, Director of the Government Office for Kosovo and Metohija.Such a move by Albania, if acted upon, could plunge the entire region back into a bloody and costly war on a scale not seen since the 1990s.Marko Djuric said that Serbia will not allow the creation of a Greater Albania in its southern province and that it is not alone in opposing the idea, which stems from the times of Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia.When asked whether this inflammatory statement by Albanian ...
The American taxpayers have been fleeced for almost seventy years by a so-called «intelligence» agency that has systematically violated the US Constitution, broken practically every federal law on the books, and penetrated virtually every facet of American life. The Central Intelligence Agency’s creation was bemoaned by its creator, President Harry S Truman, who, in a fit of personal angst following the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, wrote in a newspaper column,“I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations… I, therefore, would like to see the ...
According to a number of global mainstream media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the rest of the recent torture report.According to various well respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh, the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines roughly a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed.Sadly, it seems that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.While the video has remained under wraps thus far, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it ...
America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine –coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history. It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe 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.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe 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.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
Serbia rescued more Jews than any other part of the former Yugoslavia during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem , The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, has awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, to 127 individuals from Serbia, which is the highest number for the former Yugoslavia.On December 2, 2008, Arthur Koll, the Israeli Ambassador to Serbia, presented to the children and grandchildren of Borivoje Bondzic, Grozdana Bondzic, Ljubica Mandusic-Gazikalovic, and Jelica Rankovic the Righteous Among the Nations award. They are the descendants of Serbs who during the Holocaust risked their own lives ...
PrefaceIn the area where the multilingual state of Belgium is located, the main political mark today is the general openness for the expression of different attitudes and policies. Therefore, there are almost unlimited options in drawing political boundaries. That is unlike, for example, as well as with multilingual Switzerland, where the mountains create natural areas for the four different language districts and many political-administrative cantons. The physical openness of the area also causes Belgium to be more open for influences from outside and therefore sensitive to changes in the European policies.One way to look at the situation in Belgium is ...
This article was first published in November 2014.Recent developments confirm what is known and documented: Washington is behind the Islamic State (ISIS) and at the same time it is behind the moderate Al Qaeda terrorists, which the Obama administration is supporting as part of America’s campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS). And they expect us to believe that they are committed to waging a campaign against terrorists.The Islamic State (ISIS) was until 2014 called al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).Al Nusra is an al Qaeda affiliate which has committed countless atrocities in Syria. It is now considered by the Obama administration as ...
Following the death of President Tito in 1980 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia slid towards chaos. In the 1990s the plunge accelerated into civil war and one of the regions most affected was Kosovo from which Serbia withdrew after a NATO bomb and rocket offensive from 24 March to 11 June 1999. That blitz involved over 1,000 mainly American aircraft conducting some 38,000 airstrikes on Yugoslavia that killed approximately 500 civilians and destroyed much of the economic and social infrastructure of the region.NATO said its air bombardment was essential to halt repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and justified the ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe 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.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
The week-long deification of the late John McCain was quite the deep-state performance: Three “state funerals”(in Phoenix, D.C., and Annapolis) accompanied by the constant clucking of the “mainstream” media about how the epitome of a deep-state insider — son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, mass murderer of Vietnamese peasants, “Keating Five” criminal conspirator, friend of “the right kind” of Middle East terrorists, lifelong government employee whose senate office was ground zero for defense industry lobbyists for the past several decades — is somehow an anti-establishment “maverick.” The televised sobbing of the very appropriately named Senator Jeff Flake was rich, ...
Dear Readers and Friends:The distinguished and knowledgeable international commentator William Engdahl, in a superb statement, has expressed the view I gave you that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech on September 28 at the 70th anniversary of the United Nations changed the balance of power in the world. Until Putin’s speech the world was intimidated by the Washington Bully. Resistance to Washington brought swift retribution. In the Middle East and Africa it brought economic sanctions and military invasions that destroyed entire countries. In France and other US vassal states it brought multi-billion dollar confiscations of bank net worth as the price ...
The United States is immersed in a political St. Vitus’s dance typical of empires in convulsion. The confident colossus that watched its arch-rival disintegrate from 1989-1991 now has its highest office occupied by a malevolent clown enabled by supporters befitting a casting call for a Hieronymous Bosch panel. The liberal class gnashes its teeth and blames Trump, the Koch brothers, the Tea Party. But the shock is hardly credible. The current political trap befits a country that internalized its own Cold War propaganda campaign from 1945-1991. The unrelenting flow of messages aimed at keeping Americans fearful and accommodating debased our ...
Israel has played an increasingly provocative role in the destructive conflict unfolding within and along Syria’s borders since 2011. To many observers, it appears Israeli policy borders between opportunistic and unilateral aggression. In reality, Israel’s role in the Syrian conflict fits a much larger and long-term pattern with Anglo-American plans not only for Syria but for the entire region.A more recent row between Israel and Syria was the reported incursion of Israeli warplanes into Syrian airspace, including attacks near the eastern Syrian city of Palmyra. Palmyra hosts an ongoing battle between Syrian forces and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) terrorist ...
Veterans Day has passed. The annual ritual never changes. Politicians who didn’t serve in the armed services start unnecessary wars, killing military personnel whose sacrifices are then lauded. Officials say these heroes died defending our freedom. That is almost always a lie.Sometimes Washington must go to war. Not often, however. Despite the endless claims that we live in a dangerous world, America is amazingly safe. No other power could defeat, let alone conquer, the United States. Only Russia has a comparable nuclear arsenal, but it would be destroyed if Moscow targeted America. China and Russia trail U.S. conventional military strength ...
Here are before-and-after pictures, at https://twitter.com/MAL0mt/status/701077438525263873/photo/1, of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East:What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came into the White House, the operations — Libya, Yemen, and Syria — have been, to a large extent, joint operations with the Sauds. ‘We’ are now working more closely with ‘our’ ‘friends’, even than ‘we’ were under George W. Bush.As President Obama instructed his military, ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
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.
