CIA TORTURE REPORT

[seemslikeadream]

Torture Report Exposes Sadism and Lies
December 9, 2014

The stunning Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture and other sadistic treatment meted out to “war on terror” detainees has shredded the credibility of CIA apologists who claimed the “enhance interrogations” were carefully calibrated and humane, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman explains.

By Melvin A. Goodman

CIA Director John Brennan, having failed to block the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture and abuse, is now abetting the efforts of former CIA directors and deputy directors to rebut the report’s conclusions that the interrogation techniques amounted to sadism and that senior CIA officials lied to the White House, the Congress, and the Department of Justice about the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation program.

Former CIA directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden and deputy directors John McLaughlin and Steve Kappes, who were guilty of past deceit on sensitive issues, have threatened to make documents available to undermine the findings of the Senate committee. The senior operations officer who ran the CIA’s torture and abuse program, Jose Rodriquez, has been permitted to write a book and a long essay in the Washington Post that argue the interrogation techniques were legal and effective. Their charges are completely spurious and their credibility is non-existent.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)
CIA directors Tenet and Hayden, who signed off on the enhanced interrogation program, were involved in numerous efforts to politicize the work of the CIA. In addition to deceiving the White House on the efficacy of the torture program, Tenet provided misinformation to the White House on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. His role on Iraqi WMD has been comprehensively and authoritatively documented in the reports of the Robb-Silberman Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

In response to President George W. Bush’s demand for intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq, Tenet responded that it would be a “slam dunk” to do so. He resigned from the CIA in 2004 in order to avoid testifying to a series of congressional committees about his perfidy.

General Hayden’s record is similarly flawed. Even before taking over the CIA in 2006, Hayden was the director of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program that began after 9/11. This program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits unlawful seizures and searches.

At the CIA, Hayden named John Rizzo as the Agency’s general counsel although he knew that Rizzo had been the CIA’s leading lawyer in pursuing legal justification for torture and abuse of terrorist suspects. Fortunately, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who led the way in making sure that the CIA could not redact key aspects of the torture report, blocked the confirmation of Rizzo, who eventually withdrew his nomination.

Hayden also weakened the Office of the Inspector General, which had been critical of the CIA’s renditions and interrogations programs, and even targeted the IG himself, John Helgerson, who had recommended accountability boards for CIA officers involved in the 9/11 intelligence failure, torture and abuse, and illegal renditions.

Deputy directors McLaughlin and Kappes also misled senior U.S. officials on key intelligence issues. McLaughlin, who actually delivered the “slam dunk” briefing to President Bush that CIA Director Tenet had promised, misled Secretary of State Colin Powell on the intelligence that became part of Powell’s speech to the United Nations in February 2003 to make the case for war in Iraq.

In addition to perverting the intelligence process, McLaughlin tried to silence the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, who found no evidence of Iraqi WMD. McLaughlin was also a key advocate for the notorious “Curveball,” whose phony intelligence on mobile biological laboratories ended up in Powell’s speech to the UN. Earlier in his career, McLaughlin had a key role in covering up the efforts of CIA deputy Robert Gates to politicize key intelligence in the 1980s.

Kappes may not have been involved in all of the decisions on torture and abuse and the secret prisons where the sadistic activity took place, but he was totally witting of the program. The Senate report cites the efforts of senior CIA leaders to impede the work of the Office of the Inspector General, and Kappes was a key part of this effort.

Kappes‘s career eventually suffered from briefing the White House on a Jordanian agent who was going to lead the CIA to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri; the agent turned out to be a suicide bomber who decimated the leadership of the most sensitive CIA facility in Afghanistan in 2009.

Jose Rodriquez, like Kappes, was particularly hostile to the statutory IG, John Helgerson, and the work of the OIG on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Rodriquez, who destroyed 92 torture tapes over the objections of the White House, contends that the interrogation techniques were “blessed by the highest legal authorities in the land, conducted by trained professionals, and applied to only a handful of the most important terrorists on the planet.” The Senate report puts the lie to all of these contentions.

It is unfortunate that the Obama administration did not appoint a special prosecutor in order to get some accountability for the heinous crimes that were committed by senior CIA officials or the kind of truth and reconciliation committee that has proved useful in East Europe or South Africa where terrible crimes have been committed. Nevertheless, the Senate’s authoritative report gives a full description of the unconscionable activities that took place in the name of the United States and offers sufficient evidence to block the outrageous efforts of former CIA directors and deputy directors to deceive the American people.

[seemslikeadream]

Israel, Egypt Implicated in Torture: Middle East Reactions to Senate Report lament own Involvement
By Juan Cole | Dec. 10, 2014 |

By Juan Cole | –
That the release in Washington of a dense 450 page report on CIA torture conducted a decade ago would provoke massive demonstrations in the Middle East all along struck me as unlikely. It could perhaps provoke small terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, but those groups are already plotting out attacks on US embassies and it is a little unlikely that they would suddenly be more motivated by this report, which doesn’t contain anything they did not already know or suspect.
Washington has invented its own ersatz Middle East, which bears little resemblance to the actual one, and which is mainly used to score points in inside-the-Beltway debates.
Most Egyptians appear to have been traumatized by the year (2012-2013) of Muslim Brotherhood rule, and support for the Brotherhood is likely at an all time low. They have been quite unfairly branded a terrorist organization, and groups much to their right, such as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and al-Qaeda itself are even more unpopular and are pursued by the powerful Egyptian military. Many Egyptian youth have demonstrated against torture, and most of them don’t like it when applied to Egyptians by the military government. But since there isn’t much sympathy in Egypt for extremist fundamentalism, most Egyptians would be neither surprised nor particularly outraged that the US was torturing al-Qaeda types.
One initial reaction to the Senate report was an article in the Cairo press drawing on remarks of expatriate Egyptians, which pointed out that Egypt has been implicated in the CIA black site torture. That is, rather than anger toward the US, this article implicitly criticizes the government of then president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt itself, both for torturing and for doing it on behalf of the United States. Another such article in Tahrir News covered the whole torture scandal, So far, the main Egyptian reaction seems to be vindication that they overthrew the torturing, toadying government of Mubarak.
Meanwhile, another major US ally, Israel, was also implicated. The left-leaning daily Haaretz reported that the CIA torturers justified their actions with regard to Israeli Supreme Court rulings on the permissibility of torture.

CIA Cited Israeli Court Rulings to Justify Torture
CIA Sought to Use 'Israeli Example' in Pro-Torture PR Campaign
by Jason Ditz, December 09, 2014

Though there was some internal conflict about the use of torture within the CIA, the leadership never really questioned it too hard, and rather sought ideas on how to sell it to the public and to Congress.

The “Israeli example,” in which the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that some types of torture were acceptable in some “ticking time bomb” cases, seems to have been one the CIA General Counsel was particularly fond of.

The counsel went on to insist that even after torture was explicitly banned by the Senate in 2005, it didn’t cover “ticking time bomb” scenarios, and that CIA officers could continue to engage in torture and be assured of a legal defense if they were ever prosecuted.

Which is absurd, as we now know. No one was ever going to prosecute a CIA officer, no matter how much they tortured people. The argument further falls apart on the premise, as the sudden, imminent threat notion of the “ticking time bomb” flies out the window when one is talking about a sustained, multi-year torture campaign involving well over 100 detainees.

[NeonLX]

Oh boy, THIS ought to blow the lid off of everything...right?...eh?

<crickets>

[seemslikeadream]

The Independent / By Ella Alexander
Russell Brand on CIA Torture Report: If Rape Is Being Used As a Way To Get Info, We’re Already In Hell
The comedian called the report proof that there's no further for us to decline.

December 10, 2014 |

Russell Brand has described the CIA’s torture report as “terrifying” in his latest episode of The Trews.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report will reveal the extent of the organisation’s “enhanced interrogation”. Main methods are thought to include sleep deprivation, confinement in small spaces, slapping, humiliation, sexual assault threats and waterboarding. These measures were carried out on al-Qaeda terrorism suspects following the 9/11 attack and weren’t effective in delivering life-saving intelligence to the US.

Around 10 per cent of the 6,000-page tome will be released to the public.

“This CIA report is important because around the world now there are all sorts of measures that give governments more rights to spy on their own people,” said Brand.

“If there are unaccountable government agencies that can torture without having to ever justify or explain even when it doesn’t work. We’re living in a terrifying time.

“Isn’t it obvious that if rape is used a way of getting information out of a person that we’re already in hell? There’s no further to go, there’s no further for us to decline.”

The comedian suggested that the report should make the public question “the considerable clandestine power these organisations hold”, but noted that government torture techniques are becoming more acceptable.

A recent study showed that 36 per cent of Britons think that torture is sometimes necessary.

“The problem is we’ve created a climate where we think torture as oddly acceptable,” said Brand. “According to a recent Amnesty report, television programmes like the Fox-created 24, which a couple of neon-Conservative guys created, glamorise and justify the idea of torture. It helps us to accept that that is a normal part of international espionage.”

Brand also commented on the Fox News coverage of the report, which asserted that the document should not be released.

“What this story shows is of course the CIA are acting in an unaccountable, clandestine, terrifying way. And that the media are supporting them in that,” he said. “We have no access or purchase to power.”

Once again, he asserted that supporting localised campaigns is the best way of “confronting mighty institutions”.

“Although they might seem small, it says that we come together we can change the world,” he said. “They’re the not going to do it for us. We’ve just seen how the media collaborates with the government in order to suppress the truth about the CIA. If you want true news you have to get it for yourself.”

[seemslikeadream]

Modern-Day Mengeles: America's Terror War Torture Shrinks

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD
WEDNESDAY, 10 DECEMBER 2014 13:54
One of the "revelations" of the Senate report on CIA torture has been the role played by two psychologists in devising the regimen of torture used by the Agency.

[A quick but necessary digression: please note that this torture regimen has been lauded as "effective" and "life-saving" by the Obama Administration -- even after the release of the report; indeed, the Administration says that the fruits of these crimes still "inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day." Just bear that in mind as you read the reams of justified denunciations of the Bush Administration for the commission of these particular crimes by this particular agency. The Bush thugs should be excoriated -- and prosecuted -- for their crimes. But a multitude of crimes in many forms (including torture) are still being committed by the Terror War machine under Obama -- the man who has stoutly shielded his predecessors from prosecution and now even praises some of their worst crimes.]

But of course there is nothing new in report's uncovering of the psychologists' role. (Except for one element: the fact that these two sinister quacks were paid a whopping $81 million for helping the United States government torture defenseless captives and produce garbage intelligence.) Anyone who wanted to know about their Mengele-style perversion of medical ethics could have read about it in reputable mainstream publications years ago. (Actually, this is also true of almost all the incidents and practices detailed in the report. Anyone who didn't know of these things before now -- especially in the political-media world -- simply didn't want to know of these things.) There were also other psychologists and medical personnel involved in the program after it got started, as Mark Benjamin detailed at Salon.com back in 2007.

In that same year, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer produced an extensive report on the wide-ranging Terror War torture regimen. The article should have produced a firestorm of outrage and aggressive, in-depth, high-profile investigations from, say, the U.S. Senate, which was then in the control of the Democrats. But as we know, her revelations sank like a stone. And it is very, very likely that the same thing will happen with the newly released (and, it must always be noted, heavily truncated, censored and incomplete) Senate report. Indeed, McClatchy is already reporting that the incoming Republican-controlled Senate will gladly let the report "gather dust," taking no follow-up action. This stance will doubtless please their Terror War partners in the White House, who fought against the release of the report -- and who certainly aren't going to do anything about it.

I wrote about the Mayer and Benjamin articles when they first came out in 2007. Below are a few excerpts, dealing with their reportage on the torture shrinks:

For those who have been following and chronicling the rise of the gulag since its inception (back in the days when its instigators and practitioners were still happy to brag to cheerleading newspapers about "taking the gloves off" and going to "the dark side"), there is not a lot that is new in Mayer's piece. But she has brought it all together with devastating thoroughness and clarity.

Mayer mentions tellingly -- but briefly -- one key aspect of Bush's torture chambers that has been largely overlooked: the key role played by a couple of psychologists in drawing up the sinister regimen (which was also based in part on KGB practices): CIA contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Mark Benjamin of Salon has much more on this pair, who devoted their clinical skills to devising ways to destroy a captive's mind -- in the somewhat bizarre conviction that a destroyed mind can somehow produce useful intelligence. (Benjamin in turn drew on a 2005 piece by Mayer about Mitchell and the Bush Regime's Mengelean use of medical personnel in interrogations.)

Mitchell and Jessen helped run the military's SERE program, originally designed to teach American forces how to resist and survive torture inflicted on them by evil regimes or terrorists. But it turns out that the Rumsfeld Pentagon and its mad scientists were using U.S. soldiers as guinea pigs to help devise their own torture program. For years, the Pentagon flatly denied using SERE tactics on the captives in the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, and in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was, of course, a lie. As Benjamin reports:

Until last month, the Army had denied any use of SERE training for prisoner interrogations. "We do not teach interrogation techniques," Carol Darby, chief spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, said last June when Salon asked about a document that appeared to indicate that instructors from the SERE school taught their methods to interrogators at Guantánamo.

But the declassified DoD inspector general's report described initiatives by high-level military officials to incorporate SERE concepts into interrogations. And it said that psychologists affiliated with SERE training -- people like Mitchell and Jessen -- played a critical role. According to the inspector general, the Army Special Operations Command's Psychological Directorate at Fort Bragg first drafted a plan to have the military reverse-engineer SERE training in the summer of 2002. At the same time, the commander of Guantánamo determined that SERE tactics might be used on detainees at the military prison. Then in September 2002, the Army Special Operations Command and other SERE officials hosted a "SERE psychologist conference" at Fort Bragg to brief staff from the military's prison at Guantánamo on the use of SERE tactics.

And Mayer notes:

The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’”

… Mitchell and Jessen were not experts sought for their dispassionate advice in determining the best policy options for government officials. All the "experts" employed by the Bush Regime are just dupes … or, as with the psychologists, willing stooges, brought in to act as window dressing for policies already decided upon. Bush and Cheney and their minions wanted to torture people -- not only for the psychosexual kick these genuine perverts get from it but also because it was a central element in their drive to establish an authoritarian executive unfettered by any law. They could not, as a matter of "principle," submit to the authority of the Geneva Conventions, American law or Constitutional precepts. They had plenty of scientists and practiced interrogators on hand to tell them that the KGB-SERE system was useless -- indeed, counterproductive -- in producing actionable intelligence. But they chose to listen only to those who told them what they wanted to hear, whose pseudo-science buttressed decisions they had already taken.

I finished that 2007 piece with a paragraph that still holds true today, as a description of the kind of people who hold power in our blood-soaked bipartisan imperial system:

They don't want to govern; they want to rule. They simply cannot be treated -- on any issue whatsoever -- as an ordinary government engaged in ordinary tussles over politics and policy. They are not a government in any traditional sense of the word. They are the criminal vanguard of a radical movement that is now holding the nation hostage. And any political "opposition" that does not recognize this fact is worse than useless; it is, as we've said before, complicit in the gang's crimes.

[NeonLX]

I'm sorry I've turned into a sarcasm factory. It's not doing anybody any good.

But I did hear that Prince What's-his-face and his darling wife Who's-it are doing some really nice shit for someone. Or a bunch of people. Or something.

[Grizzly]

The West's Torture farm - Uzbekistan

t's one of the nastiest, most repressive dictatorships in Asia but its relationship with Washington has helped it avoid censor. Just how valuable an ally is Uzbekistan in the War on Terror?

Critics of the government risk being tortured to death, there's no freedom of speech and all opposition parties are banned. "This is not a government. It's a monster against its own people," laments Prof Mirsaidov. In the name of fighting Islamic terror, Uzbekistan has jailed thousands of members of Hiz-but-Tahrir. The problem is, many claim they are innocent and confessions are extracted under torture. But despite its appalling human rights record, few Western governments seem willing to criticise it. Uzbekistan is now regarded as a key ally in the War on Terror. It allows the US to use its airbases to support operations in Afghanistan and American agents are believed to have 'rendered' terrorist suspects to Uzbekistan to be tortured. However, there are growing fears that siding with this repressive regime to fight terrorism is counter productive. As former British Ambassador Craig Murray states: "Our short sighted policy in Asia is creating the terrorism we claim we are fighting."

Produced by ABC Australia
Distributed by Journeyman Pictures

Journeyman Pictures, Craig Murray, WHO CAN BELIEVE anything, these days..

[conniption]

The Politics Blog

The Torture Report, Part One: What It Says

By Charles P. Pierce
December 9, 2014


Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) answers questions from members of the media after she spoke on the Senate floor at the Capitol

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense of the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in con-
ventional hostilities. They should know the military and paramilitary forces and resources available to the Department of Defense, verify their
readiness, report on their accuracy, and make appropriate recommedations for their expansion and improvement. I look to the Chiefs to
contribute dynamic and imaginative leadership in contributing to the success of the military and paramilitary aspects of Cold War programs.

-- John F. Kennedy, National Security Action Memo No. 55, June 8, 1961.

He wanted, as he said, to splinter the CIA into a million pieces and scatter it to the four winds, did John F. Kennedy. Many people believe that this desire stemmed from Kennedy's having been lied to by the intelligence community regarding the Bay of Pigs invasion, which had occurred in April of 1961, and that that fantasy-turned-fiasco undoubtedly played a role in Kennedy's thinking, but that was not the first time that the CIA had lied to the new president. Right at the end of his second term, President Dwight Eisenhower had ordered the CIA to do away with Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister of the Congo, and a dreadful inconvenience for western interests in that benighted former Belgian colony. By the time Kennedy took office, Lumumba already had been tortured, killed, and dissolved in a vat of acid, his bones ground to dust, a result of a CIA-backed operation in conjunction with the Belgians, but Kennedy didn't know it. In fact, he was still planning on working with Lumumba. In Steven Kinzer's invaluable book about Allen and John Foster Dulles, we find that, yes, the CIA had gotten its way by giving the old okey-doke to the people who were alleged to be in charge of the American government.

"Less than two years later, Allen casually admitted that he might have exaggerated the danger Lumumba posed to the West. A television interviewer, Eric Severeid, asked him if he had come to believe that any of his covert operations were unnecessary. He named just one. 'I think that we overrated the danger in, let's say, the Congo,' Allen said. 'It looked as though they were going to make a serious attempt at takeover in the Belgian Congo. Well, it didn't work out that way at all. Now maybe they intended to do it, but they didn't find the situation ripe and they beat a pretty hasty retreat.'"

Kennedy had the right idea. Did it get him killed? I am still largely agnostic on it but, if it did, I wouldn't be at all surprised, just as I was not surprised by what Senator Dianne Feinstein read aloud on the Senate floor today, even though, behind every syllable of every word, a death knell sounded for the American idea. The concept of American exceptionalism based on anything as delicate as the rule of law -- in fact, any concept of American exceptionalism based on anything but brutish force -- has been rendered a sad and superannuated farce. Founding Fathers? Constitutional government? The bell has finally tolled for thee, motherfkers.

What was released was so breathtakingly awful, so transcendently wicked, that it's hard to keep in mind that what was read in the Senate today was merely the introduction to a heavily redacted, 528-page summary of a 6000-page congressional report into American savagery overseas. What we are being presented with is the Readers Digest Condensed Version of what was done to people in our name and on our dime. "I Am Joe's Frozen Corpse." What is in the other 5000-odd pages must be beyond belief.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee delivers new allegations of cruelty in a program whose severe tactics have been abundantly documented, revealing that agency medical personnel voiced alarm that waterboarding methods had deteriorated to "a series of near drownings" and that agency employees subjected detainees to "rectal rehydration" and other painful procedures that were never approved. The 528-page document catalogues dozens of cases in which CIA officials allegedly deceived their superiors at the White House, members of Congress and even sometimes their own peers about how the interrogation program was being run and what it had achieved. In one case, an internal CIA memo relays instructions from the White House to keep the program secret from then-Secretary of State Colin Powell out of concern that he would "blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what's going on."

(Colin Powell -- still the world's most overrated man.)

Given what already was released today, and you can read it all yourself at the link, if you have the sand for that, there are certain things I no longer take seriously. I do not take seriously anyone, in or out of government, who uses the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" instead of simply calling what we did torture. This includes Senator Feinstein, who apparently would choke on the word.

After being transferred to a site in Thailand, Zubaida was placed in isolation for 47 days, a period during which the presumably important source on al-Qaeda faced no questions. Then, at 11:50 a.m. on Aug. 4, 2002, the CIA launched a round-the-clock interrogation assault - slamming Zubaida against walls, stuffing him into a coffin-sized box and waterboarding him until he coughed, vomited and had "involuntary spasms of the torso and extremities."

Anyone who still calls this "enhanced interrogation" is an idiot and a coward and I have no time for them.

I no longer take seriously anyone, in or out of government, who attempts to justify barbarism in the name of the 3000 Americans who died from another form of barbarism on September 11, 2001. This includes former president George W. Bush and former vice-president Richard Cheney, who apparently are incredibly ungrateful for the fact that Congress went out of its way to take both of them -- and, in fact, almost everyone in the executive branch of their administration, except the CIA -- completely off the hook.

"We're fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the C.I.A. serving on our behalf," he told CNN's Candy Crowley. "These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base."

Anyone who still believes this is an idiot and a coward and I have no time for them.

I no longer take seriously anyone, in or out of government, who talks about "the debate" over whether the United States tortured people. The only debate left is the debate over whether or not it will remain the policy of this nation to torture people, or to outsource the job of torturing people, or to otherwise commit moral and national suicide by euphemism.

Anyone who still believes there's a "debate" over whether or not the United States, using techniques previously used by the Japanese Imperial Army, the Gestapo, the North Korean People's Army, and the KGB, tortured people is an idiot and a coward and I have no time for them. Not any more. Debate's over. We became what they think we are. And worse. This is not debatable and, alas, it is anything but a surprise.

79 comments

one of 79 comments:

Johnieb Wood · Top Commenter

Why am I being treated for psychological injuries sustained forty five years ago?

While an Interrogator for a brigade of the 1st Cav division in Vietnam, I occasionally was sent to work with CIA Advisers and their South Vietnamese officials. They--or we?--routinely beat/tortured anyone in their custody, which was secret to no one on any side; one could only look away and pretend it wasn't really happening. But we could, when and if we returned to th U S, tell what we saw. "I was there. It really happened. We did it." and the American people would know.

I did return, and told my fellow citizens what we were doing, through every outlet I could, and Nixon was re-elected, and people looked the other way when I told them where I'd been, before I had a chance to say what it had been like. So i finally didn't say anymore, I tried to heal, and I do the best I can not to kill my fellow citizens who are shocked that there is gambling in Rick's. While I was looking for teaching positions, I found the department head was a former CIA officer in Vietnam.

I have lowered my expectations. I hope only to go quietly to a peaceful end, and hope I am wrong about what my grand children may face, and try not to think about what happens to the Godde-damned United States of America.

· 46 · Yesterday at 12:00pm

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The Politics Blog

The Torture Report, Part Two: What It Means

By Charles P. Pierce
December 9, 2014


Photo by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images
Interior of the courtroom at the Nuremberg Trials, 1946

There were two forms of water torture. In the first, the victim was tied or held down on his back and cloth placed over his nose and mouth. Water was then poured on the cloth. Interrogation proceeded and the victim was beaten if he did not reply. As he opened his mouth to breathe or answer questions, water went down his throat until he could hold no more. Sometimes, he was then beaten over his distended stomach, sometimes a Japanese jumped on his stomach, or sometimes pressed on it with his foot. In the second, the victim was tied lengthways on a ladder, face upwards, with a rung of the ladder across his throat and head below the latter. In this position he was slid first into a tub of water and kept there until almost drowned. After being revived, interrogation proceeded and he would be reimmersed.

-- J.L. Wilson, Right Reverend Lord Bishop Of Singapore, Testimony To The International Military Tribunal For The Far East, December 16, 1946

continued

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The Politics Blog

The Torture Report, Part Three: What Will Happen Now

By Charles P. Pierce
December 9, 2014


Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
U.S. President George W. Bush (L) Vice President Dick Cheney (C) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attend the retirement ceremony for Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, December 15, 2006

The [Church] committee is remembered today for its chairman's statement that the agency had been "a rogue elephant" -- a pronouncement that badly missed the point by absolving the presidents who had driven the elephant. [George H.W.] Bush, infuriated by the very existence of the Church Committee, refused to answer [Vice-President Walter] Mondale's questions.

-- Tim Weiner, Legacy Of Ashes, P. 351

continued

[seemslikeadream]

The Missing Photos From the Senate Report on CIA Torture
Wednesday, 10 December 2014 15:19
By Michael Meurer, Truthout | News Analysis

A slender but welcome ray of light has been shone on the darkened chambers of CIA torture with the December 9, 2014, release of a report on the agency's detention and interrogation programs by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California).

However, the 528-page "summary version" of the report's "Findings and Conclusions" has, by the admission of Feinstein herself, been heavily redacted and is focused only on CIA torture. It reports only one prisoner death and does not include more damning information and photographic evidence on US torture and prisons operated by the US Army, US Navy and other Department of Defense (DOD) agencies.

For example, in March 2005, CBS's "60 Minutes" reported that 108 prisoners had already died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan prisons. A July 5, 2005, follow-up review of government documents on torture from multiple DOD agencies and the CIA, including the results of criminal investigations by the US Army and Navy, was conducted by Steven H. Miles, M.D., under the joint auspices of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Under the heading, "How Many Detainees Died of Homicide by Torture?" the Miles review said:

In March 2005, the US Armed Forces said that it suspected that 26 deaths were due to criminal homicides. However, it did not clarify whether these deaths occurred on the battlefield or in its prisons. The . . . US Department of Defense enumeration of "Substantiated" criminal homicides of detainees is certainly too low. There are cases in which a homicidal cause of death was not medically recognized and other cases in which the investigation of the death was insufficient to establish whether trauma was inflicted or accidental. Prisoners died of torture at Asadadad, Bagram, and Gardez in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, Camp Whitehorse, Basra, Mosul, Tikrit, Bucca, and an unidentified facility in Iraq (see Table). These cases do not include deaths due to medical neglect, mortar attacks on prisons, or the shootings of rioting prisoners. Such cases will be considered after reviewing US Department of Defense forensic medical procedures.
The availability of this investigative data as early as 2005, showing widespread deaths in US custody, with DOD investigations concluding there were more than two dozen homicides, makes it clear that the Senate report on CIA torture is just a start on the long road to full disclosure. More than 100,000 prisoners have been detained, and many of them tortured, at the US network of prisons across Central Asia since the war on terror began in 2002.

As Truthout reported in October 2014, a pending American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit seeks the release of more than 2,000 photos from the US Army that document an estimated 400 cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons between 2001 and 2005, including sexual assaults using "a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube."

Major General Antonio Taguba, who was appointed to investigate torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and later accused the Bush administration of war crimes, says of the 2,000 unreleased photos: "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

On August 27, 2014, the ACLU won a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in federal district court, in which Judge Alvin Hellerstein ordered the DOD and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to hand over the photos unless they could conclusively prove that American lives would be put at risk by their release. The DOJ was given until December 2014, to provide proof. As The Guardian reported in October 2014:

By 12 December, Justice Department attorneys will have to list, photograph by photograph, the government's rationale for keeping redacted versions of the photos unseen by the public, Judge Alvin Hellerstein instructed lawyers. But any actual release of the photographs will come after Hellerstein reviews the government's reasoning and issues another ruling in the protracted transparency case.
President Obama opposes release of these photos and has publicly stated they would inflame anti-US sentiment. But what signal does the United States send to its own citizens and the world by continuing to suppress and deny the widespread violation of our most fundamental values and the conscious contravention of the Geneva Conventions on torture and human rights?

Civil rights groups from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch are calling for the prosecution of those responsible for the extra-legal human rights violations documented in the Feinstein Senate report on CIA torture. Yet the full spectrum of US torture, secret prisons and even covert airlines to transfer prisoners in secret from one prison to another needs to be exposed in order to know how far up the chain of command responsibility goes.

Human Rights Watch has previously documented the machinations of the Bush administration, including then White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales and the DOJ, in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to consciously circumvent the Geneva Conventions on torture. The internal decision-making process and operational rationale inside the White House during this crucial time is almost certain to have played a major role in establishing the direction of post-9/11 US torture programs. It clearly needs to be fully understood.

The ultimate goal of full disclosure has to remain full accountability, wherever that may lead. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report exposing CIA deceit and prisoner human rights violations is just a beginning, not an end point.

[seemslikeadream]

Who Are Jim Mitchell And Bruce Jessen? CIA Torture Psychologists Were Experts In Communist Chinese Interrogation
By Philip Ross@ThisIsPRop.ross@ibtimes.com on December 10 2014 2:48 PM

Bruce Jessen, right, and Jim Mitchell, not pictured, worked for U.S. military program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, which trained military personnel through mock torture sessions on how to resist enemy interrogations. Jessen is pictured in 1988 at a SERE training camp in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Creative Commons
The architects behind the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal torture program were two retired Air Force psychologists considered masters in the art of coercion. Jim E. Mitchell, 63, and Bruce Jessen, 65, were paid upward of $80 million by the U.S. government to devise America’s boldest and most controversial counterterrorism operation in the country’s history that included methods such as mock burials, "rectal feeding" and waterboarding, according to a Senate report released Tuesday. Some of their methods -- based on Korean War-era interrogation tactics used by Chinese Communists -- were even too gruesome for the CIA.

Neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had language skills or expertise on al Qaeda – the chief enemy in the war on terror – when the CIA handpicked Mitchell and Jessen to spearhead its supposed intelligence gathering program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Their psychology backgrounds were in family therapy; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure. The CIA’s methods were described in detail following a five-year investigation by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"Our goal was to reach the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to resist or deny providing us information (intelligence) to which he had access," Mitchell and Jessen said in a cable published in the report. Not everything the psychologists proposed was approved, however. The CIA rejected the idea of mock burials, among other methods, according to the Senate investigation.

The torture plan mirrored ruthless interrogation techniques used by Chinese Communists to strong-arm false confessions from U.S. prisoners during the Korean War, according to a 2009 report by the New York Times. The admissions were used as propaganda and led to accusations of communist “brainwashing.”

Mitchell and Jessen's catalog of 10 “enhanced interrogation techniques” included sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint, slapping, waterboarding and even insects. Mitchell participated in one of the CIA's first Mitchell-Jessen-style interrogations involving Abu Zubaydah, considered al Qaeda's No. 3 man, in 2002, according to the Times.

While the report only referred to the two psychologists via pseudonyms – Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar – previous reports identified Mitchell and Jessen, whose consulting company Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was contracted by the CIA in 2005 to take over its secret prison program, as its masterminds. “The whole intense interrogation concept that we hear about, is essentially their concepts,” Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator, told ABC News in 2009.

Mitchell joined the U.S. Air Force in 1974, where he became a bombs expert and earned two psychology degrees. He later completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, where he studied the roles of diet and exercise in regulating hypertension. He returned to the Air Force two years later.

Meanwhile, Jessen, who grew up in Idaho, was steadily moving up the military ranks as a psychologist with the Air Force Survival School in Spokane, Washington, a program established in the 1960s to train airmen and women dropped behind enemy lines in how to avoid detection and survive off the land, according to the Times. The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, aimed to give Air Force members an idea of the enemies’ brutal methods. When Jessen was promoted to a top psychologist’s position at the school’s graduate sister school, he was replaced by Mitchell.

During his years with the SERE program, Jessen taught a class on “coping with isolation in a hostage environment,” a main component of the training, according to an investigation by Salon in 2007. Mitchell’s expertise was in bringing prisoners to the point of “helplessness.”

“The irony — and ultimately the tragedy — in the migration of SERE techniques is that the program was specifically designed to protect our soldiers from countries that violated the Geneva Conventions,” Brad Olson of the American Psychological Association, told Salon. “The result of the reverse-engineering, however, was that by making foreign detainees the target, it made us the country that violated the Geneva Conventions.”

Neither psychologist has publicly expressed regret for the program they orchestrated. Mitchell on Tuesday defended the CIA interrogations and accused the Senate of releasing the report for political reasons. "I think it's despicable that they cherry-picked all of that stuff," Mitchell told ABC News. "There were a lot of men and women in the CIA who put their lives on the line, and some of them died after 9/11 protecting the United States. And to suggest that they lied to the president, that they lied to the Senate, that they falsified intel reports so they could make a program look better than it was, is despicable."

[seemslikeadream]

RI SERE threads


UPDATED: Welcome to Boston, Mr. Rumsfeld. You Are Under Arrest.

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Psychologist's Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush's Torture Program

"Torture Team" Reading with Philippe Sands, Vanessa Redgrave Reaction

Taxpayers Paying Torture Contractors' Legal Bills

Guidebook to False Confessions Key Document John Yoo Used

Roger Aldrich Al Qaeda Manual Origins of Mitchel-Jessen

Wolfowitz Directive Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation

Obama Interrogation Official Linked to U.S. Mind Control Research

The Real Roots of the CIA's Rendition and Black Sites Program


The Fifty Top U.S. War Criminals Who Need To Be Prosecuted

Roger Aldrich Al Qaeda Manual Origins of Mitchel-Jessen

Five Decades of US Behavioral Scientists Implicated in Torture

Torture planning began in 2001

"Interrogation Psychologists" and the Allure of "National Security Psychology"

Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side

The CIA's torture teachers

[stillrobertpaulsen]

More Than A Quarter Of The World's Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program

Posted: 12/09/2014 8:34 pm EST

WASHINGTON -- For several months before the Senate Intelligence Committee released a summary of its controversial report on the CIA's torture program on Tuesday, Senate Democrats were locked in a well-publicized battle with the executive branch over whether to redact the aliases used for CIA officials used in the document.

But even as the White House and the CIA engaged in this dispute with the Senate, a separate, and potentially more serious, set of revelations was at stake.

According to several U.S. officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided the CIA's controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006. These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.

The officials all told The Huffington Post in recent weeks that they were nervous the names of those countries might be included in the declassified summary of the Senate report.

The names of the countries ultimately did not appear in the summary. This represents a last-minute victory for the White House and the CIA, since Senate staff was pushing to redact as little as possible from its document.

The various sites in foreign countries are now only identified in the report by a color code, with each detention facility corresponding to a color, such as "Detention Site Black."



But immediately after the document was released, journalists began to crack the code by cross-referencing details in the Senate study with previous reports about the CIA's activities in different countries.

Readers of the report can also learn how the agency managed its relationship with foreign governments, offering monetary payments for their silence and undermining more public U.S. diplomatic efforts by explicitly telling their foreign contacts not to talk to U.S. ambassadors about the torture program.



The officials interviewed by HuffPost believe the Senate report takes a major risk by enabling the identification of these countries. They pointed out that the countries participated with the understanding that their involvement would remain secret. And while many of the countries have already been identified publicly by investigations in Europe, reports from outside analysts and stories in the press, the U.S. government's tacit exposure of their involvement is still likely to have a dramatic impact abroad.

There's precedent for this: Defenders of the executive branch's position can point to the fact that even though much of the information exposed by Wikileaks about Middle East regimes' collusion with the U.S. was not a surprise, seeing the evidence in official U.S. cables helped spark outrage throughout the region and fuel the Arab Spring protests. In that sense, the intelligence community, by managing to obscure the names of the countries even though they are easily identifiable, scored a significant victory in its dispute with the Senate.

Secretary of State John Kerry indicated before the Senate document was released that he is worried about the global outrage that could follow the report. For Kerry and other diplomats, the evidence revealed in the Senate document could prove critically embarrassing for friendly governments, vindicate the narrative that the U.S.'s human rights record is no better than those of its foes, and show that the U.S. is willing to throw partner nations under the bus.

On Friday, Kerry called Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, to request that she delay the release of the report in light of its potential global ramifications. Feinstein did not honor the request, likely out of concern that, were the report's release to be delayed any further, the Senate's new Republican majority would bury the investigation once they took control of the intelligence panel.

Transparency advocates who defend the report believe that the administration's critiques are flawed. If the report makes countries less willing to cooperate on such projects in the future, they argue, that's a benefit, not a cost, because the program was illegal and immoral. The report may actually boost the pressure on foreign governments to make amends, even as the prospects for accountability seem low in the U.S. Four countries -- Canada, Sweden, Australia and the United Kingdom -- have previously given compensation to victims of the program, and Canada has also issued an apology to a victim.

Here are the countries involved.



Countries with secret CIA prisons

The Washington Post decoded the report to reveal countries that were home to secret CIA-controlled prisons.

Afghanistan (4 sites)
Poland
Lithuania
Romania
Thailand

Note: According to a 2013 report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, U.S. facilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina were used to "process" detainees, but it is unclear whether the U.S. agency running that operation was the CIA or the Department of Defense.

Countries with proxy CIA prisons

A number of other foreign partners (including two governments that the U.S. has since disavowed, those of Libya and Syria) permitted the CIA to conduct enhanced interrogation in their own facilities, through what are called proxy CIA prisons. Here's a list, drawn from reports by the ACLU and the Open Society Justice Initiative:

Egypt
Syria
Libya
Pakistan
Jordan
Morocco
Gambia
Somalia
Uzbekistan
Ethiopia
Djibouti

Countries that enabled renditions

This list features countries that proved amenable to at least some CIA measures that were only questionably legal. It is a curious mix of prominent Western nations and nations with which the U.S. has long has difficulties. The governments' assistance ranged from passing along information about suspects, including those countries' own citizens, to serving as a transit point for flights to countries where enhanced interrogation was taking place.

Afghanistan
Austria
Australia
Albania
Algeria
Azerbaijan
Belgium
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Canada
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Djibouti
Egypt
Ethiopia
Finland
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong
Iceland
Indonesia
Iran
Ireland
Italy
Jordan
Kenya
Libya
Lithuania
Macedonia
Malawi
Malaysia
Mauritania
Morocco
Pakistan
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
South Africa
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sweden
Syria
Thailand
Turkey
United Arab Emirates (UAE)
United Kingdom
Uzbekistan
Yemen
Zimbabwe

CORRECTION: Earlier versions of the infographic failed to include Macedonia and Hong Kong as states that participated in the rendition program (Hong Kong took part as an autonomous region of China able to enter some international agreements on its own) and to include Thailand as a country that hosted a secret CIA prison and enabled rendition. Macedonia was also wrongly excluded from the list of “countries that enabled renditions” in the text of the story. The infographic earlier misidentified Norway and Kosovo as countries that enabled rendition and misidentified Myanmar as a country that hosted a secret CIA prison and enabled rendition. None of these three countries has been shown to be part of the CIA's program. The graphic also misidentified the geographical position of Malawi and excluded areas of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Greece, Indonesia and Malaysia.

[seemslikeadream]

British spies may have been present at some CIA torture sessions, former security minister suggests
Admiral Lord West said there may have been the “odd case” where agents were aware of what the Americans were doing and may have even been in the same room

Tom Whitehead By Tom Whitehead, Security Editor12:43PM GMT 12 Dec 2014
British spies will have been aware of some CIA torture cases, a former security minister has suggested, as pressure mounted for a full judicial inquiry in to what the UK knew.
Admiral Lord West admitted there may have been the “odd case” where agents were aware of what the Americans were doing and may have even been present in the building.
But the former minister insisted the UK would not have taken part and dismissed calls for a full inquiry as a “waste of time”.
It came as Theresa May, the Home Secretary, faced questions over whether she applied pressure to the US Senate committee to censor its devastating report in to CIA torture, when she met with it in 2011.
It has emerged British ministers and officials held 24 meetings with members of the committee since 2009 sparking accusations that the UK sought to have any possible evidence of complicity redacted.

On Thursday Downing Street confirmed that MI6 had had discussions with its UAS counterparts to censor parts of the executive summary on grounds of national security.
Lord West, who was security minister between 2007 and 2010, said torture was "abhorrent" and was not used by the British because "we have to be whiter than white" in the battle against international terrorists.
But the former chief of defence intelligence said that 10 or 15 years ago it was not clear to British spies "as to exactly what their position was in regards to these things".
He told the BBC: "Looking back historically, if you are an agent embedded in some foreign country and this was going on, it was quite difficult for them to extricate themselves even though they weren't implementing that torture.
"So I'm sure there may be the odd case where an agent was aware what the Americans were doing, but that has now been sealed off because they are very clear now what the position is."
He added: "Would we - as we dug around and had some huge inquiry - find that one agent or maybe two agents were once in a room when somebody was waterboarded? Possibly we might."
Downing Street has not ruled out the possibility of a full judicial inquiry in to allegations of British complicity in to torture if the ongoing investigation by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee fails to answer all the questions.
But Lord West told Sky: "I really do think it's a waste of time, what are we trying to prove? The only thing one might find is 10, 15 years ago maybe an agent or maybe two agents were aware waterboarding was going on, indeed may even have been in the same building.
"But in the last 10 years or so we have made it very clear exactly what the position is for all our agents, they know they are not allowed even to be there when anything like that happens."
Lord West also met with the Senate committee in 2009 but said he "absolutely didn't lobby any committee about this report".
The Home Office declined to comment on Mrs May's meeting with the committee in July 2011 but Downing Street said it would have involved a "wide range of issues".
Reprieve spokesman Donald Campbell said: "We already know that the UK was complicit in the CIA's shameful rendition and torture programme.
"What we don't know is why there is no mention of that in the public version of the Senate's torture report.
"There are important questions which members of the current and the previous governments must answer: did they lobby to ensure embarrassing information about the UK was 'redacted' or removed from the report?"
A Downing Street spokeswoman was asked at a regular Westminster media briefing what subjects were discussed at Mrs May's meeting with the committee.
The spokeswoman said: "The Home Secretary did meet with the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2011, during one of her visits to the United States.
"I would note that the Senate Intelligence Committee has existed since the 1970s and covers a wide range of issues, just as the Intelligence and Security Committee does here, so I think you would expect a number of issues to be discussed when ministers – or indeed ambassadors and officials – meet with senators on that committee."
Asked whether David Cameron agreed with Lord West that a fresh inquiry would be a waste of time, the Number 10 spokeswoman said: "Our position is that we do have the Intelligence and Security Committee looking at the outstanding issues from the Gibson Inquiry.
"We hope that that will report by the end of next year and when that has reported we should look at the issues.
"If there are still matters to be addressed, then we will look at that."

[conniption]

counterpunch

Weekend Edition December 12-14, 2014

We Can't Just Demand Justice
Torture Is Exactly Who We Are

by MISSY BEATTIE

I could not read the names without weeping—a list of the tortured detainees. I stared at each name, lingering, imagining, feeling. I thought of the euphemism, enhanced interrogation, like collateral damage, a manipulation of words to mitigate the depravity by making the unacceptable sound less repugnant.

Torture by any other name is still torture.

Defending the CIA’s violations, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said this really wasn’t legally torture, but “we knew as bad as these people were, we were doing this to fellow human beings.” Really? Did they, the supporters of state-sponsored horror, consider, even for a second, that the detainees were human beings?

Barack Obama said that post-9/11 torture is contrary to who we are. He’s wrong. It is exactly who we are.

Dick Cheney said the torture was “absolutely, totally justified,” dismissing allegations that the CIA withheld information from the White House. The torture program was Bush and Cheney’s new toy, and they were spectators to pain.

Bush defended the CIA: “They are good people. These are patriots.”

“It’s incumbent upon a democracy in terms of our values that we represent to the world that when we have bad moments, we hold ourselves accountable,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill.

This was not a mere “bad moment”, a minor misjudgment. It was calculated, designed, and approved by top officials.

Sen. Diane Feinstein said she hoped the public would view the report in the “spirit of a just society [that] functions under law, and that when we make mistakes we admit them, we correct them, and we move on.” Feinstein continued: “I think that’s an important thing.”

Does Feinstein really believe our society is “just” and “functions under law”? How could she? But therein lies the huge obstacle towards justice. Her saying that admitting mistakes allows us to “move on” is the babble of someone who’s read the jacket of a self-help book, unless “correct them” means holding them responsible in a court of law—exactly what she opposes, since too many of her cronies are complicit.

The Bush/Cheney administration’s chamber of horrors is an extension of the greed, opportunism, and violence that pervade our system. Yielding nothing in terms of intelligence and security and, in fact, counterproductive, it was sport for officials at the top of that particular food chain. Even if it had provided information, it still would be wrong, illegal, morally reprehensible.

Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, the two psychologists who formed a business and developed the theories of interrogation based on “learned helplessness,” are former military officers. They were paid $80 million for their vision. Arrest them.

Arrest them all. Hold criminally accountable the Bush/Cheney administration, the people who sanctioned torture, the participants, and those who stood by with silent approval.

Further, when anyone argues that the release of the report hurts American interests or America’s reputation, we must conclude that fear and denial have descended. Even though the hideous torture techniques were no secret. For instance, Lindsay Graham, easily aroused by war rhetoric, said, “Don’t release it now because the world is on fire.” I thought he liked the flames, conflagrations ignited and fanned by the USA. Graham’s concern must be the possibility of repercussions, a stained legacy.

While ignoring abuses within our own borders, the US accuses other countries of human rights violations using these as a pretext for invasion or regime change. We pretend to spread democracy without nurturing it at home. Exceptional doesn’t describe us. Those who believe in American exceptionalism are the men and women in positions of influence who wear a flag pin and the flag-waving, my-country-never-wrong nationalists who scream “USA! USA! USA!” in a crass display of arrogance. As fascism kudzu vines our lives.

Torture defines us. Torture is a Kill List. Torture is a drone. Torture is war. Torture is incinerating men, women, and children to obtain coveted resources. Torture is turning other countries into wastelands with weapons that remain in the water, the soil, air, the DNA.

Torture is sending our young to die for lies, a uniform embellished with ribbons and metal medals, a Purple Heart, broken hearts, burial in a national cemetery. Torture is the loved one who returns from war a double or quadruple amputee, with PTSD, with a traumatic brain injury.

Torture is so far away we don’t know the dead, the maimed, their names. But torture is also nearby, where we do: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Darrien Hunt, Michael Brown, so many more. Torture is the growing number of homeless children, hungry children.

Torture is a militarized police force, organized to enervate, to mute us, to render us voiceless when conscienceless minds conceive and perpetrate egregious acts that are committed in our names.

Torture is exactly who we are—unless we prove otherwise. We can’t just demand justice though. We also must follow it to completion, prosecute the criminals, end war, close our military bases. This includes the wars in our own neighborhoods, towns, and cities, anything that separates us from our humanity.

Missy Beattie has written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. She was an instructor of memoirs writing at Johns Hopkins’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Baltimore. Email: missybeat@gmail.com

[seemslikeadream]

from The Rude Pundit

12/12/2014

Before the Torture Report Disappears
It's already happening, no? The Senate Intelligence committee's report on the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation techniques, known colloquially as "torture," is in the fast fade from our news cycle and from our outrage churner. It's become like that hot fuck one torrid night on a Mexican vacation, when the tequila and ecstasy flowed and you went back to your timeshare with one of the local dudes and balled your brains out, in the rush, the hurlyburly and hustle of the three hours left between leaving the bar and the cruel light of dawn. Ah, that was something you did, you can say later, and then go on with your life. If it left you with a case of herpes, well, shit, people live with that all the time, don't they? At least it ain't the HIV. Where's the beach?

So it seems it will be with the torture report, something that stays with us the rest of our days, incurable, occasionally surfacing, but tolerated. Already, the media have moved on, to the CRomnibus, the Sony email leak, the floods in California. There will be more Eric Garner and Michael Brown protests, so we're not so brain-damaged that we can't have memory of something for more than a week or two. The Tamir Rice shooting is coming into sharper focus, too. And there's all that Christmas shopping to be done.

The Rude Pundit has never had any illusions. He never thought that any prosecutions or even arrests would happen. He never thought there would be a reckoning of any sort. Oh, sure, he hoped we might spend more than a few days pointing fingers. But we are a nation that simply doesn't like to look in the mirror. And if no one is there to hold our heads and point them straight ahead, then we are happy to glance and then gaze away, into the unknown, always blindly optimistic about the future.

Before we move on, though, the Rude Pundit wants to deal with a couple last things and then we can go back to snarkily saying, "Rectal infusion" and giggling, ignoring the whole ass rape part of the act.

Conservatives and current and former members of the intelligence community promised, swore up and down, that the release of the torture report would cause violence and protests against the United States. The White House was even worried. Except, of course, it hasn't. As Joshua Keating says in Slate, it seems like the extremists in the Muslim world are more upset about degradation of their faith, like pissing on Korans or making a shitty film about Mohammed, than they are about the treatment of a few score individuals. Or maybe it's just the lack of photos this time or a sad shrug that this is all shit they knew about.

Either way, why the fuck would it matter what the reaction would be? When the people supporting the cops defend the officer who killed Eric Garner, they say that Garner should have just allowed himself to be arrested. It's his fault that violence happened. If he didn't want something bad to happen to him, he shouldn't have done something wrong in the first place. Well, fuck, doesn't that also go for torture? The time to worry about what the Muslim world - if not the entire rest of the globe - thought about us is before you start torturing. Once you've done it, aren't you kind of just asking for it? The Rude Pundit doesn't want there to be any violence against Americans, but, Jesus, stop behaving as if we're so fucking special that, even when we do evil shit, we should not be viewed as an enemy. When did we start giving a fuck about the possible damage we might be doing? The number of civilian deaths doesn't stop us from firing drone missiles.

We're Americans, goddamnit. We act without expecting there to be any consequences because fuck you. George W. Bush called the torturers "patriots." Who are you to argue?

The torture supporters defend themselves by saying that they had to do whatever it takes to protect the United States after 9/11. They say that Americans - and especially Congress and the President- wanted our intelligence agents to go brutal if they had to, especially in "the emergency and often-chaotic circumstances we confronted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11." It was a "ticking bomb" scenario, they say. But did it keep ticking for five years?

Others talk about how scared Americans were. The Rude Pundit was a thinking adult on September 11, 2001. He talked to lots of thinking adults. We were gung-ho for getting the fuckers who were behind the attacks. But mostly we were just sad about how fucked up the world had become, and he remembers specific conversations with people about how we hoped the United States wouldn't act like assholes. As soon as the invasion of Afghanistan occurred (and not a small force just to get bin Laden), along with the opening of the prison at Gitmo, the Rude Pundit knew we were gonna be total dicks.

We tortured because we're big enough to be bullies without fear of real recriminations. We also tortured because we're cowards who demonstrated quite plainly that all that shit about freedom is readily cast aside when we feel even a bit threatened. We're forgetting about it now because we're also really good at pretending, a family that sweeps it all under a rug so lumpy that you have to walk around it to get across the room.