The capitalist media have been writing stories about a secret U.S. Justice Department decision to approve more extreme forms of torture to be used in interrogations of “terror suspects.”
Most appalling, although unsurprising, was the decision to approve “water boarding,” a gruesome tactic that involves
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Other approved methods of torture include food deprivation, holding prisoners in frigid temperatures without clothing, and head slapping. This information, published in the New York Times, was enclosed in two secret memos circulated in the Justice Department in 2005.
These gruesome acts are certainly not the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the CIA, but they are particularly obscene methods to be legally authorized.
According to MSNBC, a senior administrator responded evasively, “one should not assume all techniques used previously will be used in the future.” Bush responded with typical arrogance, “highly trained professionals conduct any questioning. And by the way, we have gotten information from these high-value detainees that have helped protect you.”
The corporate media have mainly focused on two aspects of the memo: the fact that it directly contradicts a 2004 statement, which called torture “abhorrent,” and the fact that the decision was made in secret.
Long-standing practice
But torture is not a new phenomenon in the Justice Department and the CIA. It has been a tactic regularly employed against enemies of the U.S. empire.
This is the reality the New York Times obscured when it asserted that, “Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.” To further pardon the CIA, the New York Times suggested that the CIA had “virtually no experience in interrogations,” and was forced to rush to create a program.
This is not a question of one rogue president or department. The CIA and Justice Department are not noble and just institutions that have gone astray due to inept leadership.
In Latin America, generations of torturers and military dictators received training at what was then called the School of the Americas, a CIA-operated installation in Fort Benning, Ga. Tens of thousands of victims can testify to the U.S. government’s real legacy of torture, brutality and outright murder.
From Chile to El Salvador, torturers trained by Washington terrorized whole populations. Those who suffered the worst were leftists and sympathizers, but no one was immune.
U.S.-trained Honduran torturer Florencio Caballero described his CIA training to the New York Times in 1988: “They taught us psychological methods—to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.”
Guantánamo Bay has become an international symbol of human rights violations in recent years, prompting the United Nations—typically a docile body in the face of U.S. imperialism—to label it a “torture center.”
In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions do in fact cover people being held in secret prisons. This decision prompted the Bush administration to acknowledge that “black prisons,” or secret prisons, exist.
The latest torture revelation adds another crime to the imperialist rap sheet.
While the bourgeois press debates about the best method of torture, the reality is that it is not in the nature of imperialist institutions like the CIA to carry out justice or humanitarian work. They are, and have always been, meant to oppress, terrorize and torture the people who the U.S government seeks to subdue and conquer.
