On April 16, the Justice Department released documents detailing more than a dozen torture techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency at secret prisons located throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The documents were written under the Bush administration between 2002 and 2005 as it expanded its assault on the Middle East under the guise of the “war on terror.”
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In one case, Abu Zubaydah was kept in a small box. When agents discovered that Zubaydah was afraid of insects, they placed them in the box, telling him they were poisonous, stinging insects. Other prisoners were chained around their necks and slammed against a flexible wall to maximize the sound.
Waterboarding plays a prominent role in the memos and has become the most infamous of the techniques for good reason. The shocking torture method involves strapping the victim to a bench, placing a cloth over his or her face and pouring water on the cloth to simulate drowning. The practice has been defined as a form of torture since the Spanish Inquisition, and in the aftermath of World War II, Japanese military personnel were prosecuted for war crimes for subjecting POWs to the tactic.
According to the memos, Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times in a single month of captivity. And Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded over 180 times in a similar span. These numbers are far greater than previously admitted and suggest that the torture tactic is both indescribably cruel and largely useless.
As an arm of the imperialist U.S. state, the CIA was founded in 1947 to provide support for counterrevolutionary elements in Europe. The agency’s mission has broadened to serve as a key tool of the capitalists’ drive for global domination. The CIA has a history of running covert operations around the world.
In the 1980s, the CIA funded the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the progressive government that had taken power. It tried hundreds of times to assassinate former Cuban President Fidel Castro and coordinated assistance to the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Predator drones operated by the agency have been bombing tribal regions of Pakistan, killing over 700 people on the border region with Afghanistan since the summer of 2008. The CIA also spies on people inside the United States while it organizes reactionary forces around the world.
On April 20, Barack Obama spoke at CIA headquarters and promised that there would not be prosecutions for using these torture techniques. The next day, because of building public pressure and anger, Obama suggested there might be investigations. Even this statement was a signal to those responsible for the torture that Obama would try to avoid prosecution, saying at a press conference, “As a general view, I think that we should be looking forward and not backwards.”
This approach is fully in line with the Obama administration’s policy of continuing to promote U.S. imperialism across the world. Though it pursues this policy with a different face and strategy than George Bush, the goals of continuing U.S. dominance remains the same.
