[News] Torture: an American Legacy
Anti-Imperialist News
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Wed Jun 17 10:46:17 EDT 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/
June 17, 2009
A Pattern of (Not Deviation From) Empire
Torture: an American Legacy
By CARL BOGGS
As Bush-era episodes of torture have became
almost daily hand ringing fare for establishment
politicians and the media, calls for national
soul-searching and reform arrive with a
predictable litany of myths and
illusions. Mainstream scrutiny peaked with the
April release of incriminating torture memos
issued by the Office of Legal Council spanning
the years 2002 to 2005 memos that involved
clear violation of the Geneva and Torture
Conventions. The issue has touched a raw nerve
in the political culture, with government and
military leaders echoed by media pundits
quick to parrot two comforting discourses: abuses
were the product of a few wayward (low-level)
military personnel, a violation of sacred U.S.
practices and values including the rule of
law. The first myth necessarily disappeared
from view after several reports (including one
conducted by the U.S. Army) had shown culpability
extending all the way to the summits of
power. But the fiction about torture being a
radical departure from American traditions persists.
In a recent speech at UCLA, former NATO commander
and 2004 presidential candidate General Wesley
Clark denounced torture as an evil blight
conflicting with the well-known American
dedication to international rules and laws. Law
is sacred to the American system, pronounced
Clark. A retreat from Geneva means nothing less
than abandoning American values. In the
aftermath of the 2004 Abu Ghraib revelations,
President George W. Bush said that prisoner abuse
was an embarrassing exception to time-honored
national precedents, for thats not the way we
do things in America a sentiment repeated by
politicians and commentators across the
ideological spectrum. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, speaking in December 2005,
claimed: With respect to detainees the United
States government complies with its Constitution,
its laws, and its treaty obligations. Acts of
physical or mental torture are expressly
prohibited. The United States government does
not authorize or condone torture of
detainees. Torture, and conspiracy to commit
torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they
may occur in the world. She described
atrocities at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib as
sickening aberrations from the norm, thus
unlikely to be repeated. More recently, Rice
denied altogether that the U.S. practiced torture
in a heated exchange with Stanford University students.
In the midst of these platitudes, liberals, more
troubled by the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib events,
have simply added their own myths. Media figures
like Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes, and Ron Reagan
have denounced Bush-era crimes as counter to the
American character: the torture of detainees is a
uniquely wicked invention of Bush, Cheney, and
the neocons. A major problem, according to the
liberals, is that harsh interrogation methods
never work since they undermine
intelligence-gathering, eliciting nothing but
false information. This contention only reveals
a shallow understanding of how torture has
historically worked. Commenting on her April
22nd MSNBC show, Maddow roundly condemned torture
carried out by the CIA and Pentagon, intoning We
have been doing things [torture] we have never
done before in the United States. We never did
that stuff before. How did that ever
happen? Human-rights abuses, like the doctrine
of preemptive war, were the brainchild of the
Bush clique. It was the Republican Party that
gave us torture as practiced by the U.S.
government, Maddow informed her April 27th
audience, adding either we have a Constitution or we dont.
It takes little investigation to see that such
views have little basis in actual U.S.
history. Torture has always been a staple of
U.S. military interventions, built into its very
logic of imperial agendas. A nation that has
launched warfare dozens of times, repeatedly
attacked civilian populations, destroyed entire
societies, used weapons of mass destruction, and
deployed massive armed force to crush popular
movements around the world killing millions and
displacing tens of millions more in the process
could hardly be expected to shy away from
smaller-scale criminality in its pursuit of
Manifest Destiny. Illegal detentions, denial of
due process, kidnappings, assassinations,
death-squad murders, and cruel interrogation
techniques have long been just another valuable
(if illegal) tool of imperial power. U.S.
exterminationist policies against Native
Americans throughout the nineteenth century,
involving widespread torture, served as a prelude
to later barbarism in the Philippines, Mexico,
the Pacific Theater in World War II, Korea,
Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle
East. Decades of Indian Wars brought not only
the Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee
massacres but unspeakable acts of everyday
brutality: beatings, scalpings, mutiliations,
sexual assaults, kidnappings, prisoner
mistreatment, and shootings, often along with
larger-scale attacks on civilian
encampments. Captives were often summarily
executed, including women, children, and
elderly. Dwellings were routinely burned to the
ground, food stores destroyed, ponies and buffalo
slaughtered by the thousands. Dying Indians were
frequently tortured, killed, and mutilated. Such
atrocities reached new heights when General
George Armstrong Custer attacked a defenseless
settlement of Cheyenne women and children at the
Washita River in Oklahoma in 1868, a massacre
solidifying Custers credentials as heroic Indian fighter.
At Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864 the carnage
wrought by the fanatically pious Colonel John
Chivington was especially savage. Reflecting on
Chivingtons God-ordained massacre, a lieutenant
from the New Mexico Volunteers wrote: Of from
five to six hundred souls [killed] the majority
of which were women and children . . . I did not
see a body of a man, woman, or child but was
scalped, and in many instances their bodies were
mutilated in a most horrible manner men, women,
and childrens privates cut out. I heard one man
say that he had cut out a womans private parts
and had them for exhibition on a stick. I heard
another man say he had cut the fingers of an
Indian to get the rings on the hand . .
. According to this and many similar reports,
soldiers used knives to rip apart bodies, and
none were spared. Torture, butchery, mutilation
there seemed to be no limits to U.S. military
barbarism on the frontier. Those horrors were
repeated time and again, culminating in the
Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 where hundreds of
defenseless women and children were slaughtered,
many tortured before the last fatal assaults.
Slavery? That was an institutionalized system of
torture indeed terrorism from beginning to
end. The war to end slavery? Well, the Civil
War produced four years of unbelievable butchery
and torture on both sides, both within and
outside the many notorious prison camps maintained North and South.
As international law became refined since the
early twentieth century, following the two Hague
Conventions, prohibitions against torture and
similar abuses were established and codified, but
U.S. global behavior took no heed, persisting in
its earlier criminal pattern. By the 1890s U.S.
imperialism and outlawry was expanding outward,
shifting its targets to Latin America, Asia, and
later the Middle East. In World War II, the
fabled good war, torture became routine
practice in the Pacific Theater were the U.S.
carried out a war of attrition against the
Japanese culminating in months of saturation
bombing raids and two nuclear horrors. In what
John Dower calls a war without mercy (on both
sides) the Japanese were irredeemably evil, a
monolithic race apart, so subhuman that the most
extreme barbarism could be justified. Racial
stereotypes of savage Asian hordes permeated U.S.
media both in the military and home front,
sustaining a racially-charged milieu in which
rules of engagement were thrown to the
wind. Aside from incendiary aerial bombardments
of every Japanese city, repeated smaller
atrocities were common: shooting of prisoners,
torture, lifeboat strafings, attacks on
hospitals, civilian abuse, wounded buried alive,
mutilated corpses. When such criminality became
known to general military and political circles,
it was fiercely defended, even celebrated in an
atmosphere of vengeful racial hatred.
In the aftermath of World War II and Korea (laden
with even more atrocities), the Vietnam War
produced near-total collapse moral and social
constraints as U.S. criminality behavior achieved
new records. Testimony of first-hand witnesses
at the 1971 Winter Solider Hearings and elsewhere
showed that rules of engagement applied only in
military textbooks. There were no limits to the
barbarism. Vietnamese running from combat,
taking evasive action, or giving the appearance
of combatants were regularly detained, kept
captive, and more often than not tortured when
not immediately fired upon. American troops
rarely tried to distinguish civilians from
combatants, a difficult task in any event under
conditions of guerrilla insurgency. The
prevailing idea was that, in the midst of combat
and free-fire zones, any Vietnamese encountered
was a gook who, by definition, was the
enemy. The Vietnam brutality was never-ending
burning homes, mass killings, torture, rape,
murder of wounded prisoners, beatings,
destruction of animals and life-support systems,
use of chemical weapons, all fueled by some
combination of revenge, sadism, combat stress,
intimidation, and in certain instances sexual
pleasure. Such practices were routinely
tolerated or even sanctioned at the very top of the command structure.
In Vietnam ordinary troops, as well as military
intelligence personnel, soon became well-versed
in methods of harassment, intimidation, and
torture as they detained, questioned, and
punished North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops in
the field. Methods included throwing people out
of helicopters, electric shock treatment, severe
beatings, and mutilation. Prisoners were often
taken for flying lessons or half a helicopter
ride as interrogators kept throwing people out
until someone cooperated. Other creative
torture methods were employed to break down
possible informants. When a captive proved
stubborn, according to one U.S. soldier, the
answer is invariable, you take a field telephone,
wire it around a mans testicles, you ring him up
and he always answers. Its known as the Bell
Telephone Hour. You wont find it in the
curriculum. Torture could be randomly used,
the assumption being that civilians were likely
to be VC supporters or at least hostile to
American troops. Those captured were tortured
not only to gain information but more often out
of hatred, sadism, or sexual pleasure. No U.S.
military figure in Vietnam was likely to argue
that torture somehow didnt work.
Rape became a medium of combining sex and
violence. According to one macabre account: .
. . maybe four or five of us would go into a
village and take a girl and bring her out to the
jungle. . . . Explain to her to lie on the
ground and dont scream, otherwise shell be
killed immediately, and however many guys there
are well, they all do what they want. And if
the guys are in a good mood, they let her go. If
not they kill her. Sexual assault was often
followed by torture. According to widespread
testimony and reports, some women were burned to
death after gasoline was poured over their body
and troops stood around and sadistically
watched. Routine sexual encounters between GIs
and Vietnamese women frequently grew violent,
leading to rapes, beatings, and murder.
None of this could be dismissed as the isolated
or aberrant behavior of a few undisciplined
soldiers, nor was it related manly to
intelligence operations. Recycling racist
imagery that gave wars against Native Americans,
Japanese, and Koreans added savagery, military
leaders called the Vietnamese gooks, thugs, and
vermin, with General William Westmoreland
preferring the label worthless termites the
same termites, presumably, that were to be
given the blessings of freedom and democracy.
Extreme racist attitudes permeated the military
culture from top to bottom, as would later be the
case in Iraq. According to one participant in
the field, the voices of authority in the
company the platoon sergeants and officers
acknowledged that [executing prisoners] was a
proper way to behave. Who were the grunts to
disagree with it? We supported it . . .
By late 1960s the CIA Phoenix Program had been
responsible for the illegal detention and torture
of untold thousands of captives. Under this
program U.S. operatives assassinated an estimated
21,000 Vietnamese officials in the South. As the
war expanded, Navy SEALs and other units mounted
raids to destroy homes, capture and torture
people, and conduct summary executions at random.
Many hundreds of thousands (mostly civilians)
were rounded up, detained, and subjected to
unspeakable brutality all condoned or at least
ignored all the way to the top of the military and government leadership.
The U.S. criminal record in Central America,
while perhaps less egregious than that in Asia,
spans a lengthier historical period during which
the CIA, Pentagon, and U.S. proxy groups
detained, tortured, and killed tens of thousands
of people in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras,
Panama, and Nicaragua. Such atrocities flowed
from official policies at a time when
U.S.-supported corporate and oligarchical
interests were being challenged or overturned by
popular forces. As Jennifer Harbury shows in her
well-researched study of torture across Central
America, Truth, Torture, and the American Way: A
review of the materials leads relentlessly to
just one conclusion: that the CIA and related
U.S. intelligence agencies have since their
inception engaged in the widespread practice of
torture, either directly or through well-paid
proxies. Counterinsurgency campaigns gave rise
to regular kidnappings, detentions, torture, and
executions. The U.S., often through its infamous
School of the Americas and other domestic
military bases, provided finances, training,
logistics, and weapons the work of mostly
secret projects organized by the CIA. In
Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua local
atrocities reach their peak during the 1980s as
the linkage between the U.S. and Central American
agencies of death and destruction intensified,
leading to a wave of abductions, torture, and murder.
As in Vietnam, torture and related atrocities in
Central America were rarely the outgrowth of
excesses, mistakes, or the work of a few renegade
troops; nor were they usually motivated by the
quest for reliable intelligence. They were
rooted in the logic of control and repression.
What was understood as necessary dirty work
took years to plan and refine, much of it carried
over from the Vietnam experience. Such methods
as solitary confinement, beatings, electric
shocks, stress positions, and sexual humiliation
to be replicated later at Guantanamo and Abu
Ghraib had been de rigeur in Vietnam. One
difference in Central America was that the U.S.
chose to work through local military units and
death squads, that is by proxy, so that
atrocities could never be traced by the the
guilty Washington operatives. Still, as Harbury
points out, there were few doubts in the field as
to who was calling the shots: The Yankees in the
torture cells were not working for local military
officials at all. To the contrary, they were
very much in charge, and had clear authority over
the torturers themselves. The Americans were not
taking orders, they were giving them. At times
they were even supervising the entire torture session.
The postwar years witnessed a wide U.S. legacy of
illegal detentions, torture, assassination, and
other mayhem as tried-and-proven instruments of
imperial power, from Latin American to Indonesia,
Iran, Central Asia, and the Balkans as well as
Korea and Vietnam not only through the CIA but
Special Forces units, Navy SEALs, Delta Force
operatives, and other military actions. Harsh
interrogation methods were always just one facet
of this worldwide terror apparatus.
The events at Abu Ghraib were thus simply one
more episode in the overall trajectory of U.S.
imperialism, subordinate to a brutal military
occupation bringing endless horrors to the Iraqi
population. Prison abuse was built into the
general mosaic of domination, set up in
Washington and pursued with cruel rationality in
the field where U.S. troops, as in Vietnam, were
constantly surrounded by enemies or
terrorists. Not only detention centers but
homes, checkpoints, urban neighborhoods, and
roadways served as arenas of armed combat,
leading to recurrent arrests, beatings, home
invasions, shootings, bombings, and massacres (as
at Hadditha in 2006). Reports of U.S. military
officers ordering beatings of Iraqis were common
from the 2003 invasion onward. Troops were
ordered to crank up the violence level in the
struggle to quell insurgency violence that
included assaults, torture, and random killings,
both in and out of the many prisons little of
it designed to secure intelligence. Following
a procedure called dead-checking, it was a
recurring practice for American troops to murder
wounded Iraqis according to the maxim if
somebody is worth shooting once, theyre worth shooting twice.
One instigator of the Abu Ghraib torture, Pfc.
Lynndie England, said in an interview that such
practices were essentially business-as-usual
just troops behaving normally in a combat
environment filled with stress,anger, and
fear. No moral scruples or rules of engagement
entered the picture. Others described the events
as a matter of bored soldiers simply passing
time, having fun. That so many prisoners were
stripped naked, sexually intimidated or violated,
beaten, hooded, shackled, handcuffed, and forced
into stress positions not to mention sleep and
food deprived provoked little if any outrage at the scene.
In the film Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, one convicted
soldier, Specialist Sabrine Harman, spoke at
length about the atrocities as if she were
describing a movie or tennis match: it was all in
a days work, nothing special. Photographed
laughing next to an Iraqi corpse, she was
unapologetic, explaining that she always liked to
smile for photos. What emerges from Abu Ghraib
and other U.S. gulags like Guantanamo and Baghram
Air Base in Afghanistan is a bleak and
frightening picture of sadistic military behavior
devoid of moral, legal, or social restraints,
with virtually nothing to do with procuring
information. (The CIA and military did try to
force some prisoners to supply information,
under duress, that would justify the fraudulent
basis of U.S. intervention in Iraq a miserable
failure but that is another tale. Accused
terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed recently
admitted that he had lied to the CIA after being
harshly treated.) Still, recent atrocities at
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib waterboarding, sleep
and food deprivation, sensory abuses hardly
compare to the routine barbarism practiced in Vietnam and earlier U.S. wars.
History shows that present-day U.S. torture and
other similar outlawry has deep roots in the
past, the byproduct of an ever-expanding imperial
apparatus of control and repression. In
hundreds of pages of long-classified but
recently-disclosed files, CIA documents alone
describe an immense variety of illegal
activities: secret holding cells around the
world, unlawful detentions without due process,
vast surveillance, plots to assassinate foreign
leaders, severe interrogation methods. Such
outrages are outgrowth of established patterns
rather than deviations from (romanticized)
historical norms, integral to the far greater
savagery of aggressive warfare. U.S. militarism
has routinely embraced criminal behavior
sanctioned, more often than not, at the highest
levels of Washington officialdom. The CIA
torture networks in place across several decades,
but only recently a focus of mainstream political
concern, represents just one cornerstone of U.S.
imperial efforts to maximize its global
surveillance, intelligence, and control potential.
Carl Boggs is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594512981/counterpunchmaga>The
Hollywood War Machine (Paradigm) just and
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742527727/counterpunchmaga>Imperial
Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War,
which appeared last year. He can be reached at:
<mailto:cboggs at nu.edu>cboggs at nu.edu
Notes.
Los Angeles Times (October 3, 2006).
Los Angeles Times (December 6, 2005).
On the Washita River massacre, see Judith Nies,
Native American History (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), p. 276.
Cited in Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of
Genocide (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997),p. 233.
Churchill, p. 234.
John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pp. 64-66.
See, for example, James William Gibson, The
Perfect War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986)l, pp. 138-42.
Gibson, p. 149.
Cited in Gibson, p. 184.
Cited in Gibson, pp. 202-03.
Gibson, p. 203.
Gibson, p. 226.
Cited in Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 303.
See Gibson, The Perfect War, pp. 300-01.
Jennifer Harbury, Truth, Torture, and the
American Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005),p. 29.
Harbury, p. 30.
Harbury, p. 98.
Freedom Archives
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