[News] Torture: an American Legacy

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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 “that’s 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 don’t”.

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 Custer’s 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 
Chivington’s 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 children’s privates cut out.  I heard one man 
say that he had cut out a woman’s 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 man’s testicles, you ring him up 
and he always answers.  It’s known as the Bell 
Telephone Hour.  You won’t 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 “didn’t 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 don’t scream, otherwise she’ll 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, they’re 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 day’s 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.




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