<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<h1>Imperialism and the Politics of Torture</h1>
<span class="small">12.15.2014 <b>::</b> <a
href="http://petras.lahaine.org/?cat=1" title="View all posts in
United States" rel="category tag">United States</a><br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=2018">http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=2018</a></small></small></b><br>
<br>
</span>
<div class="pret_art"><strong>Introduction</strong>: The US Senate
Report documenting CIA torture of alleged terrorist suspects
raises a number of fundamental <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">questions</span> about the <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">nature</span> and operations
of the State, the relationship and the responsibility of the
Executive Branch and Congress to the vast secret police networks
which span the globe – including the United States.</div>
<img src="cid:part2.02050703.01080607@freedomarchives.org" alt=""
border="0" height="1" width="100%"><br>
<br>
<img src="cid:part3.07050702.08000403@freedomarchives.org" alt=""
height="1" width="100%">
<div class="entrytext">
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">CIA: The
Politics of a Global Secret Police Force</span></strong></p>
<p>The Senate Report’s revelations of <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">CIA torture of suspects</span>
following the 9/11 bombing is only the tip of the iceberg. The
Report <span style="text-decoration: underline;">omits</span>
the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">history</span>
and <span style="text-decoration: underline;">wider scope</span>
of violent activity in which the CIA has been and continues to
be involved. CIA organized large scale deathsquad activities and
extreme torture in Vietnam (Phoenix Project); multiple
assassinations of political leaders in the Congo, Chile,
Dominican Republic, Vietnam, the Middle East, Central America
and elsewhere; the kidnapping and disappearance of suspected
activists in Iraq and Afghanistan; massive drug-running and
narco-trafficking in the “Golden Triangle” in Southeast Asia and
Central America (the Iran-Contra war).</p>
<p>The Senate Report fails to locate the current acts of CIA
terror and torture in a broader <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">historical context</span> – one which would reveal
the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">systematic use of
torture and violence</span> as a ‘<span
style="text-decoration: underline;">normal</span>’<span
style="text-decoration: underline;"> instrument of policy</span>.
Contrary to White House and Senate claims that torture was a
“policy <span style="text-decoration: underline;">error</span>”
committed by “incompetent” (or deranged) operatives, the
historical record demonstrates that the long term extensive and
intensive use by the CIA of torture, assassinations, kidnappings
are planned and deliberate policies made by <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">highly qualified</span>,
and experienced policymakers acting according to a global
strategy approved by both Executive and Congressional leaders.</p>
<p>The <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Report</span>
treats torture as a “localized” set of events, divorced from the
politics of empire building. In point of fact, torture is and
always has been an integral part of imperial wars, colonial
military occupations and counter-insurgency warfare.</p>
<p>Imperial wars and occupations provoke widespread opposition and
nearly unanimous hostility. ‘Policing’ the occupied country <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">cannot</span> rely on
community-wide support, least of all providing voluntary
‘intelligence’ to the imperial officials. The imperial armed
forces operate out of fortresses surrounded by a sea of hostile
faces. Bribes and persuasion of local collaborators provides
limited information, especially regarding the operations of
underground resistance movements and clandestine activists.
Family, neighborhood, religious, ethnic and class ties provide
protective support networks. To break this web of voluntary
support network, the colonial powers resort to torture of
suspects, family members and others. <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">Torture becomes
“routinized” as part and parcel of policies sustaining</span>
the imperial occupation. Extended occupation and intensive
destruction of habitation and employment, cannot be compensated
by imperial “aid” - much of which is stolen by the local
collaborators. The latter, in turn, are ostracized by the local
population, and, therefore, useless as a source of information.
The “carrot” for a few collaborators is matched by <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">torture</span> and the
threat of torture for the many in opposition.</p>
<p>Torture is <span style="text-decoration: underline;">not
publicized domestically</span> even as it is ‘understood’ by
‘knowing’ Congressional committees. But among the colonized,
occupied people, through word and experience, CIA <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">and</span> military
torture and violence against suspects, seized in neighborhood
round-ups, is a <span style="text-decoration: underline;">weapon</span>
to intimidate a hostile population. The torture of a family
member spreads fear (and loathing) among relatives,
acquaintances, neighbors and colleagues. Torture is an integral
element in spreading mass intimidation – an attempt to minimize
co-operation between an active minority of resistance fighters
and a majority of passive sympathizers.</p>
<p>The <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Senate Report</span>
claims that torture was “useless” in providing intelligence. It
argues that victims were not privy to information that was
useful to imperial policymakers.</p>
<p>The current head of the CIA, John Brennan rejects the Senate
claim, while blithely admitting “some errors” (underwater
submergence lasted a minute too long, the electric currents to
the genitals were pitched to high?), he <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">argues</span> that
“torture worked”. Brennan argues that his torturer colleagues <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">did</span> obtain
“intelligence” that led to arrests of militants, activists and
“terrorists”.</p>
<p>If torture “works” as Brennan claims, then presumably the
Senate and the President would <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">approve of its use</span>. The brutalization of
human life, of family members and neighbors is not seen as, in
principle, evil and morally and politically repugnant.</p>
<p>According to the explicit rules of conduct of Brennan and the
implicit beliefs of the Senate, only “useless” torture is
subject to censure – if an address is obtained or a torture
victim names a colleague a ‘terrorist’ to avoid further pain,
then by the criteria of the <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">Senate Report </span> torture <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">is justified</span>.</p>
<p>According to the operational code of the CIA, international law
and the Geneva Conventions have to be <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">modified</span>: torture
should <span style="text-decoration: underline;">not be</span>
universally condemned and its practioners prosecuted. According
to the Senate only torture that “doesn’t work” is reprehensible
and the best judge of that is the head of the torturers, the CIA
director.</p>
<p>Echoing Brennan, President Obama, leaped to the defense of the
CIA, conceding that only some ‘errors’ were committed. Even that
mealy mouth admission was forcibly extracted after the President
spent several years blocking the investigation and months
obstructing its publication and then insisting on heavily
editing out some of the most egregious and perverse passages
implicating NATO allies</p>
<p>The Senate Report fails to discuss the complicity and common
torture techniques shared between Israel’s Mossad and the CIA
and Pentagon. In defense of torture, the CIA and White House
lawyers frequently cited Israel’s Supreme Court ruling of 1999
which provided the “justification “for torture. According to
Israel’s Jewish judges, torturers <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">could operate with impunity</span> against
non-Jews (Arabs) if they claimed it was out of “necessity to
prevent loss of or harm to human life”. The CIA and Harvard law
professor and uber-Zionist zealot, Alan Dershowitz echoed the
Israeli Mossad “ticking time bomb” justification for torture,
according to which “interrogators can employ torture to extract
information if it prevents a bombing”. Dershowitz cited the
efficiency of Israel’s torturing a suspect’s children.</p>
<p>The CIA officials frequently cited the Israeli ‘ticking bomb’
justification for torture in 2007, at Congressional hearings in
2005, and earlier in 2001 and 2002. The CIA knows that the US
Congress, under the control of the Zionist power configuration,
would be favorably disposed to any official behavior, no matter
how perverse and contrary to international law, if it carried an
Israeli mark of approval or ‘logo’.</p>
<p>The US CIA and Israeli’s Mossad share, exchange and copy each
other’s’ torture methods. The US torturers studied and applied
Israel’s routine use of sexual torture and humiliation of Muslim
prisoners. Racist colonial Israeli tracts about techniques on
destroying the ‘Arab Mind’ were used by US intelligence. Israeli
officials borrowed US techniques of forced feeding hunger
strikers. Mossad’s technique of ‘Palestinian hanging’ was
adopted by the US. Above all, the US copied and amplified
Israel’s extra-judicial ‘targeted’ killings – the center piece
of Obama’s counter-terrorism policy. These killings included
scores of innocent bystanders for every ‘successful target’.</p>
<p>The <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Senate Report</span>
fails to identify the intellectual authors, the leading
officials who presided over and who ultimately bear political
responsibility for torture.</p>
<p>Top leaders, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and
Senate Intelligence Committee chairperson, Diane Feinstein,
resort to the Nazi war criminals plea “we didn’t know”, “we were
misled” and “the CIA didn’t tell us”.</p>
<p>No judge at the Nuremberg Trials believed them. Nor will any
international court of law believe US political leaders’ pleas
of ignorance of the CIA’s decade-long practice of torture –
especially after former Vice President Cheney lauded the
practice on US television and boasted he would implement the
same policies again. (One has to wonder about the ‘source’ of
Cheney’s transplanted heart…)</p>
<p>During the administration of President Bush, Jr., CIA leaders
submitted detailed reports on intelligence, including the
sources <span style="text-decoration: underline;">and the
methods</span> of obtaining the information, on a routine
basis – with videos and ‘live feeds’ for the politicians to
view. Nothing was ‘held back’ then and now, as current CIA head
John Brennan testifies. From 2001 onward torture was the method
of choice, as testimony from top military officials revealed
during the Abu Ghraib investigation.</p>
<p>National Security Agency (NSA) meetings, attended by the
President, received detailed reports extracted from CIA
“interrogations”. There is every reason to believe that every
NSA attendee ‘knew’ how the ‘intelligence’ was obtained. And if
they failed to ask it was because torture was a ‘normal, routine
operating procedure’.</p>
<p>When the Senate decided to investigate the “methods of the
CIA”, half a decade ago, it was not because of the stench of
burning genitals. It was because the CIA exceeded the boundaries
of Senate prerogatives –it had engaged in pervasive and hostile
spying against US Senators, including the Uber-Senator Feinstein
herself; CIA crimes were compromising client regimes around the
world; and most of all because their orgy of torture and
dehumanization had <span style="text-decoration: underline;">failed
to defeat</span> the armed resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Yemen and Syria.</p>
<p>The <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Senate Report</span>
is an exercise in institutional power – a means for the Senate
to regain political turf, to rein in CIA encroachment. The <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">Report</span> goes no
further than to chastise “inappropriate” techniques: it does not
proceed from crimes of state to prosecute officials responsible
for crimes against international and domestic laws.</p>
<p>We know, and they know, and as every legal authority in the
world would know, that <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">without</span> the punishment of political
leaders, torture will continue to be an integral part of US
imperial policy: Impunity leads to recidivism.</p>
<p>Richard Cheney, Vice-President under President George W. Bush,
notorious war criminal on many counts, and prime advocate of
torture, publically declared on December 10, 2014 that President
Bush specifically authorized torture. He bragged that they were
informed in detail and kept up to date.</p>
<p>In the political world of torture, practiced by Islamic
extremists and US imperialists, how does the decapitation of
non-combatant prisoners, match up with the CIA’s refrigeration
of naked political suspects? As for “transparency”, the virtue
claimed by the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Senate
Report</span> publicists in publishing the CIA’s crimes, as
“refurbishing the US image”, the Islamists went one step further
in “transparency”: they produced a video that went global,
revealing their torture by beheading captives.</p>
<p>The <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Senate Report</span>
on CIA torture will not result in any resignations, let alone
prosecutions or trials, because over the past two decades, war
crimes, police crimes, spy crimes, and financial swindles have
not been prosecuted. Nor have any of the guilty officials spent
a day in court. They are protected by the majority of political
leaders who are unconditional defenders of the CIA, its power,
techniques and especially its torture of captives. The vast
majority of Congress and the US President repeatedly approve
over $100 billion annual budgets for the CIA and its domestic
counterpart, Department Homeland Security. They approved the
annual budget voted on December 10, 2014, even as the
“revelations” rolled in. Moreover, as the tempest over CIA
torture proceeds, Obama continues to order the assassination by
drone of US citizens “without ever crossing the door of a
judge”.</p>
<p>Despite over 6,000 pages of documents and testimony, recording
crimes against humanity, the <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">Senate Report</span> is unlikely to trigger any
reforms or resignations. This is not because of the actions of
some mysterious “deep state” or because a ballooning national
security apparatus has taken power. The real problem is that the
elected officials, Presidents and Congress people, Democrats and
Republicans, neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, <span
style="text-decoration: underline;">are deeply embedded</span>
in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">security
apparatus</span> and they share the common quest for world
supremacy. If Empire requires wars, drones, invasions,
occupations <span style="text-decoration: underline;">and</span>
torture, so be it!</p>
<p>Torture will truly disappear and the politicians will be put on
trial for these crimes, only when the empire is transformed back
to a republic: where impunity ends justice begins.</p>
<p>________________</p>
<p>James Petras latest book, <span style="text-decoration:
underline;">The Politics of Imperialism: The US, Israel and
the Middle East</span> (Atlanta: Clarity Press 2014)
</p>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>