[Ppnews] Torture - Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad

[Political Prisoner News]

  *Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Perfecting Illegality *
Posted by Alfred McCoy <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/mccoy/> at 
9:21am, August 14, 2012.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175582/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_perfecting_illegality/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=07754ba252-TD_McCoy8_14_2012&utm_medium=email#more

Her white hair peeked out from under a brilliant cerulean blue 
headscarf. Her lips and teeth were stained red from chewing areca nut 
and betel leaf, a mild stimulant favored by older Vietnamese women.  She 
was missing her right eye.  She also appeared to be in danger of 
floating away had a stiff breeze swept along the roadside where we were 
talking.  Le Thi Xuan couldn't have weighed more than 90 pounds.

But this 77-year-old whose height topped out at four-feet-and-change was 
a survivor.  That now-empty eye-socket took an elbow from an American 
Marine back in the 1960s.  That same day she survived a grenade attack 
that killed one of her sons and gravely wounded another.

Le Thi Xuan also survived torture.  When questioned about the guerrilla 
fighters that the Americans called "Viet Cong," she told me, "I did not 
reveal anything, so they kept on beating me.  Once they tired of that, 
they used electricity to torture me."

Le Thi Xuan's ordeal was no anomaly.  Electrical torture by Americans 
and their South Vietnamese allies was a commonplace of the Vietnam War.  
The prime method involved the use of hand-cranked field telephones to 
produce electricity and two wires that were generally affixed to 
sensitive areas of the anatomy: ears, fingers, nipples, genitals.  The 
use of "water torture" or the "water rag" technique -- what we now know 
as waterboarding -- was also widespread.

Some years ago, investigating 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-vietnam20aug20,0,6449035,full.story> a military 
intelligence unit that had routinely subjected Vietnamese to torture, I 
got in touch with former Staff Sergeant David Carmon.  When Army 
criminal investigators questioned Carmon in the early 1970s, he admitted 
using the water rag method on a detainee.  "I held the suspect down, 
placed a cloth over his face, and then poured water over the cloth, thus 
forcing water into his mouth," he said, according to his sworn 
statement.  Once-classified military documents show that he also 
admitted using electrical shock on detainees.  Decades later, he was 
still unrepentant.  "I am not ashamed of anything I did, and I would 
most likely conduct myself in the same manner if placed in a 
Vietnam-type situation again," he told me.  American torturers of the 
post-9/11 era are, as best we can tell, generally no less unrepentant 
<http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57423533/hard-measures-ex-cia-head-defends-post-9-11-tactics/>.

Until this moment, Americans (other than those who abused her) could 
have known nothing of Le Thi Xuan's torture.  Similarly, for decades 
almost no one knew of the rampant use of torture by Carmon's unit.  (The 
wartime investigation of it was buried in military files in the National 
Archives and forgotten.)  But torture by U.S. military personnel has a 
long history, going back to the Indian Wars 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=3K_8lWx4hbEC&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183&dq=Jacob+Downing,+prisoner,+shins&source=bl&ots=OGqisOklh5&sig=Dbr-rTS15dfINM4X2a0JwZewLx8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xSQlUKGIIaaJ6AHYj4GABw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Jacob%20Downing%2C%20prisoner%2C%20shins&f=false> and 
to the Philippine Insurrection 
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_kramer> at 
the turn of the last century, and its use has been no accident.  As 
TomDispatch regular 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175327/alfred_mccoy_the_decline_and_fall_of_the_American_empire> Alfred 
McCoy makes clear in his latest piece, there's a secret post-World War 
II and post-9/11 history of torture that's been covered up and covered 
over -- a bipartisan effort that extends to the present.  It's a sordid 
story that McCoy has been unraveling for years and brings up to date in 
his new book, /Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive 
Interrogation/ 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299288544/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>.  
Knowing it can teach us a lot about America's covert past, its present, 
and where the country may be headed in the years to come. /Nick Turse/

    *Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad*
    *How Two Administrations and Both Parties Made Illegality the
    American Way of Life *
    By Alfred W. McCoy <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy>

    After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan
    brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an /ad
    hoc/ bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on
    two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.

    President Obama has closed the CIA's "black sites,
    <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer>"
    its secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands
    with waterboarding and wall slamming
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/25/AR2009082503277.html>.
    But via rendition -- the sending of terrorist suspects to the
    prisons of countries that torture -- and related policies, his
    administration has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan,
    Somalia, and elsewhere.  In this way, he has avoided the political
    stigma of torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and
    harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them.

    This "resolution" of the torture issue may meet the needs of this
    country's deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy
    an international community determined to prosecute human rights
    abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term
    risk of another sordid torture scandal that will further damage U.S.
    standing with allies worldwide.

    *Perfecting a New Form of Torture***

    The modern American urge to use torture did not, of course, begin on
    September 12, 2001.  It has roots that reach back to the beginning
    of the Cold War and a human rights policy riven with
    contradictions. Publicly, Washington opposed torture and led the
    world in drafting the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human
    Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously
    and secretly, however, the Central Intelligence Agency began
    developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of
    these same international conventions.

     From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack
    the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of
    the mind with two findings foundational to a new form of
    psychological torture. In the early 1950s, while collaborating with
    the CIA, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered
    <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175080/alfred_mccoy_back_to_the_future_in_torture_policy>
    that, using goggles, gloves, and earmuffs, he could induce a state
    akin to psychosis among student volunteers by depriving them of
    sensory stimulation. Simultaneously, two eminent physicians at
    Cornell University Medical Center, also working with the Agency,
    found <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1806200/> that
    the most devastating torture technique used by the KGB, the Soviet
    secret police, involved simply forcing victims to stand for days at
    a time, while legs swelled painfully and hallucinations began.

    In 1963, after a decade of mind-control research, the CIA codified
    these findings in a succinct, secret instructional handbook, the
    KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual
    <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/KUBARK_Counterintelligence_Interrogation>.
    It became the basis for a new method of psychological torture
    disseminated worldwide and within the U.S. intelligence community.
    Avoiding direct involvement in torture, the CIA instead trained
    allied agencies to do its dirty work in prisons throughout the Third
    World, like South Vietnam's notorious "tiger cages
    <http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/resources/torture/luce.html>."

    The Korean War added a defensive dimension to this mind-control
    research. After harsh North Korean psychological torture forced
    American POWs to accuse their own country of war crimes, President
    Dwight Eisenhower ordered
    <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=59249#axzz1ZwwbuVnm> that
    any serviceman subject to capture be given resistance training,
    which the Air Force soon dubbed with the acronym SERE (for survival,
    evasion, resistance, escape).

    Once the Cold War ended in 1990, Washington resumed its advocacy of
    human rights, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994,
    which banned <http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html> the infliction of
    "severe" psychological and physical pain. The CIA ended its torture
    training in the Third World, and the Defense Department recalled
    Latin American counterinsurgency manuals that contained instructions
    for using harsh interrogation techniques. On the surface, then,
    Washington had resolved the tension between its anti-torture
    principles and its torture practices.

    But when President Bill Clinton sent the U.N. Convention to Congress
    for ratification in 1994, he included language
    <http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/0/5d7ce66547377b1f802567fd0056b533?OpenDocument>
    (drafted six years earlier by the Reagan administration) that
    contained diplomatic "reservations."  In effect, these addenda
    accepted the banning of physical abuse, but exempted psychological
    torture.

    A year later, when the Clinton administration launched
    <http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd39.htm> its covert campaign
    against al-Qaeda, the CIA avoided direct involvement in human rights
    violations by sending 70 terror suspects to allied nations notorious
    for physical torture.  This practice, called "extraordinary
    rendition," had supposedly been banned by the U.N. convention and so
    a new contradiction between Washington's human rights principles and
    its practices was buried like a political land mine ready to
    detonate with* *phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu
    Ghraib scandal.

    *Normalizing Torture***

    Right after his first public address to a shaken nation on September
    11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his White House staff
    expansive secret orders for the use of harsh interrogation, adding
    <http://www.alternet.org/story/27771/the_torture_test>, "I don't
    care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

    Soon after, the CIA began opening "black sites" that would in the
    coming years stretch from Thailand
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html>
    to Poland
    <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/31/cia-secret-prison-polish-_n_1393385.html>. 
    It also leased
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/national/31planes.html> a fleet
    of executive jets for the rendition of detained terrorist suspects
    to allied nations, and revived psychological tortures abandoned
    since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the agency hired
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/us/12psychs.html> former Air
    Force psychologists to reverse engineer SERE training techniques,
    flipping them from defense to offense and thereby creating the
    psychological tortures that would henceforth travel far under the
    euphemistic label "enhanced interrogation techniques."

    In a parallel move in late 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald
    Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to head the new prison at
    Guantanamo, Cuba, and gave him broad authority to develop a total
    three-phase attack on the sensory receptors, cultural identity, and
    individual psyches of his new prisoners. After General Miller
    visited Abu Ghraib prison in September 2003, the U.S. commander for
    Iraq issued orders
    <http://archive.truthout.org/article/gen-ricardo-sanchez-orders-torture-iraq-his-memo>
    for the use of psychological torture in U.S. prisons in that
    country, including sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and
    a recent innovation, cultural humiliation through exposure to dogs
    (which American believed would be psychologically devastating for
    Arabs). It is no accident that Private Lynndie England, a military
    guard at Abu Ghraib prison, was famously photographed
    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynndie_England> leading a naked Iraqi
    detainee leashed like a dog.

    Just two months after CBS News broadcast those notorious photos from
    Abu Ghraib in April 2004, 35%
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/magazine/27WWLN.html> of
    Americans polled still felt torture was acceptable. Why were so many
    tolerant of torture?

    One partial explanation would be that, in the years after 9/11, the
    mass media filled screens large and small across America with
    enticing images of abuse. Amid this torrent of torture simulations,
    two media icons served to normalize abuse for many Americans -- the
    fantasy of the "ticking time bomb scenario" and the fictional hero
    of the Fox Television show "24," counterterror agent Jack Bauer.

    In the months after 9/11, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz launched
    <http://articles.latimes.com/2001/nov/08/local/me-1494> a multimedia
    campaign arguing that torture would be necessary in the event U.S.
    intelligence agents discovered that a terrorist had planted a
    ticking nuclear bomb in New York's Times Square. Although this
    scenario was a fantasy whose sole foundation was an obscure academic
    philosophy article published back in 1973, such ticking bombs soon
    enough became a media trope and a persuasive reality for many
    Americans -- particularly thanks to "24," every segment of which
    began with an oversized clock ticking menacingly.

    In 67 torture scenes during its first five seasons, the show
    portrayed agent Jack Bauer's recourse to abuse as timely, effective,
    and often seductive. By its last broadcast in May 2010, the simple
    invocation of agent Bauer's name had become a persuasive argument
    for torture used by everyone from Supreme Court Justice Antonin
    Scalia
    <http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=NzI2NDYxOA%3D%3D>
    to ex-President Bill Clinton.

    While campaigning for his wife Hillary in the 2008 Democratic
    presidential primary, Clinton typically cited "24" as a
    justification for allowing CIA agents, acting outside the law, to
    torture in extreme emergencies. "When Bauer goes out there on his
    own and is prepared to live with the consequences," Clinton told
    <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/torture-jack-bauer-bill-clinton-article-1.230218>
    Meet the Press, "it always seems to work better."

    *Impunity in America***

    Such a normalization of "enhanced interrogation techniques" created
    public support for an impunity achieved by immunizing all those
    culpable of crimes of torture. During President Obama's first two
    years in office, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter
    Liz made
    <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=7643032&page=1#.UCCXm0J8Pdk> dozens
    of television appearances accusing his administration of weakening
    America's security by investigating CIA interrogators who had used
    such techniques under Bush.

    Ironically, Obama's assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011
    provided an opening for neoconservatives to move the nation toward
    impunity. Forming an /a cappella /media chorus, former Bush
    administration officials appeared on television to claim
    <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/02/bush-era-interrogations-provided-key-details-bin-ladens-location/>,
    without any factual basis, that torture had somehow led the Navy
    SEALs to Bin Laden. Within weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder
    announced <http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/June/11-ag-861.html>
    an end to any investigation of harsh CIA interrogations and to the
    possibility of bringing any of the CIA torturers to court. 
    (Consider it striking, then, that the only "torture" case brought to
    court by the administration involved
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/us/ex-cia-officer-john-kiriakou-accused-in-leak.html>
    a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who had leaked the names of some
    torturers.)

    Starting on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the country took the next
    step toward full impunity via a radical rewriting of the past. In a
    memoir published on August 30, 2011, Dick Cheney claimed
    <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904199404576538481141793772.html>
    the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on an al-Qaeda
    leader named Abu Zubaydah had turned this hardened terrorist into a
    "fount of information" and saved "thousands of lives."

    Just two weeks later, on September 12, 2011, former FBI
    counterterror agent Ali Soufan released his own memoirs, stating
    <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/the-interrogator/transcript-7/>
    that he was the one who started the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah
    back in 2002, using empathetic, non-torture techniques that quickly
    gained "important actionable intelligence" about "the role of KSM
    [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks."

    Angered by the FBI's success, CIA director George Tenet dispatched
    his own interrogators from Washington led by Dr. James Mitchell, the
    former SERE psychologist who had developed the agency's harsh
    "enhanced techniques." As the CIA team moved up the "force
    continuum" from "low-level sleep deprivation" to nudity, noise
    barrage, and the use of a claustrophobic confinement box, Dr.
    Mitchell's harsh methods got "no information."

    By contrast, at each step in this escalating abuse, Ali Soufan was
    brought back for more quiet questioning in Arabic that coaxed
    <http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/04/24/we-could-have-done-this-the-right-way.html>
    out all the valuable intelligence Zubaydah had to offer. The results
    of this /ad hoc /scientific test were blindingly clear: FBI empathy
    was consistently effective, while CIA coercion proved counterproductive.

    But this fundamental yet fragile truth has been obscured by CIA
    censorship and neoconservative casuistry. Cheney's secondhand
    account completely omitted the FBI presence. Moreover, the CIA
    demanded <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/us/26agent.html> 181
    pages of excisions from Ali Soufan's memoirs that reduced his
    chapters about this interrogation experience to a maze of blackened
    lines no regular reader can understand.

    The agency's attempt to rewrite the past has continued into the
    present. Just last April, Jose Rodriguez, former chief of CIA
    Clandestine Services, published his uncensored memoirs under the
    provocative title /Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions
    after 9/11 Saved American Lives/. In a promotional television
    interview, he called
    <http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57423533/hard-measures-ex-cia-head-defends-post-9-11-tactics/?pageNum=5&tag=contentMain;contentBody>
    FBI claims of success with empathetic methods "bullshit."

    With the past largely rewritten to assure Americans that the CIA's
    "enhanced interrogation" had worked, the perpetrators of torture
    were home free and the process of impunity and immunity established
    for future use.

    *Rendition Under Obama***

    Apart from these Republican pressures, President Obama's own
    aggressive views on national security have contributed to an
    undeniable continuity with many of his predecessor's most
    controversial policies. Not only has he preserved
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/world/americas/08guantanamo.html?ref=militarycommissions>
    the controversial military commissions at Guantanamo and fought
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/opinion/22sun1.html> the courts
    to block civil suits against torture perpetrators, he has, above
    all, authorized continuing CIA rendition flights.

    During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama went beyond any other
    candidate in offering unqualified opposition
    <http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0804/13/se.01.html> to both
    direct and indirect U.S. involvement in torture. "We have to be
    clear and unequivocal. We do not torture, period," he said, adding,
    "That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way,
    renditions."

    Only days after his January 2009 inauguration, Obama issued a
    dramatic executive order ending the CIA's coercive techniques, but
    it turned out to include a large loophole that preserved the
    agency's role in extraordinary renditions. Amid his order's ringing
    rhetoric about compliance with the Geneva conventions and assuring
    "humane treatment of individuals in United States custody," the
    president issued a clear and unequivocal order that "the CIA shall
    close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it
    currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility
    in the future." But when the CIA's counsel objected
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html>
    that this blanket prohibition would also "take us out of the
    rendition business," Obama added a footnote
    <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations>
    with a small but significant qualification: "The terms 'detention
    facilities' and 'detention facility' in... this order do not refer
    to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory
    basis." Through the slippery legalese of this definition, Obama thus
    allowed the CIA continue its rendition flights of terror suspects to
    allied nations for possible torture.**

    Moreover, in February 2009, Obama's incoming CIA director Leon
    Panetta announced
    <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/06/panetta-supports-rendition-but-not-torture/>
    that the agency would indeed continue the practice "in renditions
    where we returned an individual to the jurisdiction of another
    country, and they exercised their rights... to prosecute him under
    their laws. I think," he added, ignoring the U.N. anti-torture
    convention's strict conditions for this practice, "that is an
    appropriate use of rendition."

    As the CIA expanded covert operations inside Somalia under Obama,
    its renditions of terror suspects from neighboring East African
    nations continued
    <http://www.thenation.com/print/article/161936/cias-secret-sites-somalia>
    just as they had under Bush.  In July 2009, for example, Kenyan
    police snatched an al-Qaeda suspect, Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, from a
    Nairobi slum and delivered him to that city's airport for a CIA
    flight to Mogadishu. There he joined dozens of prisoners grabbed off
    the streets of Kenya inside "The Hole" -- a filthy underground
    prison buried in the windowless basement of Somalia's National
    Security Agency. While Somali guards (paid for with U.S. funds) ran
    the prison, CIA operatives, reported the /Nation's/ Jeremy Scahill,
    have open access for extended interrogation.

    Obama also allowed the continuation of a policy adopted after the
    Abu Ghraib scandal: outsourcing incarceration to local allies in
    Afghanistan and Iraq while ignoring human rights abuses there.
    Although the U.S. military received
    <http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/23/obama-administration-handed-over-detainees/>
    1,365 reports about the torture of detainees by Iraqi forces*
    *between May 2004 and December 2009, a period that included Obama's
    first full year in office, American officers refused to take action
    <http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/22/us-troops-ordered-not-to-investigate-iraqi-torture/>,
    even though the abuses reported were often extreme.

    Simultaneously, Washington's Afghan allies increasingly turned to
    torture after the Abu Ghraib scandal prompted U.S. officials to
    transfer most interrogation to local authorities. After interviewing
    324 detainees held by Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security
    (NDS) in 2011, the U.N. found
    <https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:1gNro1WbtFIJ:www.ohchr.org/documents/countries/AF/UNAMA_Detention_en.pdf+Office+of+the+High+Commissioner+for+Human+Rights,+Treatment+of+Conflict+RelatedDetainees+in+Afghan+Custod&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjrZFj_HWd_QNm0Q-wptgDVE5WN2rpasi_QXgj-uUwpXDKSHSswGApHZU6ZM4hqGt8yZy4njlGhDmvf03du7fEcvxlz4dpaJN754LqE9q4K3yaEQt96uVZaL6R9wpZjHRpvTWnw&sig=AHIEtbTEyyc8022ntpu723TgBMeW91mCIw>
    that "torture is practiced systematically in a number of NDS
    detention facilities throughout Afghanistan." At the Directorate's
    prison in Kandahar one interrogator told a detainee before starting
    to torture him, "You should confess what you have done in the past
    as Taliban; even stones confess here."

    Although such reports prompted both British and Canadian forces to
    curtail prisoner transfers, the U.S. military continues to turn over
    detainees to Afghan authorities -- a policy that, commented
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/world/asia/un-report-finds-routine-abuse-of-afghan-detainees.html>
    the /New York Times/, "raises serious questions about potential
    complicity of American officials."

    *How to Unclog the System of Justice One Drone at a Time*

    After a decade of intense public debate over torture, in the last
    two years the United States has arrived at a questionable default
    political compromise: impunity at home, rendition abroad.

    This resolution does not bode well for future U.S. leadership of an
    international community determined to end the scourge of torture.
    Italy's prosecution
    <http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/exclusive-convicted-cia-spy-broke-law/story?id=8995107>
    of two-dozen CIA agents for rendition in 2009, Poland's recent
    indictment
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/world/europe/polish-ex-official-charged-with-aiding-cia.html>
    of its former security chief for facilitating a CIA black site, and
    Britain's ongoing criminal investigation
    <http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/02/13085938-uk-cops-to-probe-allegations-of-complicity-to-torture-prisoner-at-guantanamo-bay>
    of intelligence officials who collaborated with alleged torture at
    Guantanamo are harbingers of continuing pressures on the U.S. to
    comply with international standards for human rights.

    Meanwhile, unchecked by any domestic or international sanction,
    Washington has slid down torture's slippery slope to find, just as
    the French did in Algeria during the 1950s, that at its bottom lies
    the moral abyss of extrajudicial execution. The systematic French
    torture of thousands during the Battle of Algiers in 1957 also
    generated over 3,000 "summary executions" to insure, as one French
    general put it
    <http://books.google.com/books?id=aXGosE0ZLGQC&pg=PA127&lpg=PA127&dq=algeria+%E2%80%9Cthe+machine+of+justice%E2%80%9D+not+be+%E2%80%9Cclogged+with+cases.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=MyAwGzsUvq&sig=4KoQ6ekrpFQQOgMbkMu1YxJ8VqQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6KQgUPPwM5L_qAGKsoHQBg&ved=0CEwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=algeria%20>,
    that "the machine of justice" not be "clogged with cases."

    In an eerie parallel, Washington has reacted to the torture scandals
    of the Bush era by generally forgoing arrests and opting for no-fuss
    aerial assassinations. From 2005 to 2012, U.S. drone killings inside
    Pakistan rose <http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php>
    from zero to a total of 2,400 (and still going up) -- a figure
    disturbingly close to those 3,000 French assassinations in Algeria.
    In addition, it has now been revealed that the president himself
    regularly orders
    <http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175551/engelhardt_assassin_in_chief>
    specific assassinations by drone in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia off
    a secret "kill list
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html>." 
    Simultaneously, his administration has taken
    <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html>
    just one terror suspect into U.S. custody and has not added any new
    prisoners to Guantanamo, thereby avoiding any more clogging of the
    machinery of American justice.

    Absent any searching inquiry or binding reforms, assassination is
    now the everyday American way of war while extraordinary renditions
    remain a tool of state.  Make no mistake: some future torture
    scandal is sure to arise from another iconic dungeon in the dismal,
    ever-lengthening historical procession leading from the "tiger
    cages" of South Vietnam to "the salt pit
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2576-2005Mar2.html>"
    in Afghanistan and "The Hole" in Somalia. Next time, the world might
    not be so forgiving. Next time, with those images from Abu Ghraib
    prison etched in human memory, the damage to America's moral
    authority as world leader could prove even more deep and lasting.

    /Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
    University of Wisconsin-Madison. A //TomDispatch regular/
    <http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175327/alfred_mccoy_the_decline_and_fall_of_the_American_empire>/,
    he is the author of /A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From
    the Cold War to the War on Terror/, which provided documentation for
    the Oscar-winning documentary feature film /Taxi to the Darkside/.
    His recent book, /Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of
    Coercive Interrogation
    <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299288544/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>/
    (University of Wisconsin, 2012) explores the American experience of
    torture during the past decade./

    Copyright 2012 Alfred W. McCoy

-- 
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