The War On Democracy

'The War On Democracy' (2007), It explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

The film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series of legitimate governments in the Latin American region since the 1950s. 

The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the United States.

John Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries in the region. 

He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

The film unearths the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of the barrios of Caracas rose up to force his return to power.

It also looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America lead by indigenous leaders intent on loosening the shackles of Washington and a fairer redistribution of the continent's natural wealth.

John Pilger says: 

"[The film] is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us."

US-Trained Death Squads

These are just a few examples of what our government does in our names and the risk it puts us at:


1) 

“After one year in Iraq the US government secretly enlisted retired Special Forces operatives to train Shia militia in the art of torture and other war crimes that fueled the Iraqi civil war, according to a new report.

Just over year into the Iraq War a desperate US government secretly organized and funded small militia groups to set up torture camps across the Middle Eastern country under the direction of a retired US Special Forces commander, according to a new report. 

James Steele, who came out of retirement in 2003 after guiding US-backed commandos in El Salvador in the 1980s, was deployed to Iraq as an “energy consultant” not long after the invasion began. A member of General David Petraeus’ inner circle, Steele quietly trained a Iraqi paramilitary force numbering in the thousands. With the help of Col. James Coffman, another Special Forces operative, he freely dispatched Shia militias to tortureSaddam Hussein’s Sunni soldiers in order to learn the details of the insurgency. ” RT 2013

2) In January 2005, the Pentagon, confirmed that it was considering:

” forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency [Resistance] in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago”.

Under the so-called “El Salvador option”, Iraqi and American forces would be sent to kill or kidnap insurgency leaders, even in Syria, where some are thought to shelter. …

Hit squads would be controversial and would probably be kept secret.

The experience of the so-called “death squads” in Central America remains raw for many even now and helped to sully the image of the United States in the region.

Then, the Reagan Administration funded and trained teams of nationalist forces to neutralise Salvadorean rebel leaders and sympathisers. …

John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, had a front-row seat at the time as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85.

Death squads were a brutal feature of Latin American politics of the time. …

In the early 1980s President Reagan’s Administration funded and helped to train Nicaraguan contras based in Honduras with the aim of ousting Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. The Contras were equipped using money from illegal American arms sales to Iran, a scandal that could have toppled Mr Reagan.

The thrust of the Pentagon proposal in Iraq, … is to follow that model …

It is unclear whether the main aim of the missions would be to assassinate the rebels or kidnap them and take them away for interrogation. Any mission in Syria would probably be undertaken by US Special Forces.

Nor is it clear who would take responsibility for such a programme — the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency. Such covert operations have traditionally been run by the CIA at arm’s length from the administration in power, giving US officials the ability to deny knowledge of it.  (El Salvador-style ‘death squads’ to be deployed by US against Iraq militants – Times Online, January 10, 2005, emphasis added)

3) Under the “Salvador Option,” “Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980′s, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi’ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance. Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiralled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq.

Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today. (Dahr Jamail, Managing Escalation: Negroponte and Bush’s New Iraq Team,. Antiwar.com, January 7, 2007)

4) The appearance of death squads was first highlighted in May this year [2005], …dozens of bodies were found casually disposed … in vacant areas around Baghdad. All of the victims had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head and many of them also showed signs of having been brutally tortured.  …

The evidence was sufficiently compelling for the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a leading Sunni organisation, to issue public statements in which they accused the security forces attached to the Ministry of the Interior as well as the Badr Brigade, the former armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), of being behind the killings. They also accused the Ministry of the Interior of conducting state terrorism (Financial Times).

5) The Police Commandos were formed under the experienced tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly secretive US special-forces units (Reuters, National Review Online).

6) …A key figure in the development of the Special Police Commandos was James Steele, a former US Army special forces operative who cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El Salvador at the height of that country’s civil war. …

Another US contributor was the same Steven Casteel who as the most senior US advisor within the Interior Ministry brushed off serious and well-substantiated accusations of appalling human right violations as ‘rumor and innuendo’. Like Steele, Casteel gained considerable experience in Latin America, in his case participating in the hunt for the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia’s Drugs Wars of the 1990s …

Casteel’s background is significant because this kind of intelligence-gathering support role and the production of death lists are characteristic of US involvement in counterinsurgency programs and constitute the underlying thread in what can appear to be random, disjointed killing sprees.

Such centrally planned genocides are entirely consistent with what is taking place in Iraq today [2005] …It is also consistent with what little we know about the Special Police Commandos, which was tailored to provide the Interior Ministry with a special-forces strike capability (US Department of Defense). In keeping with such a role, the Police Commando headquarters has become the hub of a nationwide command, control, communications, computer and intelligence operations centre, courtesy of the US. (Max Fuller, op cit)

7) In Afghanistan on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai alleged that the US is doing something much worse: not merely standing by and watching their trained forces torture and kill, but actively and systematically participating. As the Guardian’s Golnar Motevalli reported:

“The Afghan government has ordered US special forces to leave one of Afghanistan’s most restive provinces, Maidan Wardak, after receiving reports from local officials claiming that the elite units had been involved in the torture and disappearance of Afghan civilians. . . .

“The provincial governor and other officials from Maidan Wardak presented evidence against US forces at the national security council meeting. The presidential palace later issued a statement saying: ‘After a thorough discussion, it became clear that armed individuals named as US special forces stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people.

“‘A recent example in the province is an incident in which nine people were disappeared in an operation by this suspicious force and in a separate incident a student was taken away at night from his home, whose tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge,’ the statement added” . . . .

“Aimal Faizi, spokesman for Karzai, said the decision came after of months of reports of abuse.

“‘People have been complaining about US special forces units torturing people, killing people in that province, and nine individuals were taken from their homes recently and they have just disappeared and no one knows where they have gone,’ Faizi said.”

8) The training of foreign militaries to serve the interests of the American state goes all the way back to at least the Cold War. The U.S. used taxpayer money and weapons to subsidize foreign governments and militaries that were “anti-communist” even if the regimes were incredibly brutal and ruthless. All an authoritarian had to do was refer to his political opponents as “communists” and the Americans came rushing in.

In nearly every continent, the U.S. taught extremely fascistic, right-wing governments the art of cracking down on domestic dissent, jailing and torturing political opponents, centralizing power, making deals beneficial to American corporations, and employing death squads. Cheaper and less visible than directly invading and overthrowing governments the U.S. didn’t like, sock puppet dictators were the preferred means of implementing policy.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 left very little justification for an American imperial position throughout the globe, yet those same Cold War policies were not only not discarded, but expanded upon. Back in 2010, President Obama and the Pentagon began implementing a strategy with a larger emphasis on “combat operations” and military-to-military coordination. U.S. Special Forces are now operating in (at least) 75 countries, teaching their governments more efficient means of subjugating their populations, creating chaos, and serving the interests of the American empire.

America's Friend and Ally Convicted Of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

Mike McDonald of Reuters reports that:

Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty on Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity during the bloodiest phase of the country's 36-year civil war and was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Rios Montt, now 86, took power after a coup in 1982 and was accused of implementing a scorched-earth policy in which troops massacred thousands of indigenous villagers thought to be helping leftist rebels.

At the height of the bloodshed, the number of killings and disappearances reached more than 3,000 per month.

Prosecutors say Rios Montt turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson to try to rid Guatemala of leftist rebels during his 1982-1983 rule, the most violent period of a 1960-1996 civil war in which as many as 250,000 people died.

He was tried over the killings of at least 1,771 members of the Maya Ixil indigenous group, just a fraction of the number who died during his rule.

"He had full knowledge of everything that was happening and did not stop it," Judge Yasmin Barrios, who presided over the trial, told a packed courtroom where Mayan women wearing colorful traditional clothes and head-dresses closely followed proceedings.

Throughout his mass atrocities, Montt continued to receive extensive support from the United States. President Reagan, America’s freedom-loving hero of the 80′s, described Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.” The Reagan administration actively covered up and aided Montt’s ruthless crimes against humanity –  you know, for the sake of democracy.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan said in late 1982 that the dictator was getting a "bum rap" from rights groups for his military campaign against left-wing guerrillas during the Cold War.

He also once called Rios Montt "a man of great personal integrity".

The School Of The Americas, CIA and Torture

US-Condoned Cancer Of Torture Continue To Spread In Latin America, Including Mexico

By Mark Karlin,
Sunday, 10 June 2012 07:46
Courtesy Of "Truth Out"

Jennifer Harbury Married an Armed Populist Leader, Who Was Tortured and Executed in Guatemala With CIA Involvement

By academic pedigree and personal background, Jennifer Harbury should be among the ruling elite in the US. She is a graduate of Cornell and Harvard Law School, in fact receiving her law degree from Harvard just a few years before Barack Obama. Instead of following the path of most of her classmates to money and power, she became a legal aid attorney in Texas.

As part of her interest in human rights, she traveled to Guatemala in the early '90s to write a book, "Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Compañeros & Compañeras." It was at that time she met, fell in love with and married Everardo (Efraín Bámaca Velásquez), who was a commandante in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Front. He was fighting against the US-backed military and government, which was committing genocide against the indigenous population and the poor (ending in more than 200,000 dead - and countless more tortured, but released).

In 1992, Everardo was captured by the Guatemalan military. Harbury demanded to know the whereabouts of her husband and held a hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House, which was covered by the media and made into a national story by "60 Minutes." Harbury's request was simple: she wanted the State Department or CIA to tell her what had happened to her husband. But both agencies didn't acknowledge they knew of his whereabouts.

In an interview with Truthout, Harbury recounted:

After a year of trying to find out what had really happened to him, a young prisoner escaped from the army torture program and reported that Everardo was alive and being severely tortured.

After my third hunger strike to save his life, in March 1995, then New Jersey Senator Toricelli disclosed that official US documents indicated that he had been killed by Guatemalan officers on the CIA payroll.

After receiving many files at last through the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], it became clear that the State Department and the CIA had known where Everardo was and that he was in the hands of our own CIA liaisons or assets, since the week of his capture. They also knew approximately 300 other secret prisoners of war were suffering the same fate. The files show that all these prisoners were tortured to death, thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., yet the truth was only revealed to us in 1995. By then all were dead. We could have saved them.

Harbury's Husband Was Kept in a Body Cast to Make His Torture Easier

In fact, Everardo, Harbury discovered, was kept in a body cast to keep him constrained while he was tortured for more than two years before being executed, all the time with the full knowledge and likely operational involvement of the CIA.

And then there is, of course, the legacy of the infamous School of the Americas (now renamed the euphemistic Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation: WHINSEC). It has been accused of teaching torture, which was confirmed in a US government admission during the Clinton administration. Although now, under its new WHINSEC name, it claims to no longer offer such instruction.

Of the School of the Americas, Harbury told BuzzFlash in a 2005 interview:

Very simply, the School of the Americas is a US military institution that has given training and education to high-level military officials from across Latin America for 40 years now. The students who they have trained and educated, in huge numbers, turned out to have been the worst human rights violators in the Western Hemisphere, bar none. We're talking about high-level people under Pinochet. We're talking about eight to twelve of my husband's torturers. We're talking about people involved in massacre upon massacre within El Salvador, including people that were highly implicated in the murder of Monsignor Romero and the Maryknoll church women, etc. 

The Current President of Guatemala Was Trained at the School of the Americas

The current president of Guatemala, Otto Fernando Pérez Molina, was trained at the School of the Americas and is accused of helping to oversee the Guatemalan military genocide and torture. Pérez was head of the Guatemalan military intelligence at the time of Everardo's capture, and Harbury has sought to have him charged with human rights' violations. There is also the allegation that Pérez participated in 1998 in the planning of the assassination of a Guatemalan bishop, who campaigned for human rights accountability.

Harbury points out that US agents are often reported, by survivors, of being in the torture chambers, outed by their American accents in Spanish or by their speaking in English. This was the case of Sister Dianna Ortiz, who was abducted in Guatemala in 1989 for speaking out on behalf of the poor. She was gang raped, forced to kill another prisoner with a knife, used as a human ash tray and was the subject of further barbaric acts of torture. Ortiz also recalls an American serving as a consultant while she was being tortured.

Torture, Killing and Disappearance in the Southern Cone Countries in the '80s

During the period of military dictatorships in the Southern Cone nations of South America, the US - particularly under Reagan - supported regimes such as Argentina and Chile, which had the two highest numbers of disappeared individuals, tortured dissenters and those killed. More than 30,000 were disappeared in Argentina by the military, tortured and presumed killed (some of them dropped alive - while drugged - from planes and helicopters into the Rio De La Plata between Argentina and Uruguay, bound with weights on their legs).

In Chile where a minimum of 3,000 disappeared (los desaparecidos), the "National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report," in 2004, confirmed a minimum of 35,000 tortured in Chile after the Allende overthrow, which some critics of the commission argue is a low-ball estimate.

During the period of the US-backed Operation Condor, figures conforming to the UN definition of torture put the number as high as 300,000 or more tortured in the Southern Cone nations overall, under the brutal military regimes of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay, among other nations that carried out gestapo-like torture and elimination of persons deemed a threat to the state.

In a recent commentary in Truthout, Noam Chomsky wrote:

Thus in the "Cambridge History of the Cold War," John Coatsworth recalls that from 1960 to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites."... These crimes, substantially traceable to U.S. intervention, didn't inspire a human-rights crusade [from the US government].

How Does This Background on US-Backed Torture and Murder in Latin America Fit in With Mexico? 

Perhaps, part of understanding torture going on now in Mexico is what Sister Ortiz wrote about her horrific ordeal in Guatemala: "So often it is assumed that torture is conducted for the purpose of gaining information. It is much more often intended to threaten populations into silence and submission. What I was to endure was a message, a warning to others - not to oppose, to remain silent and to yield to power without question."

Only in Mexico, the issue is rather more complex because torture is used by the cartels, the police, the military and death squads. That is not wild speculation. The US State Department confirmed it in its 2011 "Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011" for Mexico: 

Security forces reportedly engaged in unlawful killings, forced disappearances and instances of physical abuse and torture.

The following problems also were reported during the year by the country's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) and other sources: kidnappings; physical abuse; poor, overcrowded prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; corruption and lack of transparency that engendered impunity within the judicial system; and confessions coerced through torture. Societal problems included: killings of women; domestic violence; threats and violence against journalists and social media users, leading to self-censorship in some cases; trafficking in persons; social and economic discrimination against some members of the indigenous population; and child labor.

Despite some arrests for corruption, widespread impunity for human rights abuses by officials remained a problem in both civilian and military jurisdictions....

There were multiple reports of forced disappearances by the army, navy and police....

SEDENA [which oversees the Army and the Air Force] was the government entity with the greatest number of human rights complaints (1,695) filed against it during the year.

In Mexico, killings, torture and disappearances are not fully reflected in statistics provided by the government for a variety of reasons, including a poor reporting system; but, moreover, the lack of trust many Mexican citizens have in the police and the military, which are often seen as equally threatening - particularly to the poor, the indigenous population, Central Americans passing through Mexico and the so-called "undesirable" class.

Not detailed in the State Department report are daily examples of the common use of torture by the police to coerce false confessions, obtain extra money for stopping the torture, being paid off to arrest and torture someone by a person with a vendetta, torturing someone at the behest of a drug lord who pays for the service etc.

Occasionally an American Gets Caught in the Torture Trap in Mexico

Occasionally, an American gets caught in the torture trap. The El Paso Times just recently reported: 

El Pasoan Kevin Huckabee, whose son Shohn Huckabee, was tortured by Mexican authorities after his arrest in 2009 in Juárez on suspicion of drug-trafficking, said the [State Department] report reinforced some of his suspicions about why no U.S. or Mexican official has addressed his son's torture complaint.

"I am concerned that the State Department is capable of reporting on the issues of government involvement, yet continue pursuing a relationship with the security forces that are known to be involved in human rights abuses of the highest order," Huckabee said. "I do not believe that the economic value in Mexico to the United States is worth looking past the awful array of human rights violations." 

But look away, the US government does.

Segments of the Mexican Military, Police and Government Are Involved With Torture and Killing

What the US State Department doesn't report is that segments of the Mexican military and police, as well as the government, have a longstanding, shifting relationship with the drug cartels, sometimes fighting them, but often working with one or another of the cartels in exchange for payoffs. This would be difficult for the US to admit due to domestic political considerations, but the national government, the CIA and the US military have a longstanding tolerance (despite the deadly alleged anti-drug war) of tolerating drug corruption in Latin American governments as long as those in power don't interfere with US trade relations, military dominance or become too populist.

Land reform, for instance, is a trigger that gets the US State Department, CIA and many elected officials in DC very unnerved. Land reform efforts led to the CIA overthrow of a democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954, and more recently, to supporting the Honduran coup against a democratically elected president who supported modest land reform.

The Mexican Government's War of Social Cleansing

That may be why the US has done little to stop what appears to be "social cleansing" (limpieza social) carried out by the Mexican military, police and government-sanctioned death squads at times. A 2010 article in El Universal explained (in translation): 

In the early 1990s, the lawyer Miguel Angel García Leyva and other citizens formed the Sinaloa Front Against Impunity. For 10 years, they gathered evidence on the activities of "death squads, causing thousands of kidnappings and killings in the state." These groups were made up of police or military personnel.

"The participation of these squads is known publicly not only in Sinaloa, but throughout the country," he says. "They operate dressed in official uniforms, driving patrol cars and with weapons, badges and keys just like the forces of the state."...

To confirm this, he cites an investigation conducted between May 2008 and May 2010 along the highways in northwestern Mexico. They produced video, photographs and written reports on police and military checkpoints in Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora and Baja California. "The results astounded us, most of the checkpoints are not only points of extortion, but places to identify and locate people to disappear, assassinate or commit other acts against them," says Garcia.

The El Universal article argued that much of the killing in Mexico is not just due to the complicated and shifting alliances in the so-called war on drugs, but rather also to the "elimination" of "undesirables" by the government.

Javier Sicilia, whose peace campaign in Mexico was the subject of the fifth Truthout on the Mexican border installment recently reinforced the notion that the killing of innocents is being carried out by both the military and the drug cartels, not to mention the police:

Question: Do you consider the people coming to the US, from Mexico or from other parts of Latin America, refugees because they are fleeing this violence?

Javier Sicilia: ...Central American people who have to cross Mexican territory to come to the US are being disappeared by the army or the organized crime. Either way, it looks like social cleansing. In every sense, in every way, this war against drugs is inhuman.

Torture in Mexico Is an Epidemic

Torture pervades Mexican governmental and criminal forces and, for civilians, the lines between law enforcement and criminals is too murky to navigate. If harmed, it is most often better just to be quiet. After all, who wants to be tortured for knowing something he or she shouldn't know and all the time not knowing if the police officer or soldier to whom you are reporting torture or threats is working on behalf of the person who tortured you? Or perhaps it was the military or police who did the torturing.

As Jennifer Harbury noted in 2005 when BuzzFlash interviewed her, torture "spirals out of control hugely. And because someone under torture will say anything to stop the pain, very often completely innocent bystanders are picked up because they're incorrectly named by persons who are in excruciating pain. Also, you cannot stop a government force or army force. Once it starts torturing, that also spirals out of control."

Such is the case in Mexico.

A CIA Latin America Section Chief Makes His Argument for "Ugly" Collateral Damage

Given that the CIA and countless US intelligence agencies, not to mention the Drug Enforcement Agency, are entrenched in Mexico, it might be appropriate to reflect that our real government/corporate interest in the nation is as a marketplace and a non-populist pro-US government.

In a 2007 documentary, "The War on Democracy," by British, leftist, political commentator John Pilger, he explores the exploitative and deadly anti-democracy efforts to ensure that Latin America stays in the hands of the ruling classes and open to American business and the extraction of natural resources south of our border.

Toward the end of a recounting of the US backing of juntas and keeping tin horn dictators on a short leash, Pilger interviewed Duane Claridge, CIA chief for Latin America from 1981 to 1984 - during a high point of the Central American and Southern Cone nations' reign of terror and death. In a remarkably pugnacious and blunt series of responses, Claridge vociferously asserted that he didn't give a hoot about whether a country was a democracy. All that mattered was whether or not the Latin American nation was an obstacle to the "national security interest" of the US, although he didn't define that term.

Here are some excerpts:

Pilger: Is it then okay to overthrow a democratically-elected government?

Claridge: It depends upon what your national security interests are.

Pilger: What right does the CIA and the US government have to do what you do in other countries?

Claridge: National security. We are going in to protect ourselves. We will intervene whenever we decide it is in our national interest to intervene and if you don't like it, lump it. Get used to it world!

It is important to understand that our national interest is perhaps often perceived by the US government as preserving our economic status through the guarantee of open markets, cheap labor and natural resources. To do that, the US condones torture and murder when a democracy that represents a populist majority - or an attempt to correct an economic imbalance among classes - gets in the way in Latin America.

"Sometimes things have to be changed in an ugly way," CIA Latin American Chief Claridge matter-of-factly asserted, citing the war crime reign of Pinochet as an example of a man who, Claridge claims, saved his country. "Chile wouldn't exist today if it weren't for Pinochet," Claridge asserted with conviction.

A country as scarred as Mexico by torture and barbaric killings from all directions may take generations to recover. But the healing process is not yet possible.

The torture, killing and fear hasn't stopped. It's still spiraling out of control.

For now, with government-protected torture and killing - existing both separately and intertwined with the narco wars - sections of Mexico look more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell than a civilized democracy that we claim to be promoting.

There may be internal cultural and political foundations for torture and gruesome murders in each country in turmoil south of the border, but the US is also responsible, since torture is a major export of this nation to Latin America.

The U.S. Has Been Enabling Torture For Decades

(Image: Troy Page; Adapted: mike.benedetti, Caleb Kimbrough)

By Mark Karlin 
Thursday, 15 March 2012 04:27 
Courtesy Of "Truth Out"

Marjorie Cohn – a law professor and past president of the National Lawyer's Guild – has assembled a compelling interdisciplinary anthology on the "normalization" of torture as an extension of American foreign policy. This is not a new occurrence limited to the so-called "war on terror," but extends back decades.

The United States Exports Torture

Mark Karlin: The infamous School of the Americas (SOA) (now euphemistically renamed the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation") has long been accused of teaching human rights violations, including torture. The Defense Department vigorously denies this accusation.

In Chapter 2, Bill Quigley - who writes for Truthout, as well as yourself - outs the truth. Hasn't the School of the Americas, and its predecessor, which was located in the Panama Canal Zone, been outsourcing torture and human rights violations for decades?

Marjorie Cohn:  During the 1970s and 1980s, dictators and military leaders in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay used skills they learned at the US Army's School of the Americas to torture and execute dissidents. SOA graduates assassinated bishops, priests, labor leaders, women, children and community workers, and massacred entire communities. Although the school was cosmetically renamed in 2001 to the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" (WHINSEC) at Ft. Benning, Georgia, the US government continues to resist accountability for those complicit in the egregious human rights violations perpetrated by the school's students. There is a growing protest movement against the SOA/WHINSEC. Since the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in 1980, protesters have increasingly engaged in lobbying and civil disobedience, including regular teach-ins, demonstrations and prayer vigils. Up to 20,000 demonstrators descend on Ft. Benning each year. They want the US government to admit what it has done at the school, allow an independent investigation and accept responsibility for the consequences. They are demanding that the torture school be closed.

MK: The torture and murders that occurred during the "dirty wars" in South America and the military dictatorship/right-wing militias' suppression of opposition in Central America was something out of the Spanish Inquisition. The US was on the side of the military governments, and yet, they were committing torture and massacres even against US citizens, including nuns. Terry Lynn Karl describes this in Chapter 2, with El Salvador as a case study. How come it took the war on terror to ignite a national discussion on torture and US foreign policy?

MC: During the dirty wars in Latin America, most of the torture was perpetuated by foreign governments (albeit with the backing of the United States). But when the grotesque photographs of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib were published, Americans were confronted with torture being committed by their own government. As additional photographs and reports of torture emerged, and memoranda written by former President George W. Bush's legal mercenaries were made public, it became impossible to ignore the cruelty being perpetrated by the US government.

MK: We tend to think of torture as physical, but you have a chapter on psychological torture. What forms does that take, in the United States and abroad?

MC: As historian Alfred McCoy explains in his chapter, the CIA has refined the "art"of torture by developing techniques to manipulate human consciousness. Since drug research had been unsuccessful, the CIA explored sensory deprivation and stress positions to be used offensively by CIA interrogators and defensively to train US troops to resist enemy interrogators. In 1963, the CIA created the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual (KUBARK), which codified secret research on mind control. McCoy observes how they used heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine, and sensory overload and deprivation to pursue their sordid ends.

MK: What is the role that professionals play - doctors, psychologists, lawyers, etc. - in the normalization of torture as a tool of the state?

MC: Psychologists were an essential component of the Bush torture regime. They helped develop, supervise, implement and disseminate abusive interrogation techniques, modeled on the US military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. Bush administration officials "engineered"SERE techniques to design counter-resistance methods in order to break detainees. The American Psychological Association (APA), which is the nation's largest professional mental health organization, "essential cover"for the psychologists' assistance to the torture regime. Notably, a group of activist psychologists opposed the APA's complicity. The movement achieved several major successes, which forced a change in APA policies. 

Psychologist Stephen Soldz documents that movement in his chapter.

Lawyers in the Bush administration's Justice Department rewrote the law to justify torture and abuse. In a memo signed by Jay Bybee, John Yoo narrowed the definition of torture so the victim must experience intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result; Yoo's definition contravenes the definition in the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT), a treaty the US has ratified which is thus part of the US law under the Constitution's supremacy clause. Yoo said self-defense or necessity could be used as a defense to war crimes prosecutions for torture, notwithstanding CAT's absolute prohibition against torture in all circumstances, even in wartime. This memo, and another Yoo wrote with Jay Bybee in August 2002, provided the basis for the administration's torture of prisoners.

MK: Obviously, in the post-9/11 period, the US got into torture in a big way. Many people have forgotten the photos from Abu Ghraib that showed prisoners who had been tortured to death, or of prisoners being tortured. Waterboarding became the focal point of media attention, not torture in general. Why do you think the visually documented torture by the US military in Iraq (leading to murder in some cases) has become sort of a near-forgotten footnote?

MC: The corporate media have short-term memories. Unless there is a breaking development in the torture saga, it is absent from the national conversation. Torture should be an ongoing story because the Bush officials and lawyers who choreographed the torture program should be facing trial in our courts. But Obama continues to resist accountability for his predecessors. His attorney general, Eric Holder, announced on June 30 that his office will investigate only two instances of detainee mistreatment. He said the department,  "has determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted." Holder has granted impunity to those who authorized, provided legal cover and carried out the "remaining matters."

Both of the incidents that Holder has agreed to investigate involved egregious treatment, and both resulted in death. These two deaths should be investigated and those responsible punished in accordance with the law.But the investigation must have a much broader scope. More than 100 detainees have died in US custody, many from torture. And untold numbers were subjected to torture and cruel treatment in violation of US and international law. 

MK: Chapter 13 focuses on the criminal accountability of the Bush administration for torture, but there have been no significant charges ever brought, except for low-level military personnel. Are high-level American officials above the law when it comes to torture?

MC: No. Under the well-established doctrine of command responsibility, commanders are liable for torture (considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and the US torture statute) if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit torture and they did nothing to stop or prevent it. Bush officials Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Colin Powell and Bush himself, as well as their lawyers, including Yoo and Bybee, engaged in a common plan to authorize torture in violation of CAT and the Geneva Conventions. They knew that interrogators would take action based on that authorization. These officials and lawyers should be investigated and prosecuted for war crimes under US law. There is precedent for holding lawyers criminally liable for giving legally erroneous advice that resulted in great physical or mental harm or death. In US v. Altstoetter, Nazi lawyers were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for advising Adolf Hitler on how to "legally" disappear political suspects to special detention camps.

MK: As far as Guantánamo, isn't the whole prison complex there an ongoing state of torture?

MC: Guantánamo has become a powerful symbol of human rights violations - so much so that Amnesty International described it as "the gulag of our times." Prisoners released from Guantanamo have detailed assaults, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, sexual abuse and threats with dogs. Mustafa Ait Idr, an Algerian citizen who was living in Bosnia when he was sent to Guantanamo, charged that US military guards jumped on his head, resulting in a stroke that paralyzed his face. They also broke several of his fingers and nearly drowned him in a toilet. Mohammed Sagheer, a Pakistani cleric, claimed the wardens at Guantanamo used drugs "that made us senseless." French citizen Mourad Benchellali, released from Guantanamo in July 2004, said, "I cannot describe in just a few lines the suffering and the torture; but the worst aspect of being at the camp was the despair, the feeling that whatever you say, it will never make a difference." Benchellali added, "There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty." Many of the prisoners at Guantanamo refused food to protest being held incommunicado for years with no hope of release. They concluded that death could not be worse than the living hell they were enduring. Attorney Julia Tarver's client Abdul Rahman told her "of his determination to die and said that, 'now, after four years in captivity, life and death are the same,'" Tarver wrote in a sworn declaration filed in federal district court.

MK: Isn't it odd that so many of the same people who promote the concept of American exceptionalism - and the US being a nation of higher moral values than the rest of the world - also condone torture?

MC: It's not surprising that those who think American lives are worth more than others would objectify groups of people - Arabs, Muslims - to rationalize cruel treatment. This is not a new phenomenon. The people in most of the countries the United States has attacked, or whose repressive governments the US has supported, are non-white.

MK: Under the Obama administration, it has become the policy of the White House that US citizens who are thought - not tried, but "thought" - to be aiding terrorism can be assassinated. This came true - and we may not know of other incidents - when the US military killed US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone missile attack in Yemen. If the US government can now kill US citizens without a trial, what is to prevent us from being tortured?

MC: Holder is trying to justify the assassination of US citizens without trial under Congress' Authorization for Use of Military Force after 9/11. But the Geneva Conventions and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both treaties the United States has ratified, forbid extrajudicial executions. They also forbid torture and cruel treatment. But that didn't stop the Bush administration from torturing and abusing detainees. The first indication that Bush officials would employ torture in their war on terror occurred in December 2001, after US citizen John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan. Lindh's American interrogators stripped and gagged him, strapped him to a board and displayed him to the press. He was writhing in pain from a bullet, which US officials would leave in his body for weeks in order to "preserve the chain of custody of the evidence" against him. A Navy admiral told the intelligence officer who interrogated Lindh that, "the secretary of defense's counsel has authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and ask whatever he wanted." Although Lindh was initially charged with terrorism crimes that exposed him to three life terms plus 90 years, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft permitted him to plead guilty to lesser offenses that garnered him 20 years. The condition: that Lindh declare he suffered "no deliberate mistreatment" while in custody.

MK: Of course, no discussion of torture is complete without bringing up the CIA. Frankly, I can't imagine that the CIA does not engage in torture around the world. How would we ever know if it was?

MC: Since 9/11, CIA involvement in extraordinary renditions, sometimes called "outsourcing torture," has increased dramatically. Terrorism suspects in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East have been rendered to foreign countries such as Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Jordan, all notorious for torture. The Council of Europe has identified 14 European states which have apparently cooperated with the United States in extraordinary renditions. There are secret CIA prisons, so-called "black sites," in many countries, including Romania and Poland, in which prisoners have been tortured after having been rendered there. In her chapter, journalist Jane Mayer discusses Ibn Sheikh al Libi, who was tortured in CIA custody. Al Libi provided a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which Powell cited in his speech before the UN Security Council as he tried to secure a resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq. The CIA knew Al Libi's information was false; indeed, he later recanted and died under mysterious circumstances.