Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
A casual glance at the news these days might give one the impression that the Bush Administration invented torture last month. However, in the corporate media equivalent of a scoop, the Washington Post "broke" the story of U.S. torture of Arab and Afghan "detainees" nearly four years ago.
A Dec. 26, 2002, article, perfectly timed to get lost in the holiday
shuffle, began like a bad spy novel: "Deep inside the forbidden zone at
the U.S.-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner
from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine
military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected
by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most
valuable prizes in the war on terrorism-captured al Qaeda operatives
and Taliban commanders."
The
Post reported that those refusing to cooperate are "sometimes kept
standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted
goggles" or "held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep
with a 24-hour bombardment of lights" (euphemistically termed "stress
and duress" techniques). And these are the lucky ones.
Other
detainees (POW status conveniently denied) are handed over to "allies
of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines
between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred,"
according to the Post, quoting an unnamed official source as
explaining: "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to
other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." Former
CIA inspector general Fred Hitz claimed the Agency doesn't "do torture"
but if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, "we
can use the fruits of it."
This
approach, called "operational flexibility," was allegedly something
new. At a Sept. 26, 2002, joint hearing of the House and Senate
intelligence committees, Cofer Black, then head of the CIA
Counterterrorist Center declared: "After 9/11 the gloves come off."
This was certainly news to the rest of the world where U.S.-sponsored torture is hardly a revelation.
There
are many examples of direct U.S. torture. For example: a 1975 Senate
investigating committee exposed U.S. methods of interrogating pairs of
Vietcong prisoners. In one case, when the first prisoner refused to
speak, he was thrown from an airplane at 3,000 feet. The second prisoner
answered all questions but was thrown from the plane anyway. Other
techniques involved cutting off fingers, fingernails, ears, or sexual
organs of one prisoner while the other looked on.
However,
thanks to CIA and U.S. training, the true American torture legacy lies
in the bloody fingerprints found across the globe. Consider SAVAK,
Iran's notorious Shah-era secret police created jointly by the CIA and
Israel. Amnesty International deemed SAVAK's history of torture as
"beyond belief."
In
1960s Greece, under the rule of paid CIA operative George Papadopoulos,
U.S.-equipped police used methods like shoving "a filthy rag, often
soaked in urine, and sometimes excrement" down the throat of suspected
communists.
During
the CIA's holy war against the USSR in Afghanistan, the U.S.-trained
and funded Moujahedeen drugged captured Soviet soldiers and kept them
in cages. A reporter from the Far Eastern Economic Review told of
Soviet soldiers killed, skinned, and hung in a butcher's shop. "One
captive," he reported, "found himself the center of attraction in a
game of buzkashi," an Afghan form of polo using a headless goat as the
ball. In this case, the Soviet captive was used, alive. "He was
literally torn to pieces," said the reporter.
Ronald
Reagan called the Nicaraguan contras "the moral equivalent of the
Founding Fathers." This noble group of "freedom fighters" regularly
attacked civilians, cutting off women's breasts and men's testicles,
gouging out eyes, beheading infants, using children for target
practice, and slitting throats and pulling the victim's tongue out
through the slit. One 14-year-old girl was gang-raped and decapitated.
Her head was placed on a stake as a warning to government supporters in
her village. The chairman of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch
concluded, "the United States cannot avoid responsibility for these atrocities."
Elsewhere
in Latin America, Dan Mitrione, head of the Orwellian-named U.S. Office of
Public Safety, trained the Brazilian police force in the 1960s. One of
the techniques Mitrione taught involved placing the end of a reed in
the anus of a naked man hanging suspended. The other end of the reed is
soaked in oil and lit. In Uruguay, Mitrione was called in to help deal
with the Tupamaros, a group William Blum calls, "perhaps the cleverest,
most resourceful, and most sophisticated urban guerillas the world has
even seen." Under the guidance of Mitrione, the Uruguayan Senate found
that torture had become a "normal, frequent, and habitual occurrence." Techniques included electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles
under the fingernails, and use of "a wire so thin that it could be
fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum
increase the electrical charge."
Such
tactics were honed in Mitrione's own soundproof basement room. Blum
writes of Mitrione's use of four street beggars to demonstrate the
effects of different voltages on different parts of the body. All four
men died.
Mitrione
was eventually kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros. At his funeral,
White House spokesman Ron Ziegler stated: "Mr. Mitrione's devoted
service to the cause of peace in an orderly world will remain as an
example for free men everywhere." (Imagine if he was allowed to "take
the gloves off.")
As
one official who has supervised the recent capture and transfer of
accused terrorists explained: "If you don't violate someone's human
rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job."
***
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
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