The United States has been enabling torture for decades
By: Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
Truthout.org
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..... MORE
Source: Bulatlat.com
URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2012/03/18/the-united-states-has-been-enabling-torture-for-decades/
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unang lum...
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