The United States has been enabling torture for decades

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/