Klein says "And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream
news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location."
Read the article and let me know how NPR did covering the story. I
missed it - wouldn't it be great to be able to write to the nation and
say "NPR did cite the sordid history Klein referenced."
'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate
by Naomi Klein
It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George W. Bush's second term, and
an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic
location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not
torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team
settled on downtown Panama City.
It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood,
the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to
1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might
have been "We do torture." It is here in Panama and, later, at the
school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the
current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified
training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from across
the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive
interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo and Abu
Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and
blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload,
sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation, extreme temperatures,
isolation, stress positions--and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's
Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training
materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse,
coercion and false imprisonment."
Some of the Panama school's graduates returned to their countries to
commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the
murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El
Salvador, the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared"
prisoners, the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador and
military coups too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that
choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a little like dropping
by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of
vegetarians.
And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream
news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How could
they? To do so would require something totally absent from the current
debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials long
predates the Bush Administration and has in fact been integral to US
foreign policy since the Vietnam War.
It's a history that has been exhaustively documented in an avalanche of
books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and
truth commissions. In his upcoming book A Question of Torture, Alfred
McCoy synthesizes this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an
indispensable and riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded
experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned
into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory
deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were
field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and
then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police
training programs.
It's not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they
blame abuses on "a few bad apples"--so too do many of torture's most
prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew
about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to
subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing
prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which
point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged,
fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald
Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its
enemies while keeping its humanity intact.
The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed
"original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in
Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was
a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were
different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would
not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of
them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was
taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as
McCoy writes, "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in
South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and
tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from
press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.
Does it somehow lessen the horrors of today to admit that this is not
the first time the US government has used torture to wipe out its
political opponents--that it has operated secret prisons before, that it
has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping
students out of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were
traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On
November 8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing
claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a
question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins, expressing
her shock that the United States is running a prison gulag, wrote that
"it's just this one administration...and even at that, it seems to be
mostly Vice President Dick Cheney." And in the November issue of
Harper's, William Pfaff argues that what truly sets the Bush
Administration apart from its predecessors is "its installation of
torture as integral to American military and clandestine operations."
Pfaff acknowledges that long before Abu Ghraib, there were those who
claimed that the School of the Americas was a "torture school," but he
says that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so." Perhaps it's
time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks coaching illegal
torture techniques, all readily available in both Spanish and English,
as well as the hair-raising list of SOA grads.
Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!"
Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture
crisis by crying "Never Before"? I suspect it has to do with a sincere
desire to convey the seriousness of this Administration's crimes. And
the Bush Administration's open embrace of torture is indeed
unprecedented--but let's be clear about what is unprecedented about it:
not the torture but the openness. Past administrations tactfully kept
their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were
practiced in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush
Administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to
torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws.
Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush Administration's
real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by
US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US
planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette, more than the
actual crimes, that has so much of the military and intelligence
community up in arms: By daring to torture unapologetically and out in
the open, Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.
For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist
words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When
torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated,
there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could
prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely
deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the
juridical person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to
search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of
that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the
torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want
because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.
In Latin America the revelations of US torture in Iraq have not been met
with shock and disbelief but with powerful déjà vu and reawakened fears.
Hector Mondragon, a Colombian activist who was tortured in the 1970s by
an officer trained at the School of the Americas, wrote: "It was hard to
see the photos of the torture in Iraq because I too was tortured. I saw
myself naked with my feet fastened together and my hands tied behind my
back. I saw my own head covered with a cloth bag. I remembered my
feelings--the humiliation, pain." Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was
brutally tortured in a Guatemalan jail, said, "I could not even stand to
look at those photographs...so many of the things in the photographs had
also been done to me. I was tortured with a frightening dog and also
rats. And they were always filming."
Ortiz has testified that the men who raped her and burned her with
cigarettes more than 100 times deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with
an American accent whom they called "Boss." It is one of many stories
told by prisoners in Latin America of mysterious English-speaking men
walking in and out of their torture cells, proposing questions, offering
tips. Several of these cases are documented in Jennifer Harbury's
powerful new book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way.
Some of the countries that were mauled by US-sponsored torture regimes
have tried to repair their social fabric through truth commissions and
war crimes trials. In most cases, justice has been elusive, but past
abuses have been entered into the official record and entire societies
have asked themselves questions not only about individual responsibility
but collective complicity. The United States, though an active
participant in these "dirty wars," has gone through no parallel process
of national soul-searching.
The result is that the memory of US complicity in far-away crimes
remains fragile, living on in old newspaper articles, out-of-print books
and tenacious grassroots initiatives like the annual protests outside
the School of the Americas (which has been renamed but remains largely
unchanged). The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the current
torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, these
past crimes are being erased from the record. Every time Americans
repeat the fairy tale about their pre-Cheney innocence, these already
hazy memories fade even further. The hard evidence still exists, of
course, carefully archived in the tens of thousands of declassified
documents available from the National Security Archive. But inside US
collective memory, the disappeared are being disappeared all over
again.
This casual amnesia does a profound disservice not only to the victims
of these crimes but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from
the US policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the
Administration will deal with the current torture uproar by returning to
the cold war model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment
protects every "individual in the custody or under the physical control
of the United States Government"; it says nothing about torture training
or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit
interrogators. And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over
to Iraqi death squads, trained by US commanders like Jim Steele, who
prepared for the job by setting up similarly lawless units in El
Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq's Interior
Ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently
discovered in a Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin
was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government
exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA's William Colby,
who when asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed
under Phoenix--a program he helped launch--replied that it was now
"entirely a South Vietnamese program."
And that's the problem with pretending that the Bush Administration
invented torture. "If you don't understand the history and the depths of
the institutional and public complicity," says McCoy, "then you can't
begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to
pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture
apparatus--closing a prison, shutting down a program, even demanding the
resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But, McCoy says, "they
will preserve the prerogative to torture."
The Center for American Progress has just launched an advertising
campaign called "Torture is not US." The hard truth is that for at least
five decades it has been. But it doesn't have to be.
Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
(Picador) and, most recently, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the
Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (Picador).
(c) 2005 The Nation
Published on Friday, December 9, 2005 by The Nation
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