Torture does not produce reliable information, never did, never will. I truely believe that those who torture do so for their own sake with the excuse that they were only trying to get information.

Too many people buy into torture to extract information, that's why TV shows like '24' are so popular. The lead character in that show is nothing more than a thug and a rogue agent.

Thank god that police thugs like the ones described above are less common now. Even though we still hear about many unconscionable acts committed by police and federal thugs and bullies, they are less common today, and rapidly discovered due to the internet and the availablility of videocams.

Said sorry episode clearly illustrates why any flawed authority uses torture: they are not competent enough to do professional interrogation, they want to terrorize a selected population from pursuing social and political change, & because they can & do so as an exercise of power. That Dubya, Cheney, & Co. have been allowed to lurch America backwards will be a source of shame for generations to come.

I've no doubt that police violence continues on in America today, though perhaps not quite as it happened to this young 14 year old in 1968.

Look at the violence against demonstrators --
facing what can only be described as armed police rather than public servants to the people.

The most ignorant among us turn to violence perhaps in their own self hatred?

At the time that JFK was assassinated in Dallas,
50% of the police force were members of the KKK.

At the time RFK was assassinated in LA, 50% of the police force were John Birchers.

One of the most eloquent descriptions of why torture does not work. There is no honest rationale for the practice.

We need to keep telling and publishing stories like this. It provides new framing for the issue of terrorism and torture.

If we only hear the monopoly media story about how people are trying to kill us, we will accept just about anything in a desire to be safe.

And here come the tasers for "terrorist" protesters practicing the former right to assemble and freedoom of speech!

so, basically the USA has always used torture against non-whites. typical...What a shit-hole of a country.

I am glad that MY country has recognized the USA as the world's greatest purveyor of torture and death...now time for the economic boycott!!

I am so sorry that happened. I suppose it was done to make society safer somehow. That is so wrong. It was wrong then, wrong now, wrong to the author of this article, wrong to all other people. Just plain wrong. I hope America someday realizes that additional wrongs don't make anyone safer. It can create a fresh generation of angry enemies. Finding a way to address legitimate grievances would probably cost less in dollars, and certainly less in lost humanity.

One of the myths is always that what torture gets exposed is always something 'new' and an aberration.

If you go to antiwar.com this morning, their fundraising page is great. It shows images of 'waterboarding' stretching back from Iraq to Vietnam to the Phillipine insurgency back in the days of President McKinnley.

Its a quick easy picture to see there's nothing new here.

Or, there's never been any lack of torture in the US. US police and prisons have always used torture. The traditional police method of solving a crime in this country was always to beat a confession out of a suspect.

And remember, the prison guards at Abu Gharib did have experience of working in the US prisons. Check out the use of Tasers and restraint chairs and stress positions and isolation cells in the US prisons. Check out what some of the prisoners are subjected to in the 'super-max' prisons. People come out of those as 'broken' as the other victims of torture.

And don't try to spin this as being used against 'non-whites'. That's pure BS. Its always been more class based. The people who don't get treated this way are the wealthy and their children. I grew up in Tennesse and the sherrifs there didn't have any problems at all in beating up whites who weren't well-connected. One never got any sense that this couldn't happen to you because you were white. Now, if you were the son of the head of the chamber of commerce, that's a different matter.

COMarc

yes, the phrase "guilty until proven rich" comes to mind.

Sorry to hear about the rotten things they did to you. Hopefully they came to realize in their older years the evil they had acted out on you, to their everlasting shame.

I suppose if you wanted you could go around and look them all up individually, just to see if they had evolved any. Their names must be on record somewhere in the municipal records.

I still believe in justice, and one day they will get theirs. The wheel turns, sooner or later everyone has their turn.

canuckchuck;
Get off the damn high horse buddy. What is the percentage of Native Canadians inhabiting jails in Alberta? Did not the RCMP in Saskatchewan dump a native kid in the snow without shoes or a winter coat a few years ago? Haven't you had an Asian (Japanese or Chinese) prof relate a story about being stopped by police because they drove a fancy car in the 1990s?

Do I hear the sound of glass breaking?
Yours from sunny Alberta.

Hey canuckchuck yes your government has published the USA on the top of it's torture watch list.

When it became public knowledge the quisling leader of yours, Harper and his gang fell all over themselves in their hysterical protests that it was a mistake!

Canada is a mess.

Canada does not understand that no matter how often she kisses the ass of the USA, the USA will still shit right in her face.

The Government's torture of alleged enemy combatants serves a much more devilish purpose than its proponents claim. Torture apologists claim these techniques are necessary to get information about terrorists and their acts. NO, THIS IS COMPLETE DECEPTION. The true target of torture policy is the average American citizen, local governments, school boards, and any other uppity types who might do something Washington doesn't like. Torture exists to scare the rest of into conforming. Torture silences the populace of fools too chicken-shirt to stand up for themselves.

War is always perpetrated on the citizens of the aggressing country as well as the unfortunate foreigners.

BEekeeper -- 100% right on the mark.

Terror is the source of the fear to drive the masses in a controlled wimped-out set of highly separated and disconnected victims.

Love in the antidote for fear, and with current govt'l programs running full tilt at generating world-wide fear and intimidation -- we ALL need to come together more connected and aligned than ever before -- in LOVE and ABUNDANCE.

Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed »
« We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself » — ML King

Mr. Tom Gardner, I can only apologize to you for at the innocent age of 14 suffered so horribly, I am your age and I remember that day the nurse whispered in your ear. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. puts into words so eloquently when speaking to concerned leaders of faith and other layity as to why he was starting to speak out against Vietnam, "Time to Break Silence".

Sir, What you experienced was terrible and all to commonplace. Not to diminish your experience, but to expand it and develop the mindset that created it, read James W. Loewen's, "Sundown Towns". As a white boy a few years older than you, I was horrified by the television news of the brutality of the times. I regret not having traveled South to assist in the struggle, but my feelings at the time allowed me to appreciate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., my greatest hero alive during my lifetime. To this day, I get so filled with emotion when I listen to his speeches, especially the one from Riverside Church on April 4th, 1967, exactly one year before his assination. He knew at the time he would most likely be killed, but his love and concern mandated he speak the truth to power. For an enlightening account of his assination, read Dr. William Pepper's, "An Act of State - The Execution of Martin Luther King". You can get a copy of a speech by Pepper that summarizes his book @ tucradio,com. Hint: James Earl Ray didn't do it!, but there were several contingency plans in place to make sure it happened.

As I'm sure you know, the only history that is offered in schools is that which we can be proud of or accounts so sanitized as to be rendered almost recognizable to the participants.

Peace, Love, and Joy to you.

This story made me feel physically sick. It reveals much about human beings, their ugliness. What makes us so brutal, so cruel, so greedy? More importantly, how are we going to change ourselves into more peaceful, passive beings?

I think genetic engineering is the only real solution. We have to get rid of the primitive beasts that we are, the dangerous creation, and replace ourselves with something halfway decent. And we need to do it soon before we destroy ourselves.

www.dangerouscreation.com

Mr Gardner,
Thank you for your story. Takes guts to do that, re-live it.

I mark moments of my youth in some sad ways: the day JFK was murdered. The day RFK was murdered. The day Dr. King was murdered. The Massacre at My Lai. The Murders at Kent State.

This sounds pompous or naive, I'm certain and I don't know if I can pull it off, but I'm damn sure going to try to make this country a place where that will never happen to anyone again.

Liberty & Justice,

SJ

www.spartacusjones.com

Few interrogators believe that torture or physical/mental abuse will result in trustworthy answers. That's not its purpose. Interrogators have known for many years that pretending to befriend the suspect and get him to trust you and feel dependent on you is the most effective way of eliciting true information.

Torture serves an entirely different purpose. It is specifically employed when the interrogator knows in advance what he wants to hear and is willing to torture the innocent and guilty alike until they confess to his charges.

The "confessions" of people like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others, along with their claims of dozens of other terrorist plans, have been used by the Bush administration to buttress their false claims that their "War on Terror" is working and that the terrible things they are doing are making us safer.

And, now, in an unconscious imitation of the old Soviet Union, the confessions obtained by torture will be used to convict these people in Star Chamber "Show Trials," and then to execute them.

Friedrich Nietzsche noted: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Walt Kelly in his Pogo comic strip.

Don't be distracted with torture and with racism. Those are mere battle fronts in a much larger class war. The class war spans time and space, and national and ethnic boundaries. The simplest and most effective way to defend the people against classist aggression of all sorts is for the people to unite against classist aggression which will put the aggressors on the defensive and cause them to think twice about their oppressive tactics. So the fruit of your labor will be multiplied, plus the united front is far more formidable and effective. The question is are you ready to stand with the people or are you still tethered to the elitist establishment?

Thank you for writing this.

Personally, I deserved every beating I ever got. "Rooty poot car thief gets a beating after calling Officer Friendly a "pig" and insulting his mother," is hardly a story mandating societal self-examination.

Dude... all I could do is weep and pass this on.

Thanks for being yourself and putting the truth in plain English.

Tom Gardner -- I also was deeply moved by your re-living your brutalization and attempt at de-humanization, and by the powerful man that you've become to make a difference for our future's kids not to have to share such devastating memories.

I'm reminded that the reason the children's stories have dragons, is not to tell kids that there are such (as they already know), but to let them know that dragons can be killed.

Sir, you are a noble dragon slayer and herald the day when we no longer need to fear and when love rules the hearts (and minds)

Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed »
« We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself » — ML Kingof ALL humans.

Thank you

Hey Tom, others get beatings for being a Christian in a Muslim country. Journalist who a jew, or a muslim who just can't bring himself to kill the innocent. They lose their head and have their family taken out. I only ask equal condemnation for those people (islamic-terrorist) along with these 1968 cops.

reading Tom's story made me so angry (and sad!). What has happened to those asshole policemen who did this? They should have been prosecuted and punished just as a few of the South African police were. It's amazing that the U.S. politicians can criticize others for inhumane acts - they pass bills to get the Japanese to admit to forcing women to be sex slaves during WWII, but there's so much we should admit to in our own history - in the south, in Vietnam, to the native Americans, and on and on.

But I'm getting off subject. This letter is really about one person's experience. I wonder how or if he could recover himself? Has he been thinking about vengeance. It seems that the best way to insure that groups who believe in violent means to achieving their end - that's ALL OF US! - will have enough recruits - is to put them through such experiences. Of course they'll join groups on the other side of the torturers. What an amazing way to continue the vicious cycle of war and violence.

What a profoundly poignant historical perspective on torture, truth and justice.

And yet, with all the millennia of historical comparisons available, this survivor, another voice speaking truth to power, blithely accepts an establishment and right-wing pejorative mainstay, "relentless Stalinists" as most descriptive of his tormentors - apparently never pausing to consider the possibility that the operatives now busily re-writing the history of Bush's legacy of war, lies, wiretapping and torture as a golden age of democracy building, as they did with Ronald Iran-contras-union-busting-star-wars Reagan and his administration, may also have had a relentless hand in "enhancing" the history of the Soviet Union and Stalin.

I also am the pale color of the "white man." But as a kid in the streets of New York City, it didn't matter. The police always had their sticks out, and in Times Square, though my two friends and I--about sixteen years old--were just standing on a corner trying to decide which movie to go to, three cops slapping their sticks into their gloved hands yelled at us to get the hell out of their, and when we tried to protest, they started to approach, sticks raised. We ran. Another time when we were playing stick ball in a Bronx street a police car raced up to us and demanded why we had robbed a near-by store. After about fifteen minutes of threatening us with arrest they left cursing us. We remained, shaking and one or two kids sobbing. One more incident: squad cars zoomed up--no sirens--to a group of kids outside our high school gambling with dice, squealed tires, cops jumping out swinging their sticks at the kids, hitting them on the head, all over their bodies, even the kids who had just been standing, watching. My friend and I saw all this from across the street. These incidents and others left me with anger and fear that has never left, especially when I see a uniform, a stick, and a gun. And my experiences were nothing like what the black kids had to endure whenever they left Harlem for other parts of Manhattan--sometimes just to see a show or go to a job. I have never thought of police as our protectors.

Thank you for putting into words and sharing with us, with me, what must be painful memories. Your words are inspiring as much as they are upsetting.

Mr. Gardner,

What a horrible fate you suffered in your younger years for being "different."There is still so much hypocrisy and injustice in the un-United States. Instead of an improvement in progressive ideas and legislation, our country has taken the dark road into the abyss of a self-perpetuated hell where "torture" is excepted as 'official policy' in this administration. We are in for a rude awakening.

May you have good health, much happiness, and prosperity.
The Best to you, Tom.

It's deplorable that the present Administration including Rumsfeld have encouraged any methods of torture. And I am truly sorry for the writer to have experienced such pain. Let him know that many whites including myself walked the streets for civil rights during MLK's day. But also let the writer be aware that cruelty and barbarism exists in many forms through out the world and probably most cases of abuse occur in the family with husbands beating their wives, boyfriends beating their girlfriends, children being abused in the homes, and on and on. Torture occurs in many colors because of the nature of man.

I am fully aware that this will seem like the most naive comment ever written, but here goes anyway.

There's an amazing point there inspired by what Emptyset wrote "[f]inding a way to address legitimate grievances would probably cost less in dollars, and certainly less in lost humanity".

I've long considered, what if the cost of war in dollars was instead spent on settling the grievances. Instead of combating grievance with artillery, combating it with investment?

Say for example, the nearly Trillion Dollars US taxpayers have paid on fighting a war in Iraq was instead spent strategically on investing in Iraq surely that could have brought encouraged greater cooperation and security? It represents (for a population of 25 million) $40,000 for every Iraqi citizen.

It will be argued that this notion is pretty simplistic. Yet, one would have to agree that whereas having a nation deliver a bomb in your lounge room which kills or maims a member of your family is going to piss you off... forever and ever; if that nation were instead to have delivered a cheque to you of $40,000 when your family's annual income is a small fraction of that you are likely to dance like the Ewoks for a week at least and learn to say a Gold Bless America more emphatically than John McCain could ever dream to. It is not my point to say that you can buy love, but the insanity, and evil actually, is illustrated of choosing to kill to win rather than choosing to give to win.

We gain perspective when we consider that the reason Iraq invaded Kuwait in the first place was because it was cash starved following the 80s war with Iran due to the interdynamics of its destroyed infrastucture, low oil prices and an inability to pay its $3 billion in annual debt repayments. Somehow, a fraction of the Trillion Dollars spent today might have helped obviate this course of events and that of the subsequent escalation of mistrust leading to the current invasion.

All of this of course is to presume that invading Iraq ever had to do with anything but a rapacious scheme on behalf of the Bush Administration to plunder the oil of another sovereignty on spurious claims of pre-emptive self-defence.

The same argument also goes for the middle east war. Since the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948 how many billions of dollars in the Middle East by all sides has been dedicated to military spending? How many dollars from the superpowers have been donated towards this mutually destructive escalation? Let's just say a hypothetical figure of 10 Trilion Dollars. It is not an unreasonable figure given 60 years of military conflict involving the entire Middle East concerning a territorial dispute between Palestinians and Israelis. Surely if instead of wasting all this money over 60 years, the equivalent value of those funds could instead there and then at the in 1948 have been apportioned to the people affected to help unify them and provide them with improved standards of living the world would have been a happier place.

Of course, any such notion is way too simplistic and naive. It is a fortunate thing that we have elected (or non-elected) leaders to help steer us away from any such frivolity so that we may instead continue to devote our most brilliant engineers towards devising ingenius and novel ways to help people kill each other in the event of disputes.

In fact, Cheney, Bush, Arafat, Putin, Howard, Blair, etc... ignore everything I have said.

The cop situation hasn't changed much since the 60s, as far as blacks are concerned. They beat a 14 year old boy to death last year in a detention center in Florida. Cameras were rolling as it happened but their investigation found no wrong doing. All around the country jails are full of black men, if they are lucky enough to get there. These days, the cops shoot them to death then say, "I thought he had a gun," and the investigation concludes no wrong doing. The KKKs, John Birchs, Nazis, and skin heads, are still active today in uniforms, robes, and suits, (Politicians).

"A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals." Fyodor Dostoevsky

Tax breaks for the rich, breaking the backs of the poor, torturing the indigent.... Hurray for the USA!

marcsism- Thank you for calling be rich. Self Employment tax is still 15 percent so I'm breaking my back to pay for that. The poor in America go to rent- a- center to get there stuff, they have better TV's than I do. They can't pay for health insurance but boy that plasma looks good in their one room house. In America, you buy what matters in your individual life, It is Freedom, It is liberty and the way it should be.

As for Torturing the indigent, if they are studying the quran and play with c-4 YEP, hope their thirsty!