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Torture Is Not a New US Foreign Policy Tool
"We are going to smash your hands to pulp like the Chileans did to Victor Jara." Those were the words of the torturers in a Uruguayan prison spoken to my friend Miguel Angel Estrella, a pianist from Argentina. They were referring to the fate of the imprisoned Chilean singer and guitarist Victor Jara, whose hands were destroyed so that he would never play the guitar again. Jara, a fervent opponent of the Pinochet regime, was brutally tortured and later machine-gunned to death after the coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973.
Estrella was being held in Uruguay's Libertad prison, accused of being a guerrilla from Argentina fighting the Argentine military regime. Unable to prove the charges against him, and given the unprecedented international pressure, the Uruguayan government released him in 1978, having kidnapped him at the end of 1977.
Estrella was luckier than most of those imprisoned by the South American military. Although tortured and held for a long time in isolation, Estrella eventually recovered, leads a brilliant career as a musician, and is now Argentina's Ambassador to UNESCO.
One of those training the Uruguayan torturers was an American operative, Daniel (Dan) Mitrione, who was later captured and killed by Uruguayan guerrillas. According to A.J. Langguth, a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon, Mitrione was among the US advisers who taught torture to the Brazilian police.
Mitrione's method for the application of torture was carefully orchestrated. Langguth reports that the method was described in detail in a book by Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban double agent who worked for the C.I.A., "Passport 11333, Eight Years with the C.I.A."
This is Mitrione's voice: "When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician. Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die....Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist..."
In Uruguay, Mitrione was the head of the Office of Public Safety, a U.S. government agency established in 1957 by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to train foreign police forces. At Mitrione's funeral, Ron Ziegler, the Nixon administration's spokesman, stated that Mitrione's "devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere." Thanks to former Senator James Abourezk's efforts, the policy advisory program was abolished in 1974.
Mitrione's case was far from unique. Through the School of the Americas, thousands of military and police officers from Latin America were trained in repressive methods, including torture.
On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, a co-worker and her teenage daughter were massacred in El Salvador. I knew one of those killed, Ignacio Martin-Baró, vice-rector of the Central American University. He was the closest I have ever been to a saint. A U.S. Congressional Task Force concluded that those responsible for their deaths were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
Human beings make culture. And we also make torture, that bastard child of culture. It is up to us to change this situation. When running for president Barak Obama stated, referring to the Iraq war. "It is not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq." A similar assertion could be made about torture. It is not enough to say that torture will not be practiced any longer by the U.S. We need to get out of the mindset that made torture possible in the first place.
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20 Comments so far
Show AllIt seems that we have so much knowledge of the evil machinations of our government that we've lost our sense of outrage, our ability to be shocked and angered. At least I have. Articles like this now leave me feeling numb and powerless. What is sad, beyond the fate of the victims, those who bear the most responsibility - the architects and executors of policy - for the millions of maimed murdered and tortured will never be held to account.
Deepa
The US through the CIA has maintained its presence and control by training military forces and police of other countries. The most prominent among the training schools is the School of the Americas. This was located in Panama from 1946 to l954 and later shifted to Fort Benning, Georgia. It still remains there. Its name was changed in 2001 to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). This institute is the Defense Department’s main Spanish language training facility. It says that it trains civilian, military and law enforcement students and holds the promotion of democracy at the core of its mission.
However, George Monbiot links this school to terrorism by giving details of its numerous atrocities. He contends that “the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the al-Qaeda training camps to the attack on New York.”
Some of the alumni have been the most brutal military dictators and human rights violators in Latin America over the past five decades: Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua; Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina; Generals Hector Gramajo and Manuel Antonio Callejas of Guatemala, Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia, and the El Salvador death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson.
I can't recall any major broadcast news service ever so much as MENTIONING the School of the Americas (or its current moniker).
It was only in the second half of the 20th century that courts began to take a close look at 'interrogation' techniques of our police investigators.
I had a friend who, while waiting for trial, was deliberately mistreated while pregnant in order to induce a miscarriage. Nothing that was done would have been classed as 'torture'; yet the durress was such taht she pled out rather than be kept on the hook for months more with an indefinite trial date dangling in the haze.
Deepa
Training manuals used in courses cover methods of political control and interrogation that includes torture. The US torture training and technology has been spread among its client countries. It is alleged:
"The US firms and agencies are providing CN and CS gas grenades, anti-riot gear, fingerprint computers, thumbscrews, leg-irons and electronic "Shock-Batons" among a huge flow of equipment, training, and technical support to the police and paramilitary forces most directly involved in the torture, assassination, and abuse of civilian dissidents."
The US has not only actively engaged in training paramilitary forces and police of other countries in torture, but also overtly and covertly supported it. As Philip Agee, a former CIA operative and whistle-blower of CIA crimes, admitted,
"I was myself involved in some of these activities. I worked, for example, with the police in Latin American countries, and they were often involved in torture. I remember one Sunday morning in the office of the chief of police during a state of siege in Montevideo. My boss, the CIA chief of station in Uruguay was present, along with the local army colonel in charge of anti-riot forces. We began to hear a low moaning coming through the walls and, at first, I thought it was a street vendor outside. But then it became clear that it was someone being tortured in another part of the building. As this horrible sound became louder and louder, the police chief told the colonel to turn up a radio in order to drown out the groans and screams."
The US has perceived its torture training and technology as a help in maintaining peace and democracy. Robert McNamara considered that the US was training soldiers and police of other countries as a democratizing force.
However, Edward Herman retorts: "The 18 military coups in Latin America between 1960 and 1968 suggest the enormity of McNamara's misperception of reality (or deception of Congress). There is a large body of evidence showing that U.S. training has given not the slightest nod toward either democratic values or human rights."
One can discern from reading McCoy's expose' of human torture committed by the US since 1950 that the US is far from being a champion of human dignity, freedom and rights.
And actually never, ever was such a champion.
To champion human rights & freedom is antithetical to corporate oligarchy's overwhelming need for 'profit' coerced from the have-nots
"A premature death means a failure by the technician.... It is very important to know beforehand if we have the luxury of letting the subject die..... You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist....." - voice of Dan Mitrione
Now of course we should all be a bit wary about taking anything at face value from a book authored by a Cuban double agent who worked for the CIA. Still, the quotation in question did not fall from the sky. Even if this passage was a flight of tough boy fantasy, or colorful barroom braggadocio calculated to tittilate the listener's testosterone level, surely it speaks volumes about the mentality of men who euphemistically take the gloves off and engage in torture.
Failure consists in killing the torture victim before the interrogation has run its intended course. Letting the subject die is a luxury. Me, a monster? Oh no. I am a surgeon, an artist, a true professional, a modern 21st Century practitioner of this dark side, Medieval craft.
This is some really, really sick shit.
Time to take the toys away from the boys.
Bill from Saginaw
Deepa
What is the intention of the torturer and intended effect on the torture victim?
Commenting on the relationship between pain and language, Elaine Scarry says that extreme pain has the capacity to destroy a victim’s ability to speak: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” Thus, “the torture victim is reduced to prelanguage screams and moans that are not heard or acknowledged by anyone.”
For the torturer, torture is “the visible manifestation of power.” Through torture the torturer deconstructs and destroys the language of the victim and takes him/her back to the prelanguage stage of life. Through prolonged interrogation of the victim the torturer reconstructs the language of the victim, where the latter starts speaking the “language of the torturer”. By deconstructing and destroying the voice of the victim, the torturer reconstructs it and produces his/her voice (torturer’s voice) as the voice of the victim.
In addition to that, through torture the torturer also sends a message to the victim that “he had the power as well as authority to recognize their (victims’) worthlessness and to decide their fate to the point of destroying them.” Thus, dictatorships that do not have popular support use torture as a means to not only suppress the voice of opposition, but also deny victims their human dignity and worth.
The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared notes: "After all, what else were these tortures but an immense display of the most degrading and indescribable acts of degradation, which the military government, lacking all legitimacy in power, used to secure power over a whole nation?"
What is evident throughout history is that not only dictators but also "democracies" like the US have been using torture to demonstrate their power over the "other".
@Deepa -
You ask "What is the intention of the torturer and intended effect on the torture victim?"
I think George Orwell put it best in 1984 (a book which is highly derivative of the Russian classic 'We'... 'We' is scarier).
"The purpose of torture is torture."
I will dig out the full quotation form which that is excerpted and post it later... the full citation is a perfect reflection of the casual psychopathy of people like those referenced in the above article.
The people referred to in the article are not human beings in any operational sense, and there is no solution for humanity except their extermination. We and they CANNOT co-exist peacefully, any more than we can coexist with the smallpox virus.
Cheers
GT
GT's Market Rant
the USA is VERY GOOD, EXCEPTIONALLY good at giving fancy, innocent sounding, benevolent sounding names and titles
for deeds of PURE EVIL.
example:
with Iragi OIL and other "agreements" with nations for their resources:
"REVENUE-SHARING" whcih really means USA SUCKING out the natural resources of countirews and leaving THEM despondent, desperate, poor and BLAMED for it.
Obama wants to increase funding for South american "PUBLIC SAFETY" "advisory" projects for their local authorities:
MEANING:
suppress , undermine, provoke, torture, kill any "anti-capitalis" ,
anti-US CHAMBER OF COMMERCE exploitations...
"Freedom March" -- MEANING supporting and installing right-wing dictatorial regimes friendly to US Business interests...
and on and on it goes, EXCEPTIONALLY CRAVENLY so.
Bring America Back !!!!.........In the present situation, it did not begin with torture, it began with 9/11 !!
***The US intelligence community knows that torture is a great way to create Patsies==fall guys waterboarded to admit to anything at all !! That's what we got at Gitmo !
**They needed patsies to cover up for the false flag attack which was 9/11 !
They got a whole limosine full of Patsies, and now the Neocons have people like Chelala lamenting to the nth degree the sad atrocities of the big T--Torture.
Mainstream media wants the distracted focus on torthur so it does not need to face up to the truths of 9/11==Truths still way inside the treasonous rats who pulled it off.
Patsies.
Americans have poor memories..they cannot remember past the last American Idol episode...
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
I met the victims of U.S. funded death squads in El Salvador and Honduras in the '80's. One man had been repeatedly hung with a large rope and then cut down just short of death. You could see the rope pattern on his neck where it tore the skin off.
The wealthy demand torture as a means of controlling the more numerous poor. The only point of the torture is to destroy and disrupt the lives of possible enemies. They really don't care if they torture their true enemies or not.
When I was in the service (1964-1970) I was told that Americans don't commit atrocities. THen I heard about the US taking NLF prisoners up in a helicopter and told "Talk or else". If they didn't talk, they were thrown out of the helicopter. The next one would simply say what he thought his US captors wanted to hear, Proof that not only is torture wrong, and illegal under treaties that the US signed, it doesn't work.
Let's stop doing it.
Thank you, Cesar Chelala, for driving this point home once again. I read so many comments from well meaning Americans nostalgic for and America they were apparently told about in some detail, yet which never did exist.
We should make three important distinctions:
--the Bush Administration made the torture central
--the Bush Administration made the torture systemic
--the Bush Administration got caught.
(I also have no doubt that the Bush Administration fully intended to use these techniques on their fellow Americans. The Bush-Cheney Adminstration was a botched fascist takeover.)
Might there be a direct connection between Christianity and the use of torture?
An act of hideous torture lies at the center of Christianity. The story of Jesus is a story about torture. When Christians want to convert you, they threaten you with eternal torture.
And it's not just the mythology. Christians also suffer from a great deal psychological torment--as they love to tell us. To hang around Christians is to hang around some seriously messed-up people.
I'm sure psychological tests would reveal that Christians tend to be highly sadistic. This is when they're not disturbingly masochistic. Talk to a few fundamentalists and tell me it doesn't make your flesh crawl.
History seems to confirm that this weird religion--based on and obsessed with torture, populated by tortured souls--lends itself easily to the use of torture. America's dreadful history might be evidence of an unfortunate Christian influence. No wonder the Founding Fathers tried to keep Christianity out of government.
Talking to Da Banksta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNW4t_rcBxY
The Bush administration used the same arguments that Hitler did. Hitler said that he had to resort to extreme measures to protect the German people from the Jews and COmmunists. When it came to running a country, he copied Stalin. Let's not forget the price that the Germans paid for blindly following Hitler.
Bush argued that he took our freedoms away from us to protect us from the terrorists and to protect our freedoms.
Do you judge a whole group by the actions of a few in the group? Not just Chjrisians, but religious zealots of many other religions tend to be sadistic. Many Christians, myself included have loudly denounced torture committed by the Bush administration. You obviously need to get over your prejudices. If I said about Blacks what you said about Christians, I'd correctly be labelled a racist. So you obviously are a religious bigot.
YOu shouldn't call yourself Perry, but you should call yourself Archie, as in Archie Bunker.
Hey PL...
You bring up a good point of the correlation between modern Christianity and the use of torture...
It has been the case since the cooptation of "Christianity" by Constantine at the Council of Nicea in the 5th cent ad...
the Roman Empire was losing control of it's various pagan ethnic groups, and the emperor wanted to consolidate his power while culling the growing number of Christian zealots who were vocal about the brutal atrocities of empire, like crucifixions, as state sanctioned public displays of torture and murder...
The original "Christians" were a "literalist" spin-off of the Gnostic Mystery Schools, like the Theraputae and the Essenes (who had written the dead sea scrolls)... The Gnostics writings were symbolic narrative "road maps" for initiates to understand the path that the soul/ego must travel in order to identify with the "higher mind" aka Universal Spirit, of which each of our souls is but a fractal of the totality...
The gnostics drew from the traditions of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Judaism (which also borrowed heavily from those traditions) and even from the Buddhist monks in the near east at the time... The Gnostics recognized the common wisdom inherent in all religions, and using the trade languages of the time (especially written Greek) they sought to write a universal story that kept all the important common themes (son of god, enlightenment, reincarnation, karma, etc) and strip it of the disparate regional cultural idiosynchraties, and story that was set in a contemporary storyline to make it more appealing to a multi-cultural audience...
They also wrote the Jesus Myth to call bullshit on the brutal roman empire, and the corrupt Sadduccees who had turned the Temple into a "pay to play" prayer service, holding court until the return of the Messiah... The gnostics wrote that the Announted One had already come and gone, and the "money changers" hadn't even noticed, thus exposing their greed and aloofness...
Unfortunately, the true intention of using the Jesus story as a guide for spiritual growth on the path of enlightenment was lost on many ignorant folks who took a "literalist" interpretation of a symbolic language encoded to protect the higher wisdom from being bastardized by the uninitiated... The literalist fools soon found themselves building huge congregations and justifying their acts of terrorism against the State, which in turn threw them to the lions... Eventually, the empire embraced the hollow shell of Christianity to justify the conquests of foreign lands and conformity of the vassals of empire... They perverted the "crucifixion" story to say "don't fuck with empire, we will even torture and kill the son of god!"... And they selected only a few books for the biblical canon, and stripped them of any meaning that did not suit the needs for empire...
Damn right "torure is not new'.
But this is the 1st mention I've seen that confirms the CIA's consistent practice of torture in South and Central America.
It was secret at first, then institutionalized as the SOA.
The "Banana Republics" were upheld by force, including torture, supported by the CIA.
Abu Graief is old.
And it, torture, works for a while to demoralize, repress, and control; but, eventually, it infuriates and fails.
A very, very stupid practice.
Excellent and important article!
========================
"Bushrod May 24th, 2009 2:56 pm
Damn right "torure is not new'.
But this is the 1st mention I've seen that confirms the CIA's consistent practice of torture in South and Central America.
It was secret at first, then institutionalized as the SOA.
The "Banana Republics" were upheld by force, including torture, supported by the CIA."
THE CIA also used torture in Vietnam, apparently for or during two 10-year periods there, too.
If the article had been posted May 24th, then I'd provide some links to articles I sought after reading the first things Cesar Chelala says in his above article about Daniel Mitrione; but the article was posted May 22nd, which means few people would read this post anyway. I'll just wait for another opportunity for posting the links.
Otoh, I'll add a note or two on those links to provide a tip or two for people who do read this post, before they use my suggestion to do as I did and simply do a Web search.
Part I (of 2 parts) of a transcript, I guess, of a lecture given by John Stockwell in October 1987 appears among the links returned by the search I did, his lecture apparently entitled, "The Secrets Of The CIA", for which there are copies at InformationClearningHouse.info and at ThirdWorldTraveler.com. The copy at ICH has an embedded video that's in .WMV (Windows Media) format and a download link is provided for the .wmv file. It seems to be a 7-minute video with John Stockwell, who, btw, is a former CIA agent, having served 13 years, including during the period that GHW Bush was CIA director. And he has a lot to say on the CIA's covert ops, globally, including in Angola, where I believe to have read that John Stockwell has served, as well as in Nicargua, and I think Chile and Indonesia. Dark covert ops!
I think it's his Part I lecture page that provides some text on Daniel Mitrione, according to what appeared to be an excerpt in a page at oilempire.us, which is a page that also has an excerpt from an article by Alexander Cockburn (of counterpunch.org) on the U.S. and torture, including torture applied in the U.S. prison system as well as for interrogations in U.S. police departments; while the article also briefly provides information on RAPE in U.S. prisons and that it's worse in men's prisons than in women's.
OilEmpire.us's page provides links to those articles, and my Web search also turned up a link to the second page or part of an article with additional pages or parts at MiamiNewTimes.com. It's about a woman whose husband was sent by his boss or "friend" to do some work in the Bahamas for boat and boat engine maintenance, ..., but while the man, whose name I think is Gary Weaver (based on the wife's name and only stating the husband's first name), being murdered shortly after going to the Bahamas. It involves the CIA and/or FBI, international drug-trafficking, Daniel Mitrione (second and third pages, and maybe more, the first page being an intro. and a little critical info.), etcetera.
More links turned up with the Web search, but I'll cut this post off with this above info. stated.
US (and especially CIA) use of torture has been widely known for decades. See the definitive:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II.
by William Blum
Or google william blum for further info