Leading Historian On US Torture: How To Read Senate Report
Leading Historian On US Torture: How To Read Senate Report
By Alfred W. McCoy, www.historynewsnetwork.org
December 31st, 2014
Introduction:
The recent Senate Intelligence Committees report on CIA torture is arguably the single most important U.S. government document released to date in this still-young 21st century. Yet even with all its richly revealing detail about the CIAs recourse to torture since 9/11, the reports impact on the ongoing U.S. debate over impunity is muted by some serious failings. Above all, the committees cursory treatment of Washingtons long, contradictory history with torture renders this report, in certain critical areas, superficial.
No matter what its limitations might be, this Senate report is still an historic document that will be debated for months and analyzed for years. At its most visceral level, these 534 pages of dense, disconcerting detail takes us into a Dante-like hell of waterboard vomit, rectal feeding, midnight-dark cells, endless overhead chaining, and crippling cold. With its mix of capricious cruelty and systemic abuse, the CIAs Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan can now join that long list of iconic cesspits for human sufferingDevils Island, Chateau dIf, Con Son Island, Robben Island, and many, many more. But perhaps most importantly, these details have purged that awkward euphemism enhanced interrogation techniques from our polite public lexicon. Now everyone, senator and citizen alike, can just say torture.
In its most important contribution, the Senate report sifts through some six million classified documents to rebut the CIAs claim that torture produced important intelligence. All the agencys assertions that torture somehow stopped terrorist plots or led us to Osama Bin Laden were false, and sometimes knowingly so. Instead of such spurious claims, CIA director John Brennan has now been forced to admit that any link between torture and actionable intelligence is unknowable.
Of equal import, the Senate staffers parsed those millions of CIA documents to shatter the agencys myth of derring-do infallibility and expose the bumbling mismanagement of its two main missions in the War on Terror: incarceration and intelligence. Every profession has its B-team, every bureaucracy has its bumblers. Instead of sending James Bond, Langley dispatched Mr. Bean and Maxwell Smartin the persons of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. In perhaps its single most damning detail, the Senate report revealed that the CIA paid these two Air Force retirees $81 million to create sophisticated enhanced interrogation techniques after they had spent their careers doing little more than administering the SERE torture-resistance curriculuma mundane job tailor-made for the mediocrities of modern psychology (more on this in a moment).
More:
https://www.popularresistance.org/leading-historian-on-us-torture-how-to-read-senate-report/
90-percent
(6,829 posts)The highest levels of my government committed war crimes and didn't even get any actionable intelligence? Didn't Dick Cheney state publicly that the torture worked?
This guy dishonored everything my country was founded on and yet he still walks free? Overly wealthy mean corrupt sociopaths seem to be relishing in the sheer magnitude they wreak upon the entire planet merely in the name of ignorant meanness.
Are there any honorable institutions left in this entire country? Is there any Oligarch on the planet that will ever be held to account for their war profiteering climate changing medieval cruelty crimes against all that is fair and just?
-90% Jimmy