Watching Torture

[Contrary1]

Whether or not the government under George Bush has authorized torture such as the examples given in this article, matters not. Throughout most of the Middle East, and perhaps the rest of the world, this is how the US is now perceived. This is what comes to their minds, when they hear the word "torture".


"I think I know why Jose Rodriguez, then head of the CIA's clandestine service, destroyed those two videos of the interrogations of a pair of suspected Al Qaeda operatives. They were disgusting.

We have taken refuge in euphemisms. "Enhanced," sometimes "aggressive" interrogation techniques—or, the latest offering of a CIA spokesman, "special methods of questioning"—are, deliberately, verbal anesthetic. In the wake of the last great war to save civilization, George Orwell taught us to distrust euphemisms. Always and without exception, they are designed to dull us to the truth. Those CIA videos would have stripped anyone who saw them of that comfortable distancing—confronted everyone who viewed them with the unimaginable reality of what the U.S. government has authorized in our name.

Why do I suspect this? Because I've seen two films of torture sessions. Years ago, both of them. Even now, on bad nights, images surface. The unerasable pornography of calculated violence.

One film came from Tehran. The shah's secret police, the Savak, were notoriously savage. (My first instruction in this came in Amman, Jordan, in the early 1970s. A British consular official told me about an Iranian exile who had gone from Jordan into Iran to try to organize unions. Savak caught him, surgically amputated his arms and legs, and sent his living trunk back to his family in Amman as a warning. I looked for the man, but his family had fled with him from Jordan. The consul knew him, though, and had talked with him.) After the Shah fell in 1979 and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over, one of his early appointees to a top job, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, decided to delve into the Savak archives. He found neatly filed certificates recording the demise of everyone who had died under torture—hundreds and hundreds of forms. "How Ottoman we are," Ghotbzadeh marveled. "Even in this, there is a procedure to be followed." He also found a shelf of reels of film. He smuggled a couple out to Cairo, and it was there that, under an oath of secrecy, I viewed one in the Nile-side apartment of an Egyptian friend and ally of Ghotbzadeh's. (Ghotbzadeh was terrified, trembling. He suspected, correctly as it turned out, that Khomeini's regime would turn to just these measures, so anyone who knew of them would be at risk. His fear proved prescient; he was executed in 1982.)"

More: http://www.newsweek.com/id/75104

[mmonk]

1. Enhanced interrogation techniques

is what the Nazi party in Germany was calling it as they came to power. Thanks for the article link.

[PDJane]

2. The US has done this before.

I keep hoping "never again." However, torture and genocide and the pollution of the land and air and water by the machines of war continue.

There have been a number of genocides in this century alone, and some are ongoing; and yes, Iraq and Palestine come to mind. This doesn't count the genocides of First Nations peopls, or Australian aboriginals, or various African nations.

However, the list includes:
Armenians in Turkey, 1915-1918 (1,500,000 deaths)
Stalin's forced famine, 1932-1933 (7,000,000 deaths)
East Timor, 1996-1998 (about 800,000 deaths and atrocities, including forced sterilization of the female population)
The Rape of Nanking, 1937-1938 (about 300,000 deaths)

WWII:
Nazi Holocaust, 1938-1945 (about 12,000,000, including civilians and concentration camps)
Mussolini, 1936, Yugoslavia, WWII. 300,000
Japan, WWII, esp. Chinese civilians, 5,000,000

Cambodia, 1975-1979. (bombing by the Americans and the support of Pol Pot, at least 2,000,000 people)
Rwanda, 1994. (800,000 deaths. The criminals have removed themselves from Rwanda and are spreading mayhem in neighbouring countries)
Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1995, about 200,000 deaths.
Viet Nam, 1969-1974, around 1,000,000 vietnamese, and counting. Agent Orange continues to pollute the land and the water to the present.

THIS IS ONLY A PARTIAL LIST!!!!