Another Torture Report and Still No Prosecutions
Weekend Edition December 26-28, 2014
When Crimes of State Go Unpunished
Another Torture Report and Still No Prosecutions
by JOHN LaFORGE
It’s common knowledge that torture never produces good information. No one needed the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Cheney torture program to learn that lesson. The revulsion and outrage caused by torture is so universal that the community of nations has adopted the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war.
But Messrs. Cheney and Bush didn’t institute torture to garner information. They did it because the publicized use of torture weakens political opposition. Torture instills such terror and fear in the populace that its use works to keep large numbers of potential government critics quiet, scared, and too intimidated to risk acting or even speaking out against the state. So Cheney is deceptively correct in claiming his torturing “worked” in that even Obama is too afraid to appoint a Special Prosecutor.
The Senate’s torture report has raised awareness of the grisly crimes committed by the Bush/Cheney Administration, and the CIA can’t escape looking like a gang of coldblooded psychopaths. But it is only the latest of dozens of studies, reports and books on the U.S. torture program. It adds little to the 560-page report of 2013 by the bi-partisan Constitution Project, titled “Detainee Treatment.” That study found that U.S. military and CIA abuse of prisoners “violate[s] U.S. laws and international treaties” and that the “information” extracted under torture was useless, unreliable and insignificant.
Ten years ago a report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba revealed the illegal abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and documented “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses … inflicted on several detainees” by the 800th Military Police Brigade. Gen. Taguba reported: the rape of a female prisoner by a male MP; the use of military dogs without muzzles to terrorize detainees and, at least once, to bite and severely injure a prisoner; the breaking of chemical lights and pouring of the phosphoric liquid on prisoners; death threats against detainees with loaded pistols; beating of prisoners with a broom handle and a chair; threats of rape; and the anal rape of a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/26/another-torture-report-and-still-no-prosecutions/
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