Originally published February 15 2006
Embrace of torture by U.S. officials spans decades
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The open acceptance of torture by the Bush administration is unprecedented, but the torture is not. Past administrations had secret "black ops" where the crimes were sanctioned but officially denied and condemned.
It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location.
But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration?
An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture".
Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.
That would require something totally absent from the debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials has been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam war.
It's a history exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions.
In his forthcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesises this evidence, producing a riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture", based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain.
McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix programme and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training.
It is not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples".
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