CIA: Torture and Structural Brutality

A report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed documents yesterday showing that the torture used by the CIA in response to the 9/11 attacks was even more brutal than was previously known. The report describes such torture as simulated drowning, placing detainees in submissive positions, sleep deprivation over several days, death threats and rectally administered injections. The report also accuses the CIA of routinely misleading legislators, the White House and the general public regarding the range and extent of the interrogation programs and clandestine prisons operated by the agency in dozens of countries.

The White House is using the release of this document to justify its decision to cancel the interrogation program. At the same time, however, the report has once again shed light on Barack Obama’s indecisiveness and characteristic reluctance in relation to these issues. Far from formulating a clear and unequivocal limit in the face of the interrogation practices, the president issued a less than subtle defense of the work by the intelligence agencies and of the administration of his predecessor George W. Bush and his anti-terrorist crusade. Against this background, Obama has indicated that some errors were made, and has asked the report not serve to revive old arguments.

In fact, it should be remembered that Washington has remained unperturbed about the disclosure of other offensive crimes perpetrated by its military and intelligence apparatus within and outside the United States for decades in the past as well as recently. Since 1997, Washington has acknowledged that the CIA participated in the training and financing of torturers used by the military dictatorship that took power in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973.

More than 15 years ago, the Pentagon declassified seven counterinsurgence manuals prepared in prior decades which contained precise instructions for torturing detainees. At least four similar documents are known to have been produced by the CIA and made public in that same era.

Chelsea Manning’s revelations about crimes against humanity committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, revelations that were published in turn by WikiLeaks, later added to that knowledge.

In any case, the information from the Intelligence Committee provides another aggravating circumstance adding to the discredit of the U.S. government, and establishes brutality as a systematic practice and structural tendency in that country. Now that it is known the CIA misled Washington for years, it is worth remembering that both Washington and the CIA have transgressed international and American law and the law of other countries in a systematic, deliberate and planned manner, violating the human rights of countless individuals in the same way.

What is truly reprehensible is not that the CIA’s torture practices were more brutal than previously known, but that those practices were used as the basis for policy, the economy, business and the supposed strengthening of the rule of law by a superpower.