US: The Senate Report

There is no doubt that human beings are the only animals capable of torturing their fellow humans. A lion may kill another lion, but it does not torture it. We humans have this wretched trait in our DNA. We have the capacity of making others suffer: not only other humans, but also any other animal. How many cases of animal abuse happen everyday in this world? Torture is not only using physical tools to cause suffering to others. A husband can torture his wife without even having to put his hand on her. Psychological torture is as despicable as physical torture, but it is not mentioned as often. Parents can make a child suffer, even though they believe they are disciplining him or her.

I am mentioning these issues because the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has just released a report that describes the horrible torture conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency on those they considered terrorists or suspected terrorists. The report, which I have in my possession, is nothing more than a 500-page summary of an investigation conducted by that committee, which has over 6,000 sheets in total.

I have not the slightest idea why the publication of this report has created such a huge uproar. Spiritualists say that what is known is not asked, and I would say that what is known is not surprising. What is there to be surprised about: that an intelligence agency uses torture methods to extract information? Since the time of our most remote ancestors, these methods have been more or less common.

Since U.S. soldiers landed in Afghanistan over a decade ago, President Bush’s government, with the consent and complacency of Congress, gave the green light to the CIA and other agencies to use any method they wanted to gather information. Moreover, the occupation army itself in Iraq was responsible for the horrific torture methods used on the prisoners it had in various prisons in that country. The photographs of U.S. soldiers torturing defenseless prisoners traveled around the world.

The American people are horrified when they learn that their government is capable of using this type of method against its enemies. There is reason for people to feel ashamed of their leaders using these torture instruments. For the American people, this issue is certainly a hard pill to swallow. Historically, at the domestic level, the leaders of this country blame any kind of human rights violations on the individuals or institutions responsible for carrying them out. If a police officer kills or beats up a citizen, the police officer is to blame, not the government. The same thing is happening now with the CIA, which is an official agency of the U.S. administration. It is now being blamed for deceiving the government by withholding information on the torture methods it used to interrogate prisoners, and this is an absolute lie, for the government knew that this intelligence agency had its approval.

The use of water-boarding on prisoners by intelligence agents was discussed publicly for years. That this procedure was being used was vox populi in the entire world; it was also vox populi that the CIA had secret prisons in many European countries and other places.

At no point has Vice President Dick Cheney denied his support for the methods used against prisoners; moreover, now that the Senate report has surfaced, Mr. Cheney has stated that the authors of these atrocities should not be condemned but, rather, decorated for doing patriotic work. Cheney calls the torturers patriots, and does not even blush.

This Senate report on CIA practices is nothing new; in the 1970s, another committee of that same body, the Church Committee, also conducted an investigation blaming the CIA for using espionage against political opponents and those involved in assassination attempts.

In reality, the only thing this report has done is make official what was already unofficial. I doubt its publication will change any of the rules of the game, and that all of a sudden, the CIA or any other body of the U.S. government will stop acting the way it has acted so far.

To be honest, it should also be said that it was not the CIA that invented torture as a method of extracting information, and it is not the only one that has used it.