"Working the Dark Side"--as Cheney revealed...
Working the Dark Side
by Robert C. Koehler
Ten years later . . . the hooded man with arms outstretched, electrodes attached to his fingers, revisits the national conscience. Iraq is in a shambles. The prison itself was closed in mid-April because Sunni insurgents are too much of a threat in the region. We wrecked and contaminated two countries in reckless pursuit of revenge and national interest.
Ten years later, a 6,300-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on the U.S. detention and “enhanced interrogation” program is due to be released, or partially released, at some point in the near future — pending declassification, i.e., censorship, of its findings by the White House and even the CIA itself.
McClatchy DC, to which portions of the still-secret report were leaked, recently reported: “The investigation determined that the program produced very little intelligence of value and that the CIA misled the Bush White House, the Congress and the public about the effectiveness of the interrogation techniques, committee members have said.”
Mural paintings depicting scenes from the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. (AFP/File, Behrouz Mehri)
In other words, the pain and degradation we inflicted on detainees — including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, extreme stress positions, wall-slamming and so much more (“working the dark side,” as Dick Cheney infamously put it) — yielded little or no information we were actually able to use. We tortured, we strip-mined, these men and women for nothing.
While I can appreciate the irony and outrage of all this, I cringe at its superficiality. Torture’s OK if it gets good stuff, like in the movies? The ends actually do justify the means, and the only “scandal” here is the inadequacy of the end results our torture program coughed up?
Here’s the thing. We have no innocence in this matter. We are a nation founded on the premise that the ends justify the means. Ten years after the glaring inhumanity of the “enhanced interrogation” program went public with the release of some ghastly photos, we haven’t as a nation acknowledged the depth of their revelations. We’ve been working the dark side all along.
A decade ago, an organization called Historians Against the War released a publication, “Torture, American Style,” which addressed all this. Scapegoating and dehumanization have always been tools of the trade of statecraft. The Abu Ghraib photos do not represent a departure from the past. In them, technology finally catches up with our own eternally classified secret self and reveals it in stark relief. There’s no escaping it.
Ten years ago, we finally had a clear look at ourselves. That’s the beginning of salvation.
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https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/01-1
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It will take decades for this nation to outlive this shame we've inflicted on ourselves. And that only if we stop the torture right now, and hold Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Wolfowitz accountable, putting them in the dock for war crimes. A trial and conviction of these clowns followed by life sentences (or perhaps a noose, as we did to the Nazis in Nuremburg) would be very cathartic to this nation. 
