How Torture became Normalized in America
http://www.juancole.com/2014/04/torture-normalized-america.html
How Torture became Normalized in America
By Juan Cole | Apr. 22, 2014
(By Rebecca Gordon)
The US military involvement in Iraq has more or less ended, and the war in Afghanistan is limping to a conclusion. Yet leaks of Senate torture reports about actions in 2002 to 2006 are still breaking news. Dont the problems of torture really belong to the bad old days of an earlier administration? Why bring it up again? Why keep harping on something that is over and done with? Because its not over, and its not done with.
Torture is still happening. Shortly after his first inauguration in 2009, President Obama issued an executive order forbidding the CIAs enhanced interrogation techniques and closing the CIAs so-called black sites. But the order didnt end extraordinary renditionthe practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured. (This is actually forbidden under the UN Convention against Torture, which the United States signed in 1994.) The presidents order didnt close the prison at Guantánamo, where to this day, prisoners are held in solitary confinement. Periodic hunger strikes are met with brutal force feeding. Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel described the experience in a New York Times op-ed in April 2013:
I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I cant describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldnt. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before.
Nor did Obamas order address the abusive interrogation practices of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which operates with considerably less oversight than the CIA. Jeremy Scahill has ably documented JSOCs reign of terror in Iraq in Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. At JSOCs Battlefield Interrogation Facility at Camp NAMA (which reportedly stood for Nasty-Ass Military Area) the mottoprominently displayed on posters around the campwas No blood, no foul.