U.S. has sanctioned torture for too long (Jennifer Harbury)

[struggle4progress]

BY JENNIFER K. HARBURY

Jennifer K. Harbury, author of "Truth, Torture and the American Way," and a book on her husband's death, heads the Stop Torture Permanently campaign of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

September 25, 2005

<snip> We must also remember that these horrific practices were not invented during the war against terror. Throughout Latin America, secretly held prisoners were subjected to raging dogs, excruciating positions, simulated drownings, long-term sleep and food deprivation, blasting noises and terrifying threats.

U.S. responsibility was hardly limited to funding and training military death squads. In many cases, U.S. intelligence agents visited cells, observed battered prisoners and gave advice or asked questions. Instead of insisting on humane treatment, these agents simply left the detainees to their fates.

Worse yet, many notorious torturers were on the CIA payroll as informants. I ought to know. My husband, a Mayan resistance leader, was brutally tortured for two years by Guatemalan officials serving as such "assets." The "water-pit" technique referred to in Afghanistan appears in his files, too. Eventually, he was either thrown from a helicopter or dismembered. Within six days of his capture, the CIA knew he was in the hands of its own people, yet continued payments and kept the matter secret even from our Congress. My husband's life could have been saved. <snip>

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-ophar234442343sep25,0,2934111.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. It's no surprise that the torture methods are the same.

They learned them from us at the School of the Americas.

Some of them we learned in Vietnam, and some were home grown, from the southern prison-plantation system. We refined and codified the methods and fed them to central america, where we could watch them in practice.

The RW coup has been planned for decades, and they've wanted and needed to know how effective these things are but forgot that they are not for getting information or intelligence, but for terrorizing a populace. Trying these methods against so-called insurgents is either a mistake, or it is practice for when they bring it home.

[gfenley]

2. torture

New report from Human Rights Watch has testimony of 3 USA soldiers saying there was systematic prisoner torture in Iraq.

[burythehatchet]

4. welcome

fellow Atlantan!
:hi:

[Briar]

3. British judges

are about to be asked to approve the use of evidence gathered by torture in British courts.

The mood has changed, saith Bliar. And that means encouraging the use of torture, sacrificing one person for the general good, is now the patriotic thing to do.

So the poison spreads.