Torture: An American Institution (Mickey Z.)

[Tace]

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

A casual glance at the news these days might give one the impression that the Bush Administration invented torture last month. However, in the corporate media equivalent of a scoop, the Washington Post "broke" the story of U.S. torture of Arab and Afghan "detainees" nearly four years ago.

A Dec. 26, 2002, article, perfectly timed to get lost in the holiday shuffle, began like a bad spy novel: "Deep inside the forbidden zone at the U.S.-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism-captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders."

The Post reported that those refusing to cooperate are "sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles" or "held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights" (euphemistically termed "stress and duress" techniques). And these are the lucky ones.

Other detainees (POW status conveniently denied) are handed over to "allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred," according to the Post, quoting an unnamed official source as explaining: "We don't kick the out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the out of them." Former CIA inspector general Fred Hitz claimed the Agency doesn't "do torture" but if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, "we can use the fruits of it."

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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/content/view/292/lang,en/

[bemildred]

1. "Violence is as American as cherry pie."

-- H. Rap Brown