Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared
on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"?
Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this
government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we
had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years
earlier.
Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to
call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many
terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA had not only lied
about the torture of large numbers of people after 9/11, but it had vastly
exaggerated any valuable information that came from such practices.
However secret rendition of prisoners to other places was ongoing.
The US not only tortured people in its own custody, however. Last week the
European Court of Human Rights found that the US government transferred individuals
to secret detention centers in Poland (and likely elsewhere) where they were
tortured away from public scrutiny. The government of Poland was ordered to
pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to two victims for doing nothing
to stop their torture on Polish soil.
How tragic that Poland, where the Nazis constructed the Auschwitz concentration
camp in which so many innocents were tortured and murdered, would acquiesce
to hosting secret torture facilities. The idea that such brutality would be
permitted on Polish soil just 70 years after the Nazi occupation should remind
us of how dangerous and disingenuous governments continue to be.
This is the first time the European court has connected any EU country to
US torture practices. The Obama administration refuses to admit that such facilities
existed and instead claims that any such "enhanced interrogation" programs
were shut down by 2009. We can only hope this is true, but we should be wary
of government promises. After all, they promised us all along that they were
not using torture, and we might have never known had photographs and other
information not been leaked to the press.
There are more reasons to be wary of this administration's claims about rejecting
torture and upholding human rights. The president has openly justified killing
American citizens without charge or trial and he has done so on at least three
occasions. There is not much of a gap between torture and extrajudicial murder
when it comes to human rights abuses.
Meanwhile, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior current and
former CIA officials are said to be frantically attempting to prepare a response
to a planned release of an unclassified version of a 6,500 page Senate Intelligence
Committee study on the torture practices of that agency. The CIA was already
caught tapping into the computers of Senate investigators last year, looking
to see what information might be contained in the report. Those who have seen
the report have commented that it details far more brutal CIA practices that
have been revealed to this point.
Revelations of US secret torture sites overseas and a new Senate investigation
revealing widespread horrific CIA torture practices should finally lead to
the abolishment of this agency. Far from keeping us safer, CIA covert actions
across the globe have led to destruction of countries and societies and unprecedented
resentment toward the United States. For our own safety, end the CIA!
