News:
The December 15th, 2014 issue of the New York Magazine carries an article titled: “The Torture Party: Why Republicans Defend the Most Sadistic Government Program in Recent History”, which discusses the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture between 2001 and 2009 that was released earlier this week.
Comment:
The new revelations include rectal abuse, being forced to stand on broken limbs as well as murder. This may not sound new, as these torture methods have been described before, in relation to the process called ‘rendition’ where the U.S. sent prisoners to third party countries for some of the West’s now ousted partners in crime from the Middle East to do the dirty work. What is new, however, is that we now know that Americans were performing all these types of torture themselves, and that American doctors, nurses and psychologists were actively involved in these cruel and immoral practices!
Much of the news this week has focused upon adding, to the description of these sadistic torture methods, indignation that Western governments have lied to their peoples and lost their moral credibility in the world. The revelations only add embarrassment to former Soviet Bloc countries, such as Poland that supported clandestine U.S. torture houses to be sited on its territory until they became so concerned that they could no longer stomach what Americans were doing. The Senate Intelligence Committee report described in detail some tortures that were used there at “Detention Site Blue” during 2002 and 2003. Britain, on the other hand, managed to get key passages related to its likely extensive involvement in the torture process removed! It is already known that Britain sent British nationals abroad for torture, and that its airfields were an important stopping over point for U.S. transportation of victims for rendition.
The New York Magazine article throws light upon the craftiness of the West’s deception over the past years. Dick Cheney, who has been at the center of the controversy about an ugly torture practice called ‘waterboarding’, which simulates torture, has been minimizing the scale and nature of torture being used. He is quoted as saying: “You’ve heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists … Few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.” All this talk of ‘waterboarding’, which is bad enough in itself, has actually been concealing the ugly fact that the U.S. has been using other more brutal methods on a much larger scale than admitted before.
In addition, there are those who continue to defend the indefensible. One example comes from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. His views are quoted in TIME Magazine and CNN on December 12, 2014. The CNN report is titled: “Scalia on torture morality: ‘I don’t think it’s so clear at all”, continues to quote Scalia as saying: “What are human rights is not written up in the sky”, but this is a different tune to the one that the U.S. sings when it is building an international alliance to wage war against its enemies.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia makes the supposed moral ambiguity clear: “each society’s perception of what it believes human rights should be ought to be up to that society, and I think it’s very foolish to yield that determinations not only to a foreign body but to a foreign body of judges”. This is extremely ugly from the highest court of the U.S., as it supports the U.S. in torturing people regardless of what anyone else in the world thinks, as long as they think it could be beneficial. Such an ambiguous moral position would also imply that other countries could not be criticized, if they also find that torture benefits them. The message reads like a world torturer’s manifesto: torturers across the world – unite!
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Dr. Abdullah Robin