Torture - Part of US Culture, as US/American as Apple Pie    

     Our new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey is a federal Judge of many years and a legal scholar.  He testified to Congress that he does not know if waterboarding is torture. He has, therefore, started his tenure as the highest law enforcement officer in the US with a lie. Waterboarding has been a torture technique for centuries, and I believe that Attorney General Michael Mukasey knows exactly what it is, and has professed ignorance to protect the President who has permitted its use. 

     The debate over the use of torture focusses on its legality. I do not believe that the CIA, FBI, armed services or law enforcement official at the point of interrogation of an arrestee from whom they want to extract a confession or information cares one whit about the law. This justification for torture, that it will be used to save thousands of innocent lives by eliciting a confession under pressures of time, is unnecessary. If a person in a position of power is inclined to torture a suspect, he/she will torture. 

     We do not have to look far for an example. In Chicago, from 1973 to 1991, 135 black men were tortured, with an electric shock box, with cattle prods, and with typewriter covers. Some were beaten, with fists and flashlights, some were subjected to mock execution. The shock box is a box with a crank that generates an electric shock that creates lesions wherever the alligator clips that carry the charges are connected to a human body. The cattle prod was often used on the genitals. The typewriter cover was used to create a “dry submariner”. When placed over an arrested man’s head and held down, it made the victim feel that he was being suffocated and was very effective in eliciting confessions. 

     Mayor Richard Daley was the State’s Attorney during 55 of these tortures, and he has to this day refused to seek accountability in the Chicago Police Department for these crimes. “He was aware of the torture from the beginning and he did nothing about it,” said Flint Taylor, an attorney for the People’s Law Office, which has spent over a decade representing victims and pursuing justice in these cases. 

     Jon Burge, the Police Commander who was responsible for the majority of these abuses, lost his job, but today lives in Florida on a Chicago pension. 14 officers implicated in torture practices during this period are still on the Chicago police force. On August 14, 2007, James Andrews, who was beaten with fists and a flashlight in 1983 and convicted on the basis of his confession, was granted a new hearing on the validity of his confession by a Cook County Judge, who noted that his conviction in 1984 was obtained in Chicago during a period when torture and forced confessions were an acknowledged practice. 11 Illinois death row prisoners were tortured into confessions by Burge and his associates. Four were released by Governor Ryan, and seven had their sentences commuted to life and are awaiting the results of appeals. There are still many prisoners in Illinois convicted on the basis of torture-produced confessions. T

     he impunity granted the torturers by the Illinois “justice system” has led the victims to the international courts. In 2005, a case was brought before the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, and in May of 2006, the Chicago victims appeared before the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which in its findings noted that the United States practices torture in its domestic and foreign policy. The committee noted that the US has no federal law criminalizing torture, for example, and subjects prisoners to protracted periods of isolation in its super maximum prisons, uses inhumane methods of execution, and fails to bring torture perpetrators to justice. 

     The UN Commission Against Torture draws a direct line between the actions of law enforcement officers in Chicago, and the policies of the United States at Abu-Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. 

     I would add that the connection extends to Central and South America. The United States has been training Latin American soldiers in the finer arts of assassination and torture for decades at the School of the Americas, in 2000 renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Here is an excerpt from a National Security Archives report in 2004: 

      CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described "coercive techniques" such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to the declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The Archive also posted a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney warning that U.S. Army intelligence manuals that incorporated the earlier work of the CIA for training Latin American military officers in interrogation and counterintelligence techniques contained "offensive and objectionable material" that "undermines U.S. credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment." The two CIA manuals, "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual-1983" and "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation-July 1963," were originally obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Baltimore Sun in 1997. The KUBARK manual includes a detailed section on "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources," with concrete assessments on employing "Threats and Fear," "Pain," and "Debility." 

     The language of the 1983 "Exploitation" manual drew heavily on the language of the earlier manual, as well as on Army Intelligence field manuals from the mid 1960s generated by "Project X"-a military effort to create training guides drawn from counterinsurgency experience in Vietnam. Recommendations on prisoner interrogation included the threat of violence and deprivation and noted that no threat should be made unless the questioner "has approval to carry out the threat." The interrogator "is able to manipulate the subject's environment," the 1983 manual states, "to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception." “Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past”, Wednesday, May 12th 2004, Thomas Blanton and Peter Kornbluh, from National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 122. 

     Torture has been part of US policy through Vietnam and the Phoenix Program, during the dirty wars throughout the Americas from Chile to Colombia to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.  

     When I was working with the Coalition of Religious and Civic Organizations in Easton in 1978, 1979, 1980, in meeting after meeting citizens would come to us with complaints of police brutality. It was a policy in the Easton Police Department, I believe, and I wonder if very much has changed in the intervening years, except that perhaps now the public tolerates lawless police behavior. Our current local spike in violent crime shows that crime cannot be “fought” by criminals – current law enforcement personnel and policies will only lead to more violence and crime.

     I believe that torture has permeated our culture. Many advertizers pay to support television programs that show police officers beating suspects, and prison guards enforcing the de facto torture of life in the maximum security prisons of various States. Congress has now acknowledged, in their acceptance of Mukasey, that torture will be allowed legally as long as we label the torture an accepted interrogation technique. The torturers among us, who have never been deterred by law anyway, have now been granted legal license to practice their craft by the highest authorities. –Joe DeRaymond