Torture will come home
Mike 11 March 2008, 10:08PM
On Saturday, Bush vetoed legislation that would have banned "enhanced" CIA tortures like waterboarding, hypothermia, and sexual humiliation.
The latest news is that the House will attempt an override today. The numbers are not encouraging. On December 13, the House voted on 222-199 in favor of the provision to ban CIA "enhanced" torture, but to override a veto a two-thirds majority is needed.
The vote instead will provide a platform for those on the right side of history - those against sexual humiliation, electric shocks, and waterboarding- to lambast Bush's legacy of torture. McCain too will be singled out for his cowardly about face on the issue. The fact remains though - this all comes over half a decade strong key Congressional leaders were initially briefed on "the program".
Ending the corrosive two track torture regime (ie. CIA is "official" torture agency while others agencies ostensibly cannot torture) is vital. As I pointed out last year in American Torture, legalised "enhanced" torture will spread. I wrote:
Knowing that it is essentially legal for the CIA to torture will no doubt tempt interrogators - perhaps even detectives in American police departments - to use these same techniques.
Last month, torture expert Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, expanded on this same notion. As he lucidly explained to Harper's Scott Horton:
I am opposed to two track systems, where one group of people can torture and the other people can’t. And it is not hard to understand why. Suppose you’re an interrogator who is not allowed to use some technique, but the guy from the Other Governmental Agency can. What is more, you believe that these techniques work. So why should you be stuck using techniques that are slow and time consuming, when the guy from the OGA can get good results and win all the glory? Aren’t you just an idiot for sticking to the rules? Of course not, and so torture will spread... [...] Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident. So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you.
About the Author
Michael Otterman is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney and author of critically acclaimed American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Pluto 2007). As a freelance journalist, he has covered crime and culture for an array of publications including New Matilda, Crikey!, Melbourne's Is Not magazine, the Sydney City Hub newspaper and Boston’s Weekly Dig. His website is www.americantorture.com.
This blog entry was created by Mike and does not necessarily represent the position or opinion of Amnesty International Australia.
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