Assassinations

Is Murder the New Torture?

davidswanson — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:34:43 -0700

By David Swanson

I've been reading about the history of torture, including John T. Parry's new book "Understanding Torture: Law, Violence, and Political Identity." Parry gives a history of torture in Europe and the United States through the twentieth century, establishing its pervasiveness, and the repetitiveness of the excuses and legalistic machinations used to allow it. Parry sees torture as an absolutely normal activity in our society, but an activity that at least until now was always treated as an aberration, no matter how systemic. Parry even tries to suggest at times that torture is required, necessary, or "essential" for western democracies.

That torture has been pervasive I am persuaded of. That the bizarre torture memos crafted by John Yoo and Jay Bybee and their gang differ less than we might think from previous legal memos, laws, and treaties I accept to some extent. That the US prison and immigration systems fed into the new torture regime is beyond dispute. But Parry could have picked out many times and places to describe that did not use torture to the same extent. The racist and colonialist attitudes that Parry sees as a major support for torture are not constant. The fact that someone can make a twisted legalistic argument for torture does not make it legal beyond serious dispute. The new public acceptance and mainstreaming of torture in the United States has been a dramatic change, at least in awareness; and a dramatic change in a different direction, even as a reaction to this one, is possible.

As Parry notes, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights bans both torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. If we need to clarify that this ban allows no exceptions based on time or place or citizenship or any other factor, then let us clarify that and put it into our Constitution, our treaties, and our statutes, with a requirement to prosecute every act of conspiracy to engage in any such behavior. The world order will not collapse, at least not in a bad way.

Tomgram: An American Hell

Tom Engelhardt — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:24:18 -0700

Originally posted at TomDispatch.com

Don't Turn the Page on History: Facing the American World We Created

We've just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here's how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney's orders, didn't inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn't keep that body's "Gang of Eight" informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We're told that the CIA -- being the president's private army and part of the executive branch of our government -- has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even "be illegal," according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA's own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations -- sometimes wiping out innocent civilians -- from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never -- we're told -- off the ground.