Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Former President George W. Bush With Former CIA Director George Tenet; V.P. Dick Cheney is Facing Them (Official White House Photo by Eric Draper)
Yesterday, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 499-page Executive Summary of its 6,000-page report on the use of torture by the CIA during the presidency of George W. Bush. The outrage to the findings was immediate and worldwide. The New York Times called the conduct “a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend.”
Senator John McCain, who experienced torture first-hand during the Vietnam War, said the CIA had “stained our national honor.” Stephen Kinzer, writing in the Boston Globe, said that “no one has suggested that these officers, or their superiors, were doing anything other than what elected leaders wanted them to do. By focusing on the CIA’s kidnappers, torturers, and fabulists, this report diverts us away from the central responsibility of political leaders.”
Among the barbarous tactics used against the prisoners was waterboarding, sleep deprivation while standing in stress positions for up to 180 hours, confinement in small boxes, and what the CIA has decided to characterize as “rectal hydration” or “rectal feeding” where the detainee had pureed food or hummus inserted in their rectum. Thomas Burke, a professor at Harvard Medical School and an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital told the Washington Post that: “No one in the United States is hydrating anybody through their rectum. Nobody is feeding anybody through their rectum…That’s not a normal practice.” Burke added later in the interview: “What we can say is that because nobody [in the medical field] would do it, it has to lead to the question of, what were they really doing?” The Senate report notes that an interrogation official at one point said the tactic demonstrated his “total control over the detainee.”
President Obama said about the findings: “That’s not who we are.” While it may not be whom the majority of Americans are, it is becoming increasingly clear that those gaining high office in the United States are frequently unfit for the position and that accountability for serial criminality – whether in the military, at the CIA or on Wall Street – goes unprosecuted and undeterred by the U.S. Justice Department.
Confronted with growing, insurmountable evidence that this is who we are at the top of the power circle where decisions are made, if average Americans are not willing to engage in mass marches to take back their country, we have all become willful participants in the criminality and atrocities.
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