Scott Horton details the non-changes in American torture policy and practice from Bush to Obama

Here is a lecture by Scott Horton at the 4th QUIT conference Oct 2010 on all the ways that the US legal system continues to defend torture as policy and practice from Bush and on to Obama.  Horton is the Harper's  No Comment columnist and a lawyer for human rights.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7GnISZyPBQ

QUIT's NEW YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!!

Dear All,

QUIT is just forming its YouTube channel.

We hope to have several recordings from our

4 conferences up soon.

Right now we have the keynote from the wonderful

Jennifer Harbury, human rights lawyer and anti-

torture activist.  She's been leading the fight 

against American sponsored torture for 

decades.  Please view this at -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsnaBrd-DtI

And share with friends, please

John

John Calvi

FOUNDING CONVENER

QUAKER INITIATIVE TO END TORTURE - QUIT!

America Must Finally Apologized for CIA Rendition Program

Published on Friday, December 14, 2012 by The Guardian

America Must Finally Apologize for CIA Rendition Program

European court of human rights finds against CIA abuse of Khaled el-Masri

by Amrit Singh    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/14-8

The much-maligned European court of human rights has this week shown itself at its very best: standing up for the rights of an individual who has been denied justice for almost nine years since he was abducted, secretly detained, and tortured under the CIA's renditionprogram.

Khaled El-Masri, a German national, was seized by Macedonian security officers on 31 December 2003, at a border crossing, because he had been mistaken for an al-Qaida suspect. He was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonian custody for 23 days, after which he was handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to Skopje airport, where he was handed over to the CIA and severely beaten.

The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled, and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository – in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock" – as Macedonian officials stood by. The CIA drugged him and flew him to Kabul to be locked up in a secret prison known as the "Salt Pit", where he was slammed into walls, kicked, beaten, and subjected to other forms of abuse. Held at the Salt Pit for four months, el-Masri was never charged, brought before a judge, or given access to his family or German government representatives.

The CIA ultimately realised that it had mistaken el-Masri for an al-Qaida suspect with a similar name. But it held on to him for weeks after that. It was not until 24 May 2004, that he was flown, blindfolded, earmuffed, and chained to his seat, to Albania, where he was dumped on the side of the road without explanation.

In December 2005, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a press conference – while then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stood by her side – that the United States had admitted it had made a mistake. But the US government still refused to acknowledge its shameful conduct in el-Masri's case and waged a successful campaign to prevent other governments from disclosing the truth.

El-Masri's subsequent search for justice has repeatedly been thwarted. The United States succeeded in getting el-Masri's US lawsuit dismissed on "state secrets" grounds without even responding to his allegations; in 2007, the US supreme court declined to review that dismissal. The Macedonian government resorted to bald-faced lies, claiming that it played no role in his detention or abuse, despite overwhelming evidence confirming his account. The German government refused to disclose what it knew about el-Masri's case, and apparently caved to US pressure not to seek extradition of CIA officials involved in el-Masri's rendition.

Today, the European court of human rights delivered a measure of justice to el-Masri. It vindicated his account of his ill-treatment, and unanimously found that Macedonia had violated his rights under the European Convention, including by transferring him to US custody in the face of a risk of ill-treatment, and facilitating and failing to prevent his being subjected to CIA "capture shock" at Skopje airport.

This is the first court to comprehensively and specifically find that the CIA's rendition techniques amounted to torture. The decision stands in sharp contrast to the abject failure of US courts to deliver justice to victims of US torture and rendition.

Both the United States and Macedonia must now issue el-Masri a full-scale public apology and appropriate compensation. Macedonia should also commit to an internationalized investigation capable of holding its officials accountable. There are plenty of examples of such inquiries into national issues that are too politically charged to handle unaided: Northern Ireland's 1997 Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) included members from Canada, the United States, and Finland.

But Europe's work is not over yet. Macedonia was not the only European country complicit in CIA renditions. A 2006 inquiry by Swiss Senator Dick Marty implicated 14 European governments – including the United Kingdom – in the CIA's "spider's web" of rendition operations. But with the exception of Italy, whose highest court recently upheld the convictions of US and Italian officials for involvement in rendition, neither the UK nor other complicit countries – including Lithuania, Romania, and Poland, which hosted secret CIA prisons – have conducted effective investigations capable of holding officials accountable for their participation in rendition.

The human rights principles at stake extend to the use of the death penalty. European governments are prohibited from transferring criminal suspects to the United States if they risk execution; yet Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national, was secretly flown toGuantánamo Bay after being held in secret CIA prisons in Romania and Poland. He now faces a possible death sentence after a trial by military commission that does not meet international standards.

The European court's decision in the el-Masri case is a clarion call for accountability for the flagrantly illegal CIA rendition program.

The time has come for European governments to stand up to the United States and break the conspiracy of silence, regardless of the diplomatic consequences. As former Human Rights Commissioner for the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammerberg, rightly said on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the 11 September attacks:

"The purported cost to transatlantic relations of pursuing such accountability cannot be compared to the damage inflicted on our European system of human rights protection by allowing ourselves to be kept in the dark."

Small Signs that Justice can prevail!

ttp://www.lfpress.com/2012/10/10/small-signs-that-justice-can-prevail

Small signs that justice can prevail

By Gwynne Dyer

Wednesday, October 10, 2012 

“I wish to make it clear before I cross-examine the three claimants the (British government) does not dispute that each of the claimants suffered torture and other ill-­treatment at the hands of the colonial administration (in Kenya),” said the British government’s defence lawyer, Guy Mansfield.

Damn right they did. One, Paulo Nzili, was beaten so hard he went deaf, and was castrated in public with pliers used to geld cattle.

British colonial officers commanded the African troops who did that and worse to Nzili and thousands of others in concentration camps Britain set up to hold suspected supporters of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. Fifty years later, it has finally made it into the courts.

About 70,000 people spent years in the British camps in Kenya. Some were murdered, and almost all were beaten, sexually abused and/or tortured. But it was a long time ago, and only about 5,000 former inmates of the camps were still alive when three of them, Nzili, Jane Muthoni Mara and Wambuga wa Nyingi, decided to sue Britain for compensation.

With financial support from Kenyan human rights organizations, they launched their case in the high court in London. The British government, while admitting the torture, claimed the victims should sue the Kenyan government instead, since it had inherited responsibilities of the former colonial administration at independence in 1963.

Lawyers really do use arguments like that. They don’t even blush when they do it. But in June of last year the high court rejected the British government’s defence — whereupon its lawyers said it was all far too long ago. The few surviving witnesses are too old, and there are no documents. Sorry, we’d love to help, but in the circumstances . . .

Last Friday the same high court judge dismissed that argument, too. There are actually almost too many documents: the publicity surrounding the case led to the discovery the British Foreign Office has been hiding 8,800 files on Kenya abuses for the past 50 years.

Those files contain enough evidence to prove the truth of what the claimants say. The British government will appeal the judge’s ruling, probably in the hope of dragging things out until the claimants die (two are in their mid-80s) or become too ill to testify. But it’s likely the actual lawsuit will be heard next year, and will result in a victory for the claimants.

That would open the floodgates for thousands more claims for compensation from other Kenyan victims of British atrocities. It would also allow many thousands of aging victims of British violence elsewhere during the last years of the empire to seek compensation in British courts for their suffering.

So what are the chances a British or American court will one day offer compensation to innocent Arabs, Afghans and other Muslims swept up in the so-called “war on terror” and confined for years without charge or trial, often beaten or tortured?

Gradually, the courts are making inroads on this ancient and brutal reality. As in, for example, Kenya itself. After the terrible post-election violence of 2008, in which both leading parties were implicated, a Commission of Inquiry recommended the Kenyan government set up a tribunal to prosecute those responsible.

The National Assembly of Kenya refused. But the judge passed his evidence to the International Criminal Court, which opened a case against senior officials of both parties. The government did everything it could to stop the case, but it is going ahead in the Hague — and a majority of Kenyans support the process.

So there is progress, if only slowly.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Interview with Alfred McCoy on Torture & Impunity

Here is an interview with Professor Alfred McCoy on his new book Torture & Impunity, scroll down to August 23 -  http://wpr.org/mobile/display_archives.cfm?Code=jca&Size=320

Perfecting Illegality - Alfred McCoy

I believe this is the most important writing on American torture in the last several years.  Alfred McCoy is a professor of history and author of several books.  Here he shares the latest news and with plenty of background you will not find on the evening news.  I highly recommend his new book- see below.
John Calvi founding convener Quaker Initiative to End Torture - QUIT!

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Perfecting Illegality By Alfred McCoy Posted on August 14, 2012, Printed on August 23, 2012 http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175582/ Her white hair peeked out from under a brilliant cerulean blue headscarf. Her lips and teeth were stained red from chewing areca nut and betel leaf, a mild stimulant favored by older Vietnamese women.  She was missing her right eye.  She also appeared to be in danger of floating away had a stiff breeze swept along the roadside where we were talking.  Le Thi Xuan couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds. But this 77-year-old whose height topped out at four-feet-and-change was a survivor.  That now-empty eye-socket took an elbow from an American Marine back in the 1960s.  That same day she survived a grenade attack that killed one of her sons and gravely wounded another. Le Thi Xuan also survived torture.  When questioned about the guerrilla fighters that the Americans called “Viet Cong,” she told me, “I did not reveal anything, so they kept on beating me.  Once they tired of that, they used electricity to torture me.” Le Thi Xuan’s ordeal was no anomaly.  Electrical torture by Americans and their South Vietnamese allies was a commonplace of the Vietnam War.  The prime method involved the use of hand-cranked field telephones to produce electricity and two wires that were generally affixed to sensitive areas of the anatomy: ears, fingers, nipples, genitals.  The use of “water torture” or the “water rag” technique -- what we now know as waterboarding -- was also widespread. Some years ago, investigating a military intelligence unit that had routinely subjected Vietnamese to torture, I got in touch with former Staff Sergeant David Carmon.  When Army criminal investigators questioned Carmon in the early 1970s, he admitted using the water rag method on a detainee.  “I held the suspect down, placed a cloth over his face, and then poured water over the cloth, thus forcing water into his mouth," he said, according to his sworn statement.  Once-classified military documents show that he also admitted using electrical shock on detainees.  Decades later, he was still unrepentant.  "I am not ashamed of anything I did, and I would most likely conduct myself in the same manner if placed in a Vietnam-type situation again," he told me.  American torturers of the post-9/11 era are, as best we can tell, generally no less unrepentant. Until this moment, Americans (other than those who abused her) could have known nothing of Le Thi Xuan’s torture.  Similarly, for decades almost no one knew of the rampant use of torture by Carmon’s unit.  (The wartime investigation of it was buried in military files in the National Archives and forgotten.)  But torture by U.S. military personnel has a long history, going back to the Indian Wars and to the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the last century, and its use has been no accident.  As TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy makes clear in his latest piece, there’s a secret post-World War II and post-9/11 history of torture that’s been covered up and covered over -- a bipartisan effort that extends to the present.  It’s a sordid story that McCoy has been unraveling for years and brings up to date in his new book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation.  Knowing it can teach us a lot about America’s covert past, its present, and where the country may be headed in the years to come. Nick Turse Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad How Two Administrations and Both Parties Made Illegality the American Way of Life  By Alfred W. McCoy After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad. President Obama has closed the CIA’s “black sites,” its secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. But via rendition -- the sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that torture -- and related policies, his administration has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.  In this way, he has avoided the political stigma of torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them. This “resolution” of the torture issue may meet the needs of this country’s deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy an international community determined to prosecute human rights abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term risk of another sordid torture scandal that will further damage U.S. standing with allies worldwide. Perfecting a New Form of Torture The modern American urge to use torture did not, of course, begin on September 12, 2001.  It has roots that reach back to the beginning of the Cold War and a human rights policy riven with contradictions. Publicly, Washington opposed torture and led the world in drafting the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the Central Intelligence Agency began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with two findings foundational to a new form of psychological torture. In the early 1950s, while collaborating with the CIA, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald Hebb discovered that, using goggles, gloves, and earmuffs, he could induce a state akin to psychosis among student volunteers by depriving them of sensory stimulation. Simultaneously, two eminent physicians at Cornell University Medical Center, also working with the Agency, found that the most devastating torture technique used by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, involved simply forcing victims to stand for days at a time, while legs swelled painfully and hallucinations began. In 1963, after a decade of mind-control research, the CIA codified these findings in a succinct, secret instructional handbook, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. It became the basis for a new method of psychological torture disseminated worldwide and within the U.S. intelligence community. Avoiding direct involvement in torture, the CIA instead trained allied agencies to do its dirty work in prisons throughout the Third World, like South Vietnam’s notorious “tiger cages.” The Korean War added a defensive dimension to this mind-control research. After harsh North Korean psychological torture forced American POWs to accuse their own country of war crimes, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered that any serviceman subject to capture be given resistance training, which the Air Force soon dubbed with the acronym SERE (for survival, evasion, resistance, escape). Once the Cold War ended in 1990, Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, which banned the infliction of “severe” psychological and physical pain. The CIA ended its torture training in the Third World, and the Defense Department recalled Latin American counterinsurgency manuals that contained instructions for using harsh interrogation techniques. On the surface, then, Washington had resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices. But when President Bill Clinton sent the U.N. Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included language (drafted six years earlier by the Reagan administration) that contained diplomatic “reservations.”  In effect, these addenda accepted the banning of physical abuse, but exempted psychological torture. A year later, when the Clinton administration launched its covert campaign against al-Qaeda, the CIA avoided direct involvement in human rights violations by sending 70 terror suspects to allied nations notorious for physical torture.  This practice, called “extraordinary rendition,” had supposedly been banned by the U.N. convention and so a new contradiction between Washington’s human rights principles and its practices was buried like a political land mine ready to detonate withphenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Normalizing Torture Right after his first public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his White House staff expansive secret orders for the use of harsh interrogation, adding, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” Soon after, the CIA began opening “black sites” that would in the coming years stretch from Thailand to Poland.  It alsoleased a fleet of executive jets for the rendition of detained terrorist suspects to allied nations, and revived psychological tortures abandoned since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the agency hired former Air Force psychologists to reverse engineer SERE training techniques, flipping them from defense to offense and thereby creating the psychological tortures that would henceforth travel far under the euphemistic label “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In a parallel move in late 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to head the new prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, and gave him broad authority to develop a total three-phase attack on the sensory receptors, cultural identity, and individual psyches of his new prisoners. After General Miller visited Abu Ghraib prison in September 2003, the U.S. commander for Iraq issued orders for the use of psychological torture in U.S. prisons in that country, including sensory disorientation, self-inflicted pain, and a recent innovation, cultural humiliation through exposure to dogs (which American believed would be psychologically devastating for Arabs). It is no accident that Private Lynndie England, a military guard at Abu Ghraib prison, was famously photographed leading a naked Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog. Just two months after CBS News broadcast those notorious photos from Abu Ghraib in April 2004, 35% of Americans polled still felt torture was acceptable. Why were so many tolerant of torture? One partial explanation would be that, in the years after 9/11, the mass media filled screens large and small across America with enticing images of abuse. Amid this torrent of torture simulations, two media icons served to normalize abuse for many Americans -- the fantasy of the “ticking time bomb scenario” and the fictional hero of the Fox Television show “24,” counterterror agent Jack Bauer. In the months after 9/11, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz launched a multimedia campaign arguing that torture would be necessary in the event U.S. intelligence agents discovered that a terrorist had planted a ticking nuclear bomb in New York’s Times Square. Although this scenario was a fantasy whose sole foundation was an obscure academic philosophy article published back in 1973, such ticking bombs soon enough became a media trope and a persuasive reality for many Americans -- particularly thanks to “24,” every segment of which began with an oversized clock ticking menacingly. In 67 torture scenes during its first five seasons, the show portrayed agent Jack Bauer’s recourse to abuse as timely, effective, and often seductive. By its last broadcast in May 2010, the simple invocation of agent Bauer’s name had become a persuasive argument for torture used by everyone from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to ex-President Bill Clinton. While campaigning for his wife Hillary in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Clinton typically cited “24” as a justification for allowing CIA agents, acting outside the law, to torture in extreme emergencies. “When Bauer goes out there on his own and is prepared to live with the consequences,” Clinton told Meet the Press, “it always seems to work better.” Impunity in America Such a normalization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” created public support for an impunity achieved by immunizing all those culpable of crimes of torture. During President Obama’s first two years in office, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz made dozens of television appearances accusing his administration of weakening America’s security by investigating CIA interrogators who had used such techniques under Bush. Ironically, Obama’s assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 provided an opening for neoconservatives to move the nation toward impunity. Forming an a cappella media chorus, former Bush administration officials appeared on television to claim, without any factual basis, that torture had somehow led the Navy SEALs to Bin Laden. Within weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder announced an end to any investigation of harsh CIA interrogations and to the possibility of bringing any of the CIA torturers to court.  (Consider it striking, then, that the only “torture” case brought to court by the administration involved a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who had leaked the names of some torturers.) Starting on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the country took the next step toward full impunity via a radical rewriting of the past. In a memoir published on August 30, 2011, Dick Cheney claimed the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on an al-Qaeda leader named Abu Zubaydah had turned this hardened terrorist into a “fount of information” and saved “thousands of lives.” Just two weeks later, on September 12, 2011, former FBI counterterror agent Ali Soufan released his own memoirs, stating that he was the one who started the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah back in 2002, using empathetic, non-torture techniques that quickly gained “important actionable intelligence” about "the role of KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks." Angered by the FBI's success, CIA director George Tenet dispatched his own interrogators from Washington led by Dr. James Mitchell, the former SERE psychologist who had developed the agency’s harsh “enhanced techniques.” As the CIA team moved up the “force continuum” from “low-level sleep deprivation” to nudity, noise barrage, and the use of a claustrophobic confinement box, Dr. Mitchell’s harsh methods got "no information." By contrast, at each step in this escalating abuse, Ali Soufan was brought back for more quiet questioning in Arabic that coaxed out all the valuable intelligence Zubaydah had to offer. The results of this ad hoc scientific test were blindingly clear: FBI empathy was consistently effective, while CIA coercion proved counterproductive. But this fundamental yet fragile truth has been obscured by CIA censorship and neoconservative casuistry. Cheney’s secondhand account completely omitted the FBI presence. Moreover, the CIA demanded 181 pages of excisions from Ali Soufan’s memoirs that reduced his chapters about this interrogation experience to a maze of blackened lines no regular reader can understand. The agency’s attempt to rewrite the past has continued into the present. Just last April, Jose Rodriguez, former chief of CIA Clandestine Services, published his uncensored memoirs under the provocative title Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions after 9/11 Saved American Lives. In a promotional television interview, he called FBI claims of success with empathetic methods “bullshit.” With the past largely rewritten to assure Americans that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” had worked, the perpetrators of torture were home free and the process of impunity and immunity established for future use. Rendition Under Obama Apart from these Republican pressures, President Obama’s own aggressive views on national security have contributed to an undeniable continuity with many of his predecessor’s most controversial policies. Not only has he preserved the controversial military commissions at Guantanamo and fought the courts to block civil suits against torture perpetrators, he has, above all, authorized continuing CIA rendition flights. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama went beyond any other candidate in offering unqualified opposition to both direct and indirect U.S. involvement in torture. "We have to be clear and unequivocal. We do not torture, period," he said, adding, "That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions.” Only days after his January 2009 inauguration, Obama issued a dramatic executive order ending the CIA’s coercive techniques, but it turned out to include a large loophole that preserved the agency’s role in extraordinary renditions. Amid his order’s ringing rhetoric about compliance with the Geneva conventions and assuring “humane treatment of individuals in United States custody,” the president issued a clear and unequivocal order that “the CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” But when the CIA’s counsel objected that this blanket prohibition would also “take us out of the rendition business,” Obama added a footnote with a small but significant qualification: “The terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ in... this order do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Through the slippery legalese of this definition, Obama thus allowed the CIA continue its rendition flights of terror suspects to allied nations for possible torture. Moreover, in February 2009, Obama’s incoming CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the agency would indeed continue the practice “in renditions where we returned an individual to the jurisdiction of another country, and they exercised their rights… to prosecute him under their laws. I think,” he added, ignoring the U.N. anti-torture convention’s strict conditions for this practice, “that is an appropriate use of rendition.” As the CIA expanded covert operations inside Somalia under Obama, its renditions of terror suspects from neighboring East African nationscontinued just as they had under Bush.  In July 2009, for example, Kenyan police snatched an al-Qaeda suspect, Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, from a Nairobi slum and delivered him to that city’s airport for a CIA flight to Mogadishu. There he joined dozens of prisoners grabbed off the streets of Kenya inside “The Hole” -- a filthy underground prison buried in the windowless basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency. While Somali guards (paid for with U.S. funds) ran the prison, CIA operatives, reported the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, have open access for extended interrogation. Obama also allowed the continuation of a policy adopted after the Abu Ghraib scandal: outsourcing incarceration to local allies in Afghanistan and Iraq while ignoring human rights abuses there. Although the U.S. military received 1,365 reports about the torture of detainees by Iraqi forces between May 2004 and December 2009, a period that included Obama’s first full year in office, American officers refused to take action, even though the abuses reported were often extreme. Simultaneously, Washington’s Afghan allies increasingly turned to torture after the Abu Ghraib scandal prompted U.S. officials to transfer most interrogation to local authorities. After interviewing 324 detainees held by Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) in 2011, the U.N. found that “torture is practiced systematically in a number of NDS detention facilities throughout Afghanistan.” At the Directorate’s prison in Kandahar one interrogator told a detainee before starting to torture him, “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban; even stones confess here.” Although such reports prompted both British and Canadian forces to curtail prisoner transfers, the U.S. military continues to turn over detainees to Afghan authorities -- a policy that, commented the New York Times, “raises serious questions about potential complicity of American officials.” How to Unclog the System of Justice One Drone at a Time After a decade of intense public debate over torture, in the last two years the United States has arrived at a questionable default political compromise: impunity at home, rendition abroad. This resolution does not bode well for future U.S. leadership of an international community determined to end the scourge of torture. Italy’s prosecution of two-dozen CIA agents for rendition in 2009, Poland’s recent indictment of its former security chief for facilitating a CIA black site, and Britain’s ongoing criminal investigation of intelligence officials who collaborated with alleged torture at Guantanamo are harbingers of continuing pressures on the U.S. to comply with international standards for human rights. Meanwhile, unchecked by any domestic or international sanction, Washington has slid down torture’s slippery slope to find, just as the French did in Algeria during the 1950s, that at its bottom lies the moral abyss of extrajudicial execution. The systematic French torture of thousands during the Battle of Algiers in 1957 also generated over 3,000 “summary executions” to insure, as one French general put it, that “the machine of justice” not be “clogged with cases.” In an eerie parallel, Washington has reacted to the torture scandals of the Bush era by generally forgoing arrests and opting for no-fuss aerial assassinations. From 2005 to 2012, U.S. drone killings inside Pakistanrose from zero to a total of 2,400 (and still going up) -- a figure disturbingly close to those 3,000 French assassinations in Algeria. In addition, it has now been revealed that the president himself regularly orders specific assassinations by drone in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia off a secret “kill list.”  Simultaneously, his administration has taken just one terror suspect into U.S. custody and has not added any new prisoners to Guantanamo, thereby avoiding any more clogging of the machinery of American justice. Absent any searching inquiry or binding reforms, assassination is now the everyday American way of war while extraordinary renditions remain a tool of state.  Make no mistake: some future torture scandal is sure to arise from another iconic dungeon in the dismal, ever-lengthening historical procession leading from the "tiger cages" of South Vietnam to "the salt pit" in Afghanistan and "The Hole" in Somalia. Next time, the world might not be so forgiving. Next time, with those images from Abu Ghraib prison etched in human memory, the damage to America’s moral authority as world leader could prove even more deep and lasting. Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, which provided documentation for the Oscar-winning documentary feature film Taxi to the Darkside. His recent book,Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation(University of Wisconsin, 2012) explores the American experience of torture during the past decade. Copyright 2012 Alfred W. McCoy © 2012 TomDispatch. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175582/

Bush Torture Memos are 10 Years Old

The Bush Torture Memos are 10 Years Old!  The Center for Constitutional Rights is calling for actions to note this anniversary and bring accountability.  This link offers two short videos -

http://www.ccrjustice.org/get-involved/action/demand-accountability-u.s.-torture

The Quaker Initiative to End Torture - QUIT agrees that this 10 year milestone is a time to seek justice for American leadership that choose the policies and practice of torture.