In 1964, the Brazilian military, in a US-designed coup, overthrew a liberal (not more to the left than that) government and proceeded to rule with an iron fist for the next 21 years. In 1979 the military regime passed an amnesty law blocking the prosecution of its members for torture and other crimes. The amnesty still holds.1
On November 12—thirteen years after the onset of George W. Bush’s dirty underground war against “unlawful combatants”—the Obama administration finally told the United Nations Committee Against Torture that the United States believed, in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski, “that torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment are forbidden in all places, at all times, with no exceptions.” Finally! Not so fast.
For that minority of us who reject both this Military Industrial Empire and its ‘Two Party One Party’ system, we are marginalized and ostracized. For that smaller segment of our grouping that holds to most of the conspiracy theories of empire… Wow!! We are just simply crazy! Factor out the way out theories of aliens inside the Illuminati, the shape shifting reptilians, the One World Socialist government of the Fabian Society, or the Jews behind all our world wars etc. That is not what this writer is speaking about.
Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic: The rights and freedoms that we celebrate on the Fourth of July are the product of vast human struggle that remains unfinished
I knew a torturer. I liked him. The man loved his dog, you have to give him that. A Mongolian shepherd. He’d trained it so that if you pointed a gun or even just made bang-bang fingers, the dog would run and jump and push your arm aside with its paws, so he could take out his own gun and shoot you first. He was heartbroken when that dog died.
As Rebecca Gordon notes in her new book, Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States, polls find greater support in the United States for torture now than when Bush was president. And it’s not hard to see why that would be the case.
Some sights are so strange that you can’t stop to look: that corpse with rigor mortis on the roadside; the monkey butcher’s stand; the mummy-wrapped form balanced crosswise on that slow bicycle’s cargo rack. You just blink and proceed. We all have doubtful memories like that.
On December 4, 2013, the New York Times reported the death of General Paul Aussaresses, one of the top military men in Algeria during the years of the Algerian national liberation struggle. Aussaresses was an unabashed colonialist whose politics were quite rightist in nature. One of his primary roles in the French war in Algeria was to interrogate anti-colonial fighters. Of course, this involved torture. Unlike many torturers before and since Aussaresses’ time in Algeria, the general never seemed ashamed of the torture he ordered. In fact, he spoke about it in interviews and eventually
By Sheldon Richman | FFF | May 3, 2013
“A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that ‘it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture’ and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.”
The hoopla over President Obama’s statements on the Guantanamo Bay prison yesterday have obscured the reality of the situation. Sometimes broad talk of policy questions get in the way of the truly revealing details.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
