Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
Now Available!
Today's
Stories
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
May
4, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations
and Responses
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 2004
Virginia
Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall
May
1 / 2, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy
in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat
Robert
Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No
Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders,
Useless Spies, Angry World
Heather
Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin
American Troops Flee Iraq
Diane
Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq:
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
Diane
Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and
Sharon Speak the Same Language
Patrick
Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked,
Shocked, Shocked
Chris
Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists
and Annihilation
April
29 / 30, 2004
Dave
Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome
Death of Pat Tillman
Kathy
Kelly
The Warden's Tour
Greg
Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Banality of Evil
Michael
S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the
Ultimate Depception
Patrick
Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies
April
28, 2004
Christopher
Brauchli
Meet Congressman Know-Nothing:
Tom Tancredo
Wendy
Brinker
The Politics of the Numb
Faisal
Kutty
The Dirty Work of Canadian Intelligence
John
Chuckman
Seeking the Evil One
Mike
Whitney
Flag-Draped Coffins and the Seattle Times
Tom
Mountain
Rwanda and the F***** Word
Graeme
Greenback
The Iraqi Alamo: a CNN/CIA Production
Tracy
McLellan
The War Comes Home
M.
Junaid Alam
We are the Barbarians
William
Loren Katz
Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson
April 27, 2004
James
Davis
The Colombia 3 Acquitted
Dave
Lindorff
Chalabi as Prosecutor
Bruce
Schneier
Terrorist Threats and Political
Gain
Cockburn
/ Sengupta
British Generals Resist Calls for
More Troops to Aid Americans in Iraq
Walt
Brasch
Presidential Letters: The Day I
Was Asked to Feed an Elephant
Saul
Landau
The Empire in Denial and the Denial
of Empire
April 26, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Crossing the Shia Line: US Troops
Prepare to Enter Najaf
Wayne
Madsen
Trading Places: Will the US Go the Way of the USSR?
Grover
Furr
Protest, Rebellion, Commitment
Elaine
Cassel
Lies About the Patriot Act
Mickey
Z.
Inspired by Pat Tillman?
Greg
Moses
Bremer's De-De-Ba'athjfication Gambit
Gila
Svirsky
Anarchy in Our Souls
Uri
Avnery
Vanunu and the Terrible Secret
April 24 / 25, 2004
William
A. Cook
Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry
and Bush Melt into One
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank
Brandy
Baker
A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So
Robert
Fisk
A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free
Speech
Ben
Tripp
October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios
Nelson
Valdés
"Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Return to the Future
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Killed Pat Tillman
Mark
Scaramella
Does Anybody Know Anything?
Patrick
Cockburn
The Return of Saddam's Generals
Gary
Engler
Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas
Col.
Dan Smith
Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush
Greg
Weiher
Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam...
Elaine
Cassel
Life on the Outside: a Review
Vanessa
Jones
Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney
Jim
French
Agriculture's Bullied Market
Hammond
Guthrie
Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles
Poets'
Basement
Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella
April 23, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
The Only Solution is Immediate Withdrawal
Dave
Lindorff
Imagination Deficit Disorder
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Contractors and Mercenaries: the Rising Corporate Military Monster
Norman
Solomon
Country Joe Band, 2004: "What Are We Fighting For?"
Cynthia
McKinney
All Things Are Not Equal: the Perils of Globalization
CounterPunch
Wire
A Bitch Called Wanda
Karyn
Strickler
Sierra Club, Inc.
Hammond
Guthrie
Yellow Caked in the Face
Paul
de Rooij
Graveyard of Justifications: Glossary
of the Iraqi Occupation
April 22, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
When Terror Came to Basra: "I
Saw a Minibus of Children on Fire"
Tanya
Reinhart
The Wall Behind Disengagement
Lance
Selfa
Why is Kucinich Still in the Race?
Josh
Frank
Street Fighting Man? Kucinich's Pulled Punches
Sen.
Robert Byrd
Bush Owes America Answers on Iraq
William
S. Lind
Why We Get It Wrong
Mickey
Z.
Undoing the Latches
Robert
Jensen
Why They Fast: Remembering the Victims of the World Bank
John
L. Hess
The New York Times from 30,000 Feet
April
21, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Yeats on Iraq
Alfredo
Castro
Colombia's Forgotten Prisoners
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's Taliban Drug Deal
William
A. Cook
George 1 to George 2
Jack
Random
Iraq and Vietnam
Jean-Guy
Allard
Alarcon Meets the Editors
Mike
Whitney
Charade in the Desert
Bill
Christison
Only Major Policies Changes Can
Help Washington Now
April 20, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Bush and Kerry Share a Problem
Stan
Cox
Wal-Mart's Magic Numbers
Bruce
Anderson
On Listening to Air America
Joseph
Kalvoda
Czech Mate for Condi
Greg
Moses
Yesterday's Intelligence
Stan
Goff
The Democrats and Iraq
Website
of the Day
Santorum Happens
April 19, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
The "Central Hand" of the
Resistance
Mike
Whitney
Bob Woodward's Imperial Trifles
Douglas
Valentine
52 Pick-Up and the 100-to-1
Rule
John
Chuckman
The Sharon Annex: Evil Does Often
Triumph
Doug
Giebel
Welcome to the Club
Rahul
Mahajan
Hospital Closings and War Crimes
April
16 / 18, 2004
Robert
Fisk
Bush Legitimizes Terror
Saul
Landau
Subverting Brazil and Cuba
Dave
Lindorff
Paying for War: $2,150 per Family
and Counting
Brandy
Baker
Fallujah's Collateral Damage
Mickey
Z.
The Left Attacks from the Right
Bruce
Jackson
The Bush Press Conference: Gott Mit
Uns
Norman
Solomon
How the "NewsHour" Changed
History
Alexander
Cockburn
Bush, Kerry and Empire
April
15, 2004
Greg
Moses
Follow the Families, Not the Script
Virginia
Tilley
The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt:
Just Change the Channel
Ron
Jacobs
They Coulda Been Champions of the
World: Hurricane Carter and Ron Kovic
Michael
Neumann
A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes
Reporting in the Toronto Globe and Mail
April
14, 2004
Tom
Reeves
Return to Haiti: an American Learning
Zone
Reza
Fiyouzat
Japan and Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
What Bush Really Said
Diane
Christian
The Real Passion
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
May 8 / 9, 2004
Torture as Normalcy
As American
as Apple Pie
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Torture's back in the news, courtesy
of those lurid pictures of exultant Americans laughing as they
torture their Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib prison run by the
US military outside Baghdad. Apparently it takes electrodes and
naked bodies piled in a simulated orgy to tickle America's moral
nerve ends. Kids maimed by cluster bombs just don't do it any
more. But torture's nothing new. One of the darkest threads in
postwar US imperial history has been the CIA's involvement with
torture, as instructor, practitioner or contractor. Since its
inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly
studying Nazi techniques and protecting their exponents such
as Klaus Barbie. The CIA's official line is that torture is wrong
and is ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On countless occasions
it has been appallingly effective.
Remember Dan Mitrione, kidnapped
and killed by Uruguay's Tupamaros and portrayed by Yves Montand
in Costa-Gavras's film State of Siege? In the late 1960s Mitrione
worked for the US Office of Public Safety, part of the Agency
for International Development. In Brazil, so A.J. Langguth (a
former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon) related in his
book Hidden Terrors, Mitrione was among the US advisers teaching
Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners
without killing them. In Uruguay, according to the former chief
of police intelligence, Mitrione helped "professionalize"
torture as a routine measure and advised on psychological techniques
such as playing tapes of women and children screaming that the
prisoner's family was being tortured.
In the months after the 9/11/01
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, "truth drugs"
were hailed by some columnists such as Newsweek's Jonathan Alter
for use in the war against Al Qaeda. This was an enthusiasm shared
by the US Navy after the war against Hitler, when its intelligence
officers got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner's research into
"truth serums" at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian
prisoners high doses of mescaline and then observed their behavior,
in which they expressed hatred for their guards and made confessional
statements about their own psychological makeup.
As part of its larger MK-ULTRA
project the CIA gave money to Dr. Ewen Cameron, at McGill University.
Cameron was a pioneer in the sensory-deprivation techniques.
Cameron once locked up a woman in a small white box for thirty-five
days, deprived of light, smell and sound. The CIA doctors were
amazed at this dose, knowing that their own experiments with
a sensory-deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe psychological
reactions in less than forty hours. Start torturing, and it's
easy to get carried away.
Torture destroys the tortured
and corrupts the society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI
after 9/11/01 the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its inability
to break suspected leaders of Vietnam's National Liberation Front
by its usual methods of interrogation and torture. So the agency
began more advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized
three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in
their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given knives.
The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping the
prisoners would attack one another. They didn't. The electrodes
were removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned. You
can read about it in our book, Whiteout.
In recent years the United
States has been charged by the UN and also by human rights organizations
such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International with tolerating
torture in US prisons, by methods ranging from solitary, twenty-three-hour-a-day
confinement in concrete boxes for years on end, to activating
50,000-volt shocks through a mandatory belt worn by prisoners?
Many of the Military Police guards now under investigation for
abuse of Iraqis earned their stripes working as guards in federal
and state prisons, where official abuse is a daily occurence.
Indeed, Charles Granier, one of the abusers at Abu Ghraib and
the lover of Linndie England the Trailer Park Torturer, worked
as a guard at Pennsylvania's notorious Greene Correctional Unit
and has since gone back to work there.
And as a practical matter torture
is far from unknown in the interrogation rooms of U.S. law enforcement,
with Abner Louima, sodomized by a cop using a stick one notorious
recent example. The most infamous disclosure of consistent torture
by a police department in recent years concerned cops in Chicago
in the mid-70s through early 80s who used electroshock, oxygen
deprivation, hanging on hooks, the bastinado and beatings of
the testicles. The torturers were white and their victims black
or brown. A prisoner in California's Pelican Bay State Prison
was thrown into boiling water. Others get 50,000-volt shocks
from stun guns.
Many states have so-called
"secure housing units" where prisoners are kept in
solitary in tiny concrete cells for years on end, many of them
going mad in the process. Amnesty International has denounced
U.S. police forces for "a pattern of unchecked excessive
force amounting to torture."
In 2000 the UN delivered a
severe public rebuke to the United States for its record on preventing
torture and degrading punishment. A 10-strong panel of experts
highlighted what it said were Washington's breaches of the agreement
ratified by the United States in 1994. The UN Committee Against
Torture, which monitors international compliance with the UN
Convention Against Torture, has called for the abolition of electric-shock
stun belts (1000 in use in the U.S.) and restraint chairs on
prisoners, as well as an end to holding children in adult jails.
It also said female detainees
are "very often held in humiliating and degrading circumstances"
and expressed concern over alleged cases of sexual assault by
police and prison officers. The panel criticized the excessively
harsh regime in maximum security prisons, the use of chain gangs
in which prisoners perform manual labor while shackled together,
and the number of cases of police brutality against racial minorities.
So far as rape is concerned,
because of the rape factories more conventionally known as the
U.S. prison system, there are estimates that twice as many men
as women are raped in the U.S. each year. A Human Rights Watch
report in April of 2001 cited a December 2000 Prison Journal
study based on a survey of inmates in seven men's prison facilities
in four states. The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates
had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual
contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had
been raped in their facilities.
A 1996 study of the Nebraska
prison system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male
inmates reporting that they had been pressured or forced to have
sexual contact against their will while incarcerated. Of these,
more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least
once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives
a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.
Want to read more? Then RUSH
to order our new book Imperial
Crusades. Hot off the presses, and everything you can't find
in the corporate press about Uncle Sam's rampages. It's a must-read
diary, up there with Tacitus and Macaulay. Order here on the
site, or call CounterPunch at 1-800-840-3683 where CounterPunch
business staff are standing by. It's an inflation busting $15,
shipping and handling included.
Weekend
Edition Features for April 24 / 25, 2004
William
A. Cook
Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry
and Bush Melt into One
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank
Brandy
Baker
A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So
Robert
Fisk
A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free
Speech
Ben
Tripp
October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios
Nelson
Valdés
"Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Return to the Future
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Killed Pat Tillman
Mark
Scaramella
Does Anybody Know Anything?
Patrick
Cockburn
The Return of Saddam's Generals
Gary
Engler
Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas
Col.
Dan Smith
Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush
Greg
Weiher
Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam...
Elaine
Cassel
Life on the Outside: a Review
Vanessa
Jones
Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney
Jim
French
Agriculture's Bullied Market
Hammond
Guthrie
Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles
Poets'
Basement
Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella
|