Mark Phillips: The American Question

3/6/03: Socialism or barbarism, part 2.

Today's Los Angeles Times prints an editorial by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who writes, "Credible reports now indicate that the government, with the approval of high-ranking officials, is engaging in systematic techniques considered by many to be torture."

Turley notes,

U.S. officials have admitted using techniques that this nation previously denounced as violations of international law. One official involved in the "interrogation center" in Afghanistan said "if you don't violate someone's human rights, you probably aren't doing your job."

And he continues,

There is a striking consistency to these accounts, including those from unnamed U.S. officials. Following the arrest of terrorist suspect Abu Zubeida last year after he was shot in the chest, groin and thigh, U.S. officials admitted withholding painkillers as an inducement to force information from him. For part of his interrogation, John Walker Lindh was held naked in an unheated metal container in the dead of winter and duct-taped to a stretcher with a bullet in his leg.

The latest allegation concerns two men who died while guests of the CIA. According to the military coroner, both men show "blunt force trauma" that contributed to their deaths. They died within a week of each other at the base, one of a pulmonary embolism and one of a heart attack. Both cases are now officially listed as homicides.

One U.S. official is quoted as predicting that "this investigation will not go well for us."

While Turley's outrage is appropriate, his shock is, to say the least, uninformed. U.S. use of torture during the Vietnam war was routine and well-documented. In his excellent study, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, Jerry Lembcke quotes Lt. Jon Drolshagan of the U.S. Twenty-fifth Infantry Division:

I was a prisoner of war interrogator. I was in Vietnam from '66 to '67. Being an interrogator the way I was, you definitely don't win hearts and minds. I've heard about these "Bell Telephone Hours," where they would crank people up with field phones. I guess we did them one better because we used a 12-volt jeep battery and you step on the gas and you crank up a lot of voltage. It was one of the normal things... The basic place you put it was the genitals... The major that I worked for had a fantastic capability of staking prisoners, utilizing a knife that was extremely sharp, and sort of filleting them like a fish. You know, trying to check out how much bacon he could make of a Vietnamese body to get information.

As Turley notes, current U.S. government practice circumvents domestic law by turning prisoners over to third-party countries for torture there:

One official involved in these interrogations explained that "we don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them."

While this practice violates international law, it's tried-and-true. Tens of thousands of prisoners were tortured in "tiger cages" at the South Vietnamese government's infamous Con Son Island prison after being turned-over by U.S. authorities. In Vietnam and Other American Fantasies H. Bruce Franklin writes,

In violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, soldiers captured by U.S. forces were turned over to the Saigon government, whose appalling prison camps were gradually being exposed to American readers and viewers, most dramatically in Tom Harkin's photographs of the notorious tiger cages of Con Son Island, where the few survivors were almost all permanently disfigured and severely crippled by torture.

Yet these examples were small potatoes compared with the CIA's Phoenix Program, which Franklin describes this way:

The CIA's Phoenix Program, designed to wipe out the insurgent infrastructure by imprisoning and assassinating tens of thousands of suspects, was launched in mid-1968; U.S. intelligence officers attached to Phoenix later testified that they never saw any of its prisoners survive interrogation.

One hundred years ago, the Socialist movement had a simple slogan which elegantly summarized the alternatives facing humanity: socialism or barbarism. They were right, and they lost. The use of torture by our government is one facet of the barbarism they predicted.

Back to 2003 menu
Back to Mark's Blogspace main page

More Information

1. "All roads lead to Tehran", Phillips
2. "Complexity", Phillips
3. "weblogs: a history and perspective", blood
4. "You've got blog", Mead
5. EatonWeb Portal
6. BlogHop
7. Blogger
8. Blogroots
9. The Pepys Project