‘Advantages’ of CIA torture over mass murder

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While mass murder via “legally approved” wars re­ mains the weapon of choice of today’s imperial con­ querors—especially the United States—torture, con­ ducted properly and legally and with the help of mod­ ern science, does have its advantages. Or so we are given to understand.

The forme moderne now practiced by the CIA and defined as “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT), leaves no marks, no evidence of wrongdoing or sadis­ tic intent. Its legality is recommended and approved by well-known political scientists like John Woo, for­ mer Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General, whose “Torture Memos” included a set of rules adopted by the government to ensure that questionable deeds were fully in accord with U.S. law. Woo, a “respected scholar,” now teachers at the University of California at Berkeley.

Further, legalized torture is said to actually save lives—according to the CIA and its bipartisan defend­ ers—by extracting information from terrorists with­ out which monstrous deeds would have inevitably been committed! Torture is certainly cost effective and more precise, much more so than spending $1 trillion yearly on traditional wars that indiscriminate­ ly, or better, inadvertently, target civilians, as with the 1.5 million killed in Iraq by U.S. forces since 2003 or the four million slaughtered by the U.S. in Vietnam in the previous century.

But then again, there are advantages and disadvan­ tages to both. A wise imperialism never excludes ei­ ther!

However, once in a rare while, someone steps in and blows the whisper of a whistle questioning “some” forms of torture. Such an event took place with the over 6000-page Dec. 7, 2014, report of Diane Fein­ stein’s Senate Intelligence Committee, revealing that CIA torturers had perhaps committed some heinous deeds. For “national security” reasons, of course, 5500 pages of Feinstein’s committee report, conducted at a cost of $40 million, were “redacted,” (edited) and thus we have only some 500 pages from which to make judgments.

No doubt some skeptics are still wondering what hidden horrors lay in the original report. But as we know, “national security” requirements include pro­ tecting the guilty, lest some angry victims or outraged citizens “mistakenly” seek revenge against the mod­ ern-day Adolph Eichmanns. Indeed, not a single tor­ turer has been brought to the “bar of justice,” not to mention the CIA tops who approved what Obama of­ ficials essentially deem “moral” lapses. This “bar” has been so elevated as to permanently protect all trans­ gressors.

Feinstein noted that CIA torture “regularly resulted in fabricated information” and that the CIA program was “a stain on our values and on our history.” These are harsh words from senior Senator Feinstein, a proud supporter of every U.S. war since she was first elected to local office in San Francisco in 1970.

Her conclusion that the CIA torture was a “stain” on our values and history seemed a bit understated. “Stain” is a modest term, especially when such tor­ ture has always been accompanied by endless wars of mass destruction and murder in seven countries, where millions have been slaughtered under Bush and Obama.

It is one thing to condemn a bit of torture, “a stain,” as Feinstein puts it; it is quite another to condemn the systematic terror and murderous wars undertaken by Republicans and Democrats alike.

endars, postcards, posters. An entire indus­ try grows around them, allowing the couple to acquire a bigger house with a pool. They achieve the “American Dream.”

On a TV talk show, Walter explains that his “inspiration” was seeing destitute chil­ dren during the war. (All lies, of course.)

His audience is in tears. Later, when asked about Margaret’s art work, he says, ”We don’t talk about Margaret.”

Like the girl in the fairy tale “Rumpel­ stiltskin,” tasked to spin straw into gold, Margaret churns out her paintings in a stu­ dio behind locked doors. She is, basically, Walter’s slave. After Walter’s sadism turns to violence against her, Margaret finally es­ capes and moves to Hawaii with her daugh­ ter. There, in a radio interview, she tells the truth: “I am the only painter in the family.”

She sues Walter for slander. In court, he represents himself in one of the best scenes in the film—actually funny—in which he acts out his role both as witness and attor­ ney. To settle the dispute, the judge orders Egypt Yemen, etc., be any less immoral?

For the record, it would be useful to list just a few of the modern atrocities revealed by Feinstein’s com­ mittee. All were designed to crawl under the “bar of justice” that Woo’s Torture Memo outlined.

• Detainees were told that their children would be harmed and that their mothers would be sexually as­ saulted or have their throats cut.

• They were waterboarded, that is, subjected to re­ peated near-drowning techniques.

• Their rectums were infused with “pureed” food in a process called “rectal re-hydration.”

• They were held for long periods on freezing floors or doused with nearly freezing water while held in “stress positions.”

• They were subjected to extreme “sleep depriva­ tion.”

Needless to say, a few died during these procedures, according to the redacted report. Twenty-six of the 119 detainees were “wrongfully held,” a term still un­ defined. In most cases, however, they were either in­ nocent, and/or denied recourse to any legal counsel and always held without formal charges levied against them.

Most of the above torture techniques were designed by “contractor psychologists” James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen in 2002. They were paid $81 million by the CIA for their efforts.

In the days and weeks before Feinstein’s report was released, a ruling-class debate of sorts ensued with Feinstein and her Senate Intelligence Committee al­ lies pitted against not only the Republicans and the CIA but also against President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. Obama and Kerry joined the cho­ rus in insisting that the report be severely redacted— that is, watered down sufficiently to portray the tor­ ture as essentially limited to lapses in administration, poor coordination, and essentially unintended conse­ quences.

Feinstein, in a rare flair of disagreement, initially stuck by the report, apparently still outraged by the CIA’s successful efforts several months earlier, to sur­ reptitiously and illegally break into her committee’s (continued on page 11, in “‘Abolish the grand jury’”)

them to paint in front of the jury—which decides in her favor.

Some critics have said that Christoph Waltz overacted his role as Keane. Not at all; Walter Keane was just like that. I met the Keanes at a San Francisco Art Festival in the mid-1950s. I was staffing the booth for the art school where I was studying. They were well known in the art commu­ nity because of “Walter’s” big-eyed chil­ dren—but not yet famous.

A rumor had it even then that Margaret was the artist. She was doing charcoal por­ traits of passersby, and a friend I was with had hers done. Though Margaret had exag­ gerated my friend’s eyes, it was a good like­ ness. As Margaret sketched away, Walter swanned about, chatting up some corporate honcho with Columbia Records about “his” paintings. It was decided between the Ke­ anes and this man that I would be his din­ ner date. I asked myself, did I really want to hang with these people? I turned and walked away. n